CHAPTER 8

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CHOCOLATE JOE

ONE OF ETHEL PAYNES FAVORITE DESTINATIONS IN Tokyo was the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which was housed in a five-story redbrick building tucked into an alley a few minutes’ walk from MacArthur’s headquarters. Run-down and somewhat on the seedy side, the place was nonetheless the center of social life for many, white and black, in the Western community. It was a popular spot to get a drink or a meal, read hard-to-find newspapers, and even play the slots. One correspondent described the place as combining “some of the features of a makeshift bordello, inefficient gaming-house and black market center.”

Over drinks at the bar in the fall of 1950, Payne met reporters L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender and James L. Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American. Both World War II veterans, the two reporters had been assigned to cover the role of black soldiers in the Korean War. Everything that went to the Korean peninsula, including reporters, came through Tokyo. Over drinks, Payne told the two about her life in Japan and what she had observed about black troops. Spending time with two men who earned their living as writers, one of whom came from her hometown newspaper, was exhilarating.

Hicks was impressed with Payne. He came out to Seaview to see her at work. “This reporter,” he wrote after touring her workplace, “has seen and visited many such Special Service Clubs but never yet seen one which received the all-out support and program participation which both colored and white members on the base give the Seaview.” While the place remained a black club, there were no rules prohibiting whites from entering, and quite a few white soldiers had taken to doing so. Once, when an integrated unit took up quarters near the club and white soldiers began patronizing it, a detachment’s sergeant ordered his white men to stay away from the club. The white soldiers complained. The depot’s commander, Hicks said, “promptly issued orders that the club was ‘on limits’ to all personnel on the depot.”

But what really caught the attention of Hicks and Wilson was what Payne told them about black soldiers and Japanese women. Describing the harsh economic realities of postwar Japan, Payne described how many Japanese women had been drawn to soldiers with their ready cash and easy access to the post exchanges that bulged with Western goods. Unlike in the United States, the fair-skinned Japanese women were not put off by the men’s dark skin. In fact, many found that black soldiers were kinder and more generous than the white ones.

“By tradition,” Payne told the reporters, “the Japanese woman is submissive.” If a soldier wins the affection of one, he will be showered with affection and servitude. “Then there is the color factor,” she continued. “The hue of the girls ranges from very fair to nut brown. Hence it can be easily understood why our boys fall for them.”

“A stock comparison with American women would be: Too independent. Won’t take anything off a man or wait on a man,” Payne explained. GIs called their docile Japanese companions “mooses,” picking up on musume, the Japanese word for girl. “The musume fetches the GI’s shoes, washes, cooks, and irons. Keeps quiet, when asked. Never talks back. Laughs easily. All of which is very soothing to the male ego.

Musume has played it cool,” she continued. “Her very helplessness has been a powerful weapon and an asset to her and she is using it fully.”

BY THE STANDARDS OF RACE journalism in 1950, this was one hell of a story about violating the taboo of sex across race lines. Hicks rushed an account to his paper. “This is a story that I hate to write,” explained Hicks to his readers. “Colored women on civilian duty in occupied Japan are being ignored by colored soldiers stationed here to the point that many of the women swear once they get ‘stateside’ again, they will never so much as speak to a colored soldier who has been stationed in Japan.” Hicks’s article, however, made no mention of Payne, and he deliberately left out all names. Wilson, on the other hand, had different reporting plans.

Like Payne, Wilson had also taken an interest in writing when he was a child, but with greater success. As a male armed with a college degree and time spent studying journalism at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, he had risen up in the ranks of black journalists. The six-foot-three-inch lanky reporter, who favored a black suit and a white fedora, was a prodigious workhorse. With his clipped and sonorous voice and formal demeanor, he projected the air of one who planned to single-handedly cover all aspects of African American involvement in the war.

Payne and Wilson hit it off. They conferred regularly at the press club, and one night Payne even organized a dinner in his honor with several other Chicagoans. For Payne, time with Wilson gave her a rare opportunity to share her passion for writing with a professional. For Wilson, Payne was a valuable source. After all, for three years Payne had been spending her spare time acting like a reporter and dutifully keeping notes on her encounters and observations.

Wilson filed a report with the Defender. Headlined WHY TAN YANKS GO FOR JAPANESE GIRLS, the lengthy article quoted Payne, unlike Hicks’s earlier piece for the Afro-American. But Wilson was not done yet. He had his eye on Payne’s diary filled with stories and observations that she had brought to their meetings. “You know,” Wilson said to Payne, “the folks back home don’t know what’s going on, particularly about the GIs and Japanese women. Why don’t you just let me share this with them?”

Payne agreed. Although later she would feign innocence, claiming that she had actually forgotten about giving Wilson the diary, she certainly knew what she was doing. After years of failed attempts to launch some kind of writing career, providing her articles and notes to Wilson was hardly an act devoid of motivation in the world of journalism. She knew the editors at the vaunted Defender would read her work. Letting Wilson take it back to Chicago was like earning a literary lottery ticket.

When Wilson was back in the office, he handed editor Louis Martin the diary. “I read the manuscript and I could hardly believe it,” Martin said. Wilson confirmed its contents but warned that Payne could be fired if they published it. “The day the U.S. fired her, she could have a job with the Chicago Defender,” said Martin.

About a month later, one of Payne’s sisters called from Chicago. Ethel was in the paper again, but this time on the front page with a bylined article. SAYS JAPANESE GIRLS PLAYING GIS FOR SUCKERS, “CHOCOLATE JOE” USED, AMUSED, CONFUSED, read the headline. The editors had taken Payne’s diary and cobbled the entries into two articles. “They rewrote it,” said Payne, “and they put it into the prose that was adapted to the paper.”

THE ARTICLE, PATCHED TOGETHER as it was from the diary, lacked the cohesion of a unified piece of writing. It opened with a rambling discourse about changes in Japan under the occupation, touching on a wide range of topics from fashions and the Japanese fascination with the Sears, Roebuck catalog to a noticeable growth in height among children because of changes in diet. Halfway through, however, it came to its incendiary point.

“To get back to ‘Chocolate Joe,’” Payne wrote, “for him it was the opening of an entire new life. Surrounded by tons of army regulations, nevertheless, life in Japan became an escape from the irking confinement of the social caste system and segregation which he had left behind in the States.” With even the pay of the lowliest private, Payne reported that a black soldier could live like a king and retain the pleasures of a musume. Some of what she said had already appeared verbatim in Wilson’s article, but in this instance, here was an employee of the military detailing in a public forum how soldiers paid the rent for their girlfriends, ordered goods for them through the Sears, Roebuck catalog, obtained ration cards at the PX for them, and converted military script to yen on the black market.

The paper told its readers that the following week it would run a second article by Payne in which, “from her feminine point of view, she gives further evidence of her charge that the Nipponese girls are playing GIs for suckers.”

The identical headline above the second installment promised more on how Japanese women were taking advantage of black soldiers. But though it was again a disjointed work, the article provided a more nuanced account of the lives of the soldiers. It was indeed true, Payne wrote, that the men had a wide range of choice among “almond-eyed femmes.” But the real issue related to race and the startling experience of the black soldier in Japan. “It all added up to one thing,” Payne said. “Despite the encumbrances of Army policies on racial quotas, restrictions, limitations, etc. he was less of a Negro here than he had been at any time in his life. In his heart, he was an expatriate.”

Racial attitudes in Japan were hard to fathom because it was, after all, a conquered nation whose citizens were obliged to give respect and obedience to the occupying forces, wrote Payne. But she accused MacArthur of trying to foster an acceptance of segregation among the Japanese, well used to a rigid class system.

Defender editors ended her article on a far more sympathetic note than the first installment, which had painted the women as self-serving Oriental temptresses. The women and the “crop of sloe-eyed curly topped brown babies” were the first victims of the Korean War, Payne said. The future for the women and their children was dim, left on their own as their men were sent off to battle, probably never to return to Japan. “This means then with the passing of years without a steady income, the mother, unless she has unusually strong love for the child, may not be able to resist the hardships of social ostracism and inevitable abandonment may be the fate of the child.”

“If there was a storm in Chicago” after the publication of the articles, Payne said, “there was a tornado in Japan and Korea.” It was not long before her white superiors heard about the article as well. The War Department published a weekly “Report of Trends in the Colored Press” that was circulated among the higher ranks of the military. Payne received the dreaded summons to Allied headquarters. Only bad news came with such an invitation.

MacArthur’s aides gave her a dressing-down. They accused her of disrupting the morale of the troops. From her years on the Tokyo bases, Payne knew that there was no appeal from their judgment. She was removed from her post and shunted away to be a secretary at command headquarters. She hired an American attorney in Tokyo and awaited her punishment.

ETHEL PAYNES RESCUE came by way of one of the century’s greatest lawyers.

In the early months of the war, both the black troops, who were undertrained and ill equipped, and the white troops were unable to hold back the invaders. But unlike the white regiments, who could draw on vast reserves, the all-black regiments could be reinforced only with black soldiers. “It is a fact that enormous casualties suffered by the 24th Infantry Regiment and the 159th Field Artillery Battalion, both all Negro outfits, might have been lighter had there been replacements for them,” Payne wrote. “The wanton die-hard attitude of segregation has been a costly and needless waste of life.”

Concerned with survival in the face of overwhelming odds and lacking faith in their white officers, black soldiers deserted. Military police stationed on the roads leading away from the battlefields arrested them. Sixty black soldiers were charged with cowardice before the enemy, and about half of them were convicted in trials that often lasted less than an hour and were given sentences ranging from the death penalty to a term of imprisonment. Only eight white soldiers were similarly charged during the period, and only four of them were convicted.

When word of the drumhead trials reached the NAACP, it instructed its chief counsel Thurgood Marshall to investigate. At first MacArthur balked at the notion of having a lawyer snooping around his command, but under pressure, he relented. In early 1951, Marshall arrived in Tokyo to begin his work. He soon discovered the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and obtained a guest membership. There he found that over whiskey he could pump members of the press for information. He also found a diversion. “The slot machines at the press club are real one-arm Bandits,” he wrote in his diary.

At the club, Marshall met Payne and a group of her supporters. She detailed what had happened to her since the articles appeared in the Defender and the threat of further punishment. Marshall used his meetings with MacArthur and his staff to bring up Payne’s case. The command conceded that they would drop the matter and let Payne return to the United States two months before the end of her contract.

Meanwhile, hearing about Payne’s rough treatment at the hands of the military and that she would be returning home, the Defender’s Louis Martin remained true to his word and called Payne. “Come on home,” he told Payne. “We have a job for you.” The call was well timed. “I was going through a very psychological repression,” Payne said. “I’d been humiliated and chastised and all that, and then I was put in isolation, so to speak. So it was a relief to me. I had been there three years, so I welcomed the opportunity.”

In early March 1951 Payne asked for a seat on a homebound plane.

GETTING HOME WAS NO EASY TASK. The eighth day of waiting rolled around and the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) still had no seat for Payne on an outbound plane. With several hours to kill between the check-in times at the MATS office, Payne went out among the downtown crowds. It was a brilliant springtime Sunday full of promise. The day, said Payne, was “so brilliant with sunshine and so intoxicating with the champagne of spring that in a moment of sheer abandon you could forget there was a war and rumors of more war.” The sakura zensen, the name given to the latitudinal line marking the flowering of cherry blossoms, was moving north. The buds on the trees in Tokyo were only days short of bursting open. French sailors with berets, Australian soldiers with slouched hats, and American GIs with garrison caps intermingled with the crowds of Japanese strolling in front of the Imperial Palace, all grateful the warm breezes from the south had come to free the island of its winter cold.

The MATS office was just down the street from the Dai-ichi, where MacArthur made his headquarters, so Payne decided to take in, perhaps for the last time, what was called the “daily review.” For more than five years MacArthur’s daily comings and goings from the building had grown into a well-attended ceremony of sorts. By the time Payne reached the Dai-ichi, there was already a densely packed crowd of spectators of old hunched-over women and young mothers with their babies, workmen with sweatbands around their heads and students in black suits and peaked caps. “Blue uniformed Japanese policemen importantly waved back the forgetful ones who stepped across the yellow lines back into place.”

At the front door of the building, a chauffeured 1950 Chrysler Crown Imperial, the largest car made by the manufacturer, stood by, idling. Suddenly a Japanese policeman dashed to the corner and rang a bell, and his uniformed colleagues brought the traffic at the busy intersection to a standstill. The chauffeur opened the Chrysler’s door and two American guards took their positions on the pavement. “The people craned,” Payne said, “and Douglas MacArthur flanked by his aides strode majestically out, erect, proud, disdainful of the admiring glances of his subjects yet fully aware of his role as Destiny’s chosen to rule some 80,000,000 people.”

When Payne checked next with the MATS office, they reported she had a seat on a flight to San Francisco. Just after midnight on March 19, 1951, Payne’s DC-4 taxied out to a runway at Haneda Army Air Base at the edge of Tokyo Bay and waited for clearance. As the propellers on the plane’s four Pratt & Whitney engines noisily sliced into the night air and the craft ascended into the sky, Payne looked out her window at the twinkling lights and the glimmer of the moon on the bay.

THOUSANDS OF MILES from the DC-4 making its way across the Pacific that March night, Barbara Rose Johns was also making a change in her life. The sixteen-year-old Johns attended the all-black Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County, deep in Southside Virginia, home of the state’s most isolated and conservative communities. Under any circumstances her school would have been regarded as an inadequate facility for children. But in comparison to the new white high school, it was a galling injustice.

In enormous disrepair, Moton’s classrooms lacked suitable desks, were dotted with strategically placed pails to catch leaks on rainy days, and were so cold that in the winter the students rarely shed their coats. To cope with overcrowding, the school board had recently consented to erect some tar-paper shacks, hardly sturdier than chicken coops, heated with woodstoves. Anything the board provided its black students was shoddy and deficient. The students were even forced to ride each day in buses discarded by the white school.

The month before, the board had faced down an angry crowd of black parents at one of its meetings. The board members promised they would buy land for a new colored school but would make their decision known in due time and on their own schedule. In the meantime, they told the black families to stay away from board meetings.

Johns decided one day to talk to her approachable music teacher about the school’s deplorable conditions. “Why don’t you do something about it?” asked the teacher. The question might have discouraged a less imaginative teenager. Instead, it stirred Johns. Although she was quiet and introspective, Johns was also worldlier than many of her classmates. She knew about what other African Americans in the South were doing to fight Jim Crow laws from her uncle Reverend Vernon Johns, who was an outspoken civil rights advocate in Montgomery, Alabama. “Soon,” she said, “the little wheels began turning in my mind.”

She secretly enlisted the help of some other students. Meeting on the bleachers at the edge of the athletic field, whose grass was overgrown and unattended, the teenagers plotted. On the appointed day, one of them called the principal’s office and said that students were spotted at the Greyhound station and were in trouble with the police. With the principal out of the building, a forged note went to all the classrooms telling the teachers to bring their students to an assembly.

When the curtain in the auditorium drew open, rather than the principal, there stood Johns and a group of students. She asked the students to join her in going out on strike. The protest, she said, would aim not merely to win a new facility but to gain the right to attend school with whites. Banging her shoe on the podium, Johns urged everyone to join her. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, “just follow us.” And as a group, the 450 students rose, left the school, and marched to the courthouse, carrying protest signs they had made earlier and stored in the carpentry classroom.

Johns and another student then sent a letter to NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill in Richmond. Coincidentally, the two attorneys had recently met with Thurgood Marshall, from the NAACP’s national office. He had urged them to find a Virginia school to use in a lawsuit against segregation itself, abandoning the years-old strategy of winning improvements in black schools by filing cases based on the separate but equal doctrine of the half-century-old Plessy v. Ferguson.

Robinson and Hill drove down to meet with Johns and the protesting students. Deeply impressed by the courage of the young strikers and the support they had from their families, the lawyers agreed to go to court on their behalf. The case would eventually reach the Supreme Court, but not under its name. Instead, the justices consolidated four similar cases under the name of Brown v. Board of Education.

Johns’s actions that spring were only the start. All across the nation, a fuse of impatience was igniting a new form of activism among African Americans. Nine decades after emancipation, the yoke of Jim Crow was being directly challenged.

THOUSANDS OF FEET ABOVE the Pacific, Ethel Payne’s plane sped out of the night and toward the rising sun. In a few months she would turn forty. After two decades of waiting, she knew that a writing job was finally hers as a reporter on the nation’s premier black newspaper. What she didn’t know was that the biggest story in the history of the black press since the Civil War was breaking. The DC-4 was bringing Payne closer not just to home but to a journey through the civil rights revolution.