*  Lena the Hyena, regarded as the ugliest woman in the world, was the 1946 creation of cartoonist Al Capp for his Li’l Abner strip; she was a resident of Lower Slobbovia.

*  The Federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was created by President Roosevelt’s executive order. Truman had sought to make it a permanent commission, but Southern senators had prevented the passage of the legislation.

*  Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, an apostle of segregation, was famously the author of Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.

*  “Mr. Charlie” was a term frequently used in blues songs that referred to white men who are regarded as oppressors of blacks.

*  Terry would later become a reporter for the Washington Post and Time. He went to Vietnam in 1967 (the same year Payne would go) and became the first permanent African American correspondent assigned to cover the war. He later published the bestselling Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. His Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America; An Oral History, which was published posthumously, featured a chapter on Payne.

*  Article 15 was the term used to describe confining a soldier to barracks and giving him extra duty for two weeks.

*  The name given to the report issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner Jr. and charged with investigating the causes of the 1967 race riots.

*  His new name meant “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake,” according to the Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009).

*  A year after the trip to China, Murphy was the victim of a highly publicized kidnapping in which he was ransomed for $700,000. Murphy was able to identify his kidnapper, who was sent to prison.

*  A Freedom of Information request obtained a copy of Payne’s FBI file. It was so extensively redacted that most of the information it contained is still being kept classified more than two decades after her death. The author filed successive appeals for two years. The final appeal was denied in May 2014. However, in doing so, the FBI provided a new copy of the contested file. Several sections previously redacted were now visible, intentionally or not. For more, see “US Government Secrecy Making Historical Research Difficult” by James McGrath Morris, Al Jazeera America, October 23, 2013.

*  Super Fly was a 1972 film directed by Gordon Parks Jr., one of the earlier blaxploitation films, with music by Curtis Mayfield. “Tricky Dick” was a pejorative nickname for Richard Nixon. Payne was highly critical of most movie portrayals of blacks. “The white cinema structure taps on the desires of blacks to relate to black heroes,” she wrote. “In this identification I say, ‘right on,’ but in the creation of superniggers for this identification process, I say cinemas should cease and desist” (ChDe, 3/9/1974, 8).

*  The would-be assassin was acquitted by a jury but was later found guilty for multiple other murders. He then confessed to having stalked and shot Jordan.