Ethel Payne: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Currie: Are you ready to start again?

Payne: Yes. Fire when ready!

Currie: I was thinking that last time, we talked about when you went to Japan after World War II, but we didn't talk about the impact World War II had on you and your family.

Payne: My brother served in World War II, in the European theater. So it did have some impact, yes.

Currie: Were you working in the library during the war?

Payne: Yes. There were many young men from our community who were drafted and went off to war. Some died. That, naturally, was a traumatic period, particularly since the armed forces were still segregated. So it was not a good feeling. We did not have that much enthusiasm for war. We weren't flaming patriots. But we didn't have any draft dodgers, except one instance. There was one fellow who challenged it, and he made such an issue of it that they decided it would be better not to take him in, because he had a very strong influence on other persons. He laid down all the legal cases, the legal parameters for not signing up. He said that he challenged them on the issue of his race because he was of mixed blood. [Laughter.] So they got into a real donnybrook about it. Finally, I guess, they just decided to give up.

Currie: How did he challenge them because he was of mixed blood?

Payne: Well, on the forms that you had to supply, he refused to put down Negro, because he said he had Italian, he had Irish, he had Indian blood: "Now, which one of these do you want?" Privately, he was not disowning being black, but he did that. He was of that mind, and he confused the Selective Service Board. So he actually got away with it. I don't think he ever served any time.

Currie: I noticed on some of your résumés—and we didn't talk about this—you mentioned having attended Northwestern University.

Payne: Medill School of Journalism. Evening classes.

Currie: I see. Was this before you went to Japan?

Payne: Yes. This is back in 1940.

Currie: Oh, I see. How did you decide to do that?

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1951, then I put that aside for writing on issues. So I didn't get into the creative writing as such.

Currie: Were there any ways in which the creative writing classes affected you later on?

Payne: Yes. It developed for me a particular style of writing that I think I've carried through ever since. I have a manner of what they call pithy writing. If I do a story, serious, I invoke a little satire, and I invoke maybe—well, actually, some of my own feelings, but I like to play with words, too. I like to come up with—and words are fascinating, because they're like stringing pieces of beads or jewelry together to form patterns, you know. So I think when you tell a story, whatever it is, you can always make it more interesting to the reader if you have a little pungency there. It captures their thinking. And I might say that when I was doing my "Spectrum" pieces, I was just going through some of my files, I got so many letters saying that they liked my style of presentation because I always had a little humor, I had a little satire, but I used it to get a point across, and it was much more effective.

Currie: Interesting. So do you think there's a difference, then, in the way most journalists were trained and the way that you got your experience in writing?

Payne: Possibly so, because really, actually, I didn't have a formal training in, as you say, routine style of newspaper writing. I couldn't tell you today exactly how much comprises an inch and a half or, you know, what the journalistic rule is for that. I had just chosen to do it in the style that I know that I'm accustomed to, but I don't know if it would actually meet the standards of regular newsroom production.

Currie: I had seen on your résumé about Northwestern, and that intrigued me, and I thought I'd go back and pick that up. But I think in the last interview, we left you in Japan.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: You were a hostess with American Special Services.

Payne: Army Special Services, which took the place of the American Red Cross. See, the Red Cross had been doing previously all the recreational duties, and when the Red Cross ended its tenure, then Army Special Services moved in.

Currie: How long were you in Japan?

Payne: Just about three years.

Currie: And you first went over in—

Payne: 1948.

Currie: We talked a little bit last time about what you did there. You seemed to like that job.

Payne: Well, it was certainly very different from anything I'd ever done. You know, there was a great deal of exposure to a different way of life entirely. I had never been associated with the military before, nor had I ever been abroad before. As I

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terrorists bombed some years before. But he was really a man who had tried, when he knew that the war lords were planning this great military offense, he objected, but because he was a part of the cabinet, he was overridden. But he said very frankly that it was a mistake for them to have launched this.

Kase took a more analytical view. He was more of a tactician, and he really didn't apologize; he just said that there had been some mistakes made. But he used a phrase that I'll never forget, when he said, "We Asians have affinity," meaning that despite the differences—and there were sharp differences—for example, Japanese historically have looked down on Koreans, who call themselves Chosun, but they look down on them as a little bit inferior to them. Japanese have a very, very great consciousness of their superiority. In fact, you could call them the Aryans of the Far East. And it's possible to see why they made a pact with Hitler early on.

Currie: It's interesting that you wrote to the two gentlemen. Did you have any sense of what you might do?

Payne: I had a very, very great curiosity. I did want to know what their thinking was about the whole campaign, you know, to launch this war, and secondly, how they felt about the surrender and the occupation. There again, I thought that they were playing a very cool way, particularly Kase. Kase was getting ready to write his book, and he approached it from a historical standpoint and a very detached air. The book is out of print, but I have a copy which I hold onto for dear life. But it's very interesting to see what his judgment was. He's also an astute diplomat. I think he's still living today. Shigemitsu is dead, but I think Kase is still living.

Currie: Did you think that perhaps you might write about these two men?

Payne: Oh, yes. I did write some articles when I got home about it. But you know, it's so hard sometimes to get your articles into the mainstream of the publishing industry. It's fascinating to you, but I always found that there's a bias within the publishing industry, for example, very few black writers who get into it. Faith Berry, a friend of mine, has done a study on this, and she finds that black women writers are really shut out of publishing to a great extent. Now, naturally, they have some whom they favor—Toni Morrison is one, Alice Walker is another, Margaret Walker Alexander is another. But on the whole, there are few black women who can really get into publication in the major publishing houses. That's just the way it is.

Currie: And this was true in the early fifties?

Payne: Yes, because I thought I had information that very few people had, the fact that I had been there and had been on the scene and could talk to these people and get their feelings, you know. So I thought it was an excellent story. I wasn't able to break through with it.

Currie: Do you remember where you tried to sell it?

Payne: I know I tried McCall's, for one thing, and I may have tried Ladies Home Journal.

Currie: Some of the larger circulation magazines.

Payne: Yes.

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Currie: So he didn't tell you.

Payne: No, he didn't tell me. When he got back, he just showed this, and it was the hottest thing they'd come across. Like the Gary Hart* thing, I guess, you know. [Laughter.] It was just so explosive. So that was it. Of course, I was called up before the high command and dressed down for allegedly having disrupted the morale of the troops, but that wasn't true. What they were doing was just focusing on that particular incident to cover up the fact that they had not complied with President Truman's directive to integrate the armed forces. This took the emphasis away from that, took the onus away from that. So they could say, "Here's a woman over here working, and here she is upsetting the troops." What they were afraid of was that this old shibboleth of the separate forces would be raised again, and there would be a lot of questioning. MacArthur, being the type of person he was, he didn't want to have that raised, but he had actually defied President Truman's directive.

Secondly, the war was coming full circle, and it was going to be an unpopular cause.

Currie: You mean in Korea.

Payne: Yes. And so all this was factored into it. The other thing that happened was that along with what I had done, there was a nasty thing brewing about putting troops up on the front line, and because blacks didn't have replacements, they were up there an inordinate length of time without relief, and they were under fire. Of course, there was rebellion. So what they had was something they called drumhead court-martials, whereby you were tried right on the spot for disobeying the rules and punished, giving a severe punishment. Now, it got to be such a scandal that the NAACP sent Thurgood Marshall over to investigate these conditions, and when he came, he met with a group of us at the Overseas Club, before he went on to Korea. My case was discussed, and he took some notes on it. And when he got over there, after he made his investigation, he filed a report back to the Pentagon, and he included my case in it.

Currie: What was the status of your case at that point?

Payne: Well, they had not fired me, but they had threatened to fire me. What they did was put me on some isolated duty away from where I could get to—because you see, in June of 1950, when the conflict broke out and the Chinese crossed the 38th parallel, that precipitated it, then Truman ordered the troops to be activated and to go to Korea. But what we service personnel did was to remain behind, and we did duties at the hospital, where the wounded would be brought in. Anyhow, the soldiers that we were servicing were just servicemen; they were not combat troops. They were supply personnel, but they were ordered into Korea. Some of them were put into combat duty, and they weren't ready for it. Others, you know, continued the supply routine, but quite a few of them that I had known personally were killed right away.

Currie: I'm going to turn this tape now.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Currie: So you were more or less, as you were saying, isolated?

Payne: Yes. Put in a place in command headquarters, a secretary, you know, and really just left alone.

______________________ * During the Democratic Party primaries for the 1988 presidential election, the Miami Herald reported that Colorado Senator Gary Hart, campaigning for the nomination, was involved in an extra-marital affair with Donna Rice.

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blanche to go ahead and come up with it. And that was where my creativity came into being. One of the things that I said was—oh, by the way, the first piece that I did, the series on adoption, was submitted to the Illinois Press Association, and I won first prize for it. I won first prize for my series on adoption.

Currie: The first story you'd ever done?

Payne: That's the first undertaking. Then the next thing I did was a piece on "Industry, USA: Where the Jobs Were," and I got a Heywood Broun Memorial Citation for that. So I was building up, you know.

Currie: You were pretty successful in your new career.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: Let me ask you. How much guidance did they give you about what they wanted from you in terms of these pieces?

Payne: All they did was to tell me to go ahead and to use my good judgment and to make it factual. That was the main thing that they asked. They didn't want any big errors or misstatements that they would have to apologize for or even be subject to libel. And I never in all my career did anything that was challenged as libelous.

Currie: Was this unusual in the newsroom at Chicago Defender?

Payne: Yes. [Laughter.] I think I was regarded as something out of—I don't know. Everybody regarded me with great awe, because they said, "How could a newcomer come in and do this kind of thing right away?" Right away I just zoomed up as a lead person in the newsroom. Some envy, maybe, and some awe, but I think they all recognized that I did have something different. The main thing was that if I had an idea, I pursued it, and I could put it together quickly. That was a little different from the ordinary.

Currie: What was the ordinary?

Payne: Well, the ordinary was just going out and doing the assignments, the everyday assignments that you were told to do, and not coming up with anything particularly new or innovative.

Currie: Who would you say your mentor was at the Chicago Defender?

Payne: Louis Martin.

Currie: What did you learn from him?

Payne: Well, he's a man of extraordinary savvy. In the first place, he's a politician, and later on, he became very noted for his political savvy. He was with the Kennedys. First, he did some work with Truman, and then later, he joined the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, and he was a really powerful force within that circle. He was called on for everything. He was part of the inner circle. He was very influential in political decisions and appointments, particularly. He was responsible for all the major appointments, practically all the major appointments, that were made of blacks during those two administrations, then later on, into the Carter Administration. So he, had a keen idea for what was the unusual. Sometimes he would say I was like a race

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Payne: What I did was I went to all the adoption agencies in Chicago, and I had interviews. I did that on my own. I had interviews, I had telephone conversations. And you see, early on I decided that my best bet in newspapering was to build up a bank of contacts, and it proved very worthwhile, because people began to, well, admire me for my aggressiveness in going after something. So they cooperated by giving me information. Sometimes they would even come to the paper and just sit and talk with me. So that's the way I gathered my data.

Currie: And you stayed in Chicago with the Defender for—

Payne: [Laughter.] That's funny. I was very restless. I had never been—as I think I told you before, I had never been into the South, and I had a great curiosity about the South. My father came from the South, my mother, of course, was borderline, Evansville, Indiana. But I wanted to know what the South was really like, so I asked permission to go and spend some time in the South, so they gave me a month to make a tour of the South. I used a month to five weeks, something like that.

Currie: They were going to pay for you to go?

Payne: Yes, they paid for me to go, and I did a series called "The South at the Crossroads," because I went to about five states to report on the changing pattern of the South and what was happening since the anti-lynching laws had been passed, what was happening with the exodus of blacks from South to the North, what was happening in schools—were the segregated schools actually being improved upon? Was segregation, the "separate but equal" doctrine, was it working? You know, following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. So it was quite a thing. I came back and I wrote about six articles on my impressions.

But what happened while I was in the South, I passed through Tulsa, Oklahoma, and there was a man there who had a very small newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle, and he was a businessman who had made his fortune, so they say, first through the numbers. I don't know. I never did really check that out. But he had become very successful, and he really didn't know much about newspapering, but he had ambitions to make it grow and develop. So when he met me, we had a long talk, and he said, "You know, I think you're just the person I need," and he told me, he said, "You know I can't give you a big salary, but I can guarantee you $300 a month to start." Well, $300 a month back then was not to be sneezed at. I was making that and more at the Defender, but what he offered me was incentives, like he was going to give me 49% of the stock, and he was going to give me increments along with bringing the paper up.

I said, "Well, I'll consider it."

And he said, "I want you to be serious about it." So he called a lawyer in, and the lawyer drew up a contract for me. I remember that it had all these options in it. Somehow that contract was buried somewhere. He put a gold seal on it.

So I came back to Chicago, and I went to see Louis Martin, and I waved this in front of him. I said, "See, if you don't appreciate me, then here's somebody who does."

And he looked at it, and he snorted. [Laughter.] He said, "Forty-nine percent? Forget it! If you don't have 51%, you ain't got nothing." [Laughter.] Anyway, he said, "Ha! What are you going to do, go down there and sit with the grasshoppers in the dust?" So he said, "You know, if you're so restless, I'll tell you what. Why

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Payne: I got in. And the very fact that I walked in and broke the barrier for the weekly newspapers was a sensation in itself, because prior to that, they just weren't admitting.

Currie: When Louis Martin sent you to Washington, did he tell you what he expected you to cover and what he wanted?

Payne: He was very cavalier, I guess. He didn't have any doubt that I'd go down there and produce something, so he said, "Go on down there and do a hell of a job." [Laughter.] "Just go and do that. Just go on down there and do a job." And, of course, you know, I was by myself, and I knew that was like telling you to cover the whole world almost, because you had the White House, you had the Congress, you had the State Department, you had the Defense Department, all those agencies, and you were expected to do something with all of them. It was just like stretching yourself in little pieces, you know, and holding it together with a rubber band.

So there again, I decided, "I can't cover the whole waterfront by myself, so I have to make some contacts. So I proceeded to cultivate people. I would call key people in the various agencies, and I'd tell them that I was there and I wanted to do a good job, and I would be grateful if they would assist me. I also had people in the private sector who knew the ways of Washington, understood it, and so they volunteered, and they would give me tips. And that's the way. I had to build up that kind of a thing, because it was absolutely physically impossible for me to. I just wore myself thin trying to cover as many things as I could, press conferences, and every week—faithfully every week—going to White House press conferences, because President Eisenhower was one of the few—well, I think he was the only President I've known who had press conferences on a regular basis, a weekly basis. You could always count on it, either Wednesday or Thursday of each week, the President would hold a press conference. So you knew that. You allocated that day to it. And so that was pretty positive. You didn't have to wait around and see whether the President was going to do anything. It was not like now. I don't think since that time any President has had a press conference with that kind of regularity.

It was also the first year of the Eisenhower Administration, and the Army- McCarthy hearing was building up. You know, that Army-McCarthy hearing was instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who just became rabid over the issue of communism within the federal government. And so as chairman of a select committee, he instigated these hearings. They became really the counterpart to what the Watergate thing was. People were riveted to the television to watch it, because you had a stellar cast of characters, I might say. You had McCarthy, who would glower and hiss. He was a character all by himself. You had his aide, Roy Cohn, who was kind of an Iago to an Othello. You had the senators, who were bitter enemies of Joe McCarthy. For example, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, well, they just hated each other with a purple passion. There was Senator Carl Mundt of South Dakota, who was a great supporter of McCarthy. You had Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, who was noted as a constitutional lawyer and had been a judge before he went to the Senate. He didn't like McCarthy either. He was a conservative, but he didn't like McCarthy's tactics, and he made it very clear. McClellan was extremely influential in the Senate, because he was part of that southern bloc that had a great sway, you know, over things.

So there you had all this cast, and then you had the Secretary of the Army—his name escapes me at the moment—Robert Stevens, I believe his name was. He was Secretary of the Army, and he was the one that McCarthy had singled out for allowing subverters to creep into the Pentagon and in the armed forces. Then you had a

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Well, it hit the Evening Star, and the Evening Star bannered this headline about the spy within the Pentagon. And it was a front-page picture, full length, of Mrs. Moss, with her son. She was crying because she was so bewildered by all this. She was suspended from her job. She didn't know what to do. She retained a lawyer named George E.C. Hayes. He was a prominent lawyer in Washington, a black lawyer. But they wouldn't allow him to speak for her, but he appeared every day that they were interrogating her. So all she could answer was, no, she'd never been associated with anything; all she did was carry out her duties, and that was it.

Well, Senator McClellan and Senator Symington were especially outraged by this, and Senator McClellan—I remember, I have to paraphrase the words, but he said, "If you've got any real evidence, then come up with it and stop this nonsense." You know. When he spoke, he was serious.

And one day, after she was grilled so ruthlessly, Senator Stuart Symington leaned over the podium, and he said to her, "Mrs. Moss, do you follow the teachings of Karl Marx?"

And she turned, in bewilderment, to her lawyer. The mike was open, and she said "Who is Karl Marx? Who is Karl Marx?" Well, the fact that she put it in the present tense—she didn't say, "Who was Karl Marx." She said, "Who is Karl Marx?" Well, you know, to the press, this was dynamite, you know. This was a real story. Here's this poor woman who was being pilloried as a Communist front agent and all this, and she asks, "Who is Karl Marx?" meaning she didn't know what was going on, she didn't know who Karl Marx was or anything, and that she put in the present tense meant that she was totally innocent. So in a mad dash, they were rushing out of the newsroom to put this on the wire, telephone it in and everything, and the hearing room just exploded in laughter. Of course, all this was terribly embarrassing to McCarthy, and he became quite angry. He stalked out of the hearing room with this exchange of words with Senator Symington. It was quite stormy. Roy Cohn was right behind him, and G. David Schine, that was another one, both of them were rich kids who didn't have anything else to do, so they had signed on with McCarthy, I think just for a lark. So those were his key persons.

Robert Kennedy was on that committee, too. At first, he was an admirer of Joe McCarthy. This is very interesting. But then after his bullying tactics got to be known, then he switched over to the other side.

But the point I would like to make is that I think that was the beginning of the downfall of McCarthy, because he was never really convincing—the hearings would continue, but he was never really convincing after that.

Currie: When you were covering the hearings, what kinds of stories were you looking for?

Payne: I was looking for stories particularly about the people who had been really savaged by McCarthy, and how ruthless he was in his tactics, and why it was so important, I felt, that he be exposed for the kind of tyrant that he was. I felt that this was an affront to people, it was an abridgment of the First and Fifth Amendments, and he was a loose cannon. He was clearly a loose cannon, and he was just causing all kinds of havoc. So I centered on what the implications of the hearings were.

Currie: Did you write a lot of stories about it?

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Payne: Well, they weren't, because, you know, the feminist movement hadn't begun to take effect yet, and there's still evidence of it today. I mean, women still are fighting on the battlefront for equality and recognition. While many of them have made the breakthroughs, it isn't all wine and roses, even now.

Currie: Can you give me some examples of how women were treated in the press corps?

Payne: Well, they were relegated mostly to lower positions, and certainly, the salaries were not equal. I know for a fact that women were paid less than male reporters, and they weren't moved up in the hierarchy. They were sort of treated as maybe glorified messengers. Some of them had credentials, but they had to turn their stories over to male writers when they got back. So it was the day when blacks were struggling, and women were struggling, too.

Currie: Did you feel you had problems at your newspaper because you were a woman?

Payne: No, I never—as I said, I was so concentrated on getting the stories on my own and trying to struggle with the limitations that I had, that I never gave thought to trying to win recognition or friendship. I just was determined to try to do a job, and that took all my energy, all my thoughts, and took all my time. I didn't have time to be social.

Currie: But at your newspaper, did you feel the fact that you were a woman had any impact on the way you were treated?

Payne: Never. Never. You mean from the Defender itself?

Currie: Yes, from the Defender itself.

Payne: No. As I said, they just gave me a loose rein, and I just took it from there. No, I never had any problem with that.

Currie: Did you work from your apartment?

Payne: Yes, absolutely. My apartment was a mess. I had a small apartment, not nearly as large as this one, and it was just a disaster, with papers. [Laughter.] I barely had time to sleep, even. Because we couldn't afford the wire services, I'd have to do my stories and do three and four, five stories at a time.

Currie: For different editions?

Payne: No. Well, they went into the different editions. I would do just enough ahead so that they would have some running stories, you know, maybe as much as two or three in one edition of the paper. That's the way it was. So I'd go home and bang out my stories, rush down to the post office, and sometimes it would be 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, I'd be going down to the main post office. At this time, the taxis were very cheap. You could get a taxi for 60 cents or 75 cents, seldom a dollar. I'd go down to the post office. I'd be so tired and sleepy. Pretty soon, I got to be known among the cab drivers, and they sort of formed a benevolent protective association. [Laughter.] Because they would look out for me, and when they'd see me, they would wait for me. One of them, one of this crew, would wait for me until I came out. "Come on, it's time for you to go home. You shouldn't be out by yourself."

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Currie: Also, I think that I'd like to talk a little bit about the White House press conferences, maybe how they were organized and what it was like, so we can get a feel for them.

Payne: In those days, the press conferences were held in the old Indian Treaty Room of the State Department, which was the Executive Office Building. That's what it became. But the President would come over. He would walk over. It was a closed room; they didn't have any air-conditioning. And as many as 200 reporters jammed in there thigh to thigh, you can imagine what it was like,especially with all the hot lights on. So it was a sweat box.

But every day, of course, you had not only the general media, but you had a lot of foreign press there, too. And depending on how fast you could get on your feet to get the President's attention. But I must say this, and I've said it many times, that Eisenhower was probably very democratic, probably the most democratic, because he gave recognition to the smaller newspapers. He didn't just deal with the titans, you know. So that's how I got his attention. I remember my first question to him was about the Howard University Choir that had been excluded from the Lincoln Day Celebration, which was traditional. The Republicans always had a Lincoln Day Celebration. [Tape interruption.]

Currie: Before you answered the phone, we were talking about the White House press conferences, and you were saying that it was crowded. But then we were also talking about you had some feelings about Eisenhower.

Payne: I said that I give him credit for being more democratic in his recognition of the smaller newspapers than the other Presidents did, because nowadays, you know, it's the larger, the big giants, and the smaller newspapers just have a very difficult time getting recognition.

Currie: That helped you get recognition, then.

Payne: Yes. In those days, it was a very interesting thing. The New York Times carried the complete transcript of the press conferences; they still do that. The Post, in recent years, has taken to that. But at the time, the New York Times always carried the name of the questioner and the name of the paper or whatever he or she represented. So that created the kind of situation where you had a personality competition, because everybody was anxious to get recognized so that the name would be in the New York Times. So that made it quite a little interesting competition, too. I think they've dropped it when President Kennedy came in. But it was an interesting time.

Currie: You were talking about the first question you asked, about the Howard University Choir.

Payne: Oh, yes. This occurred, as I said, on the Lincoln Day Celebration, which is a tradition with the Republican Party. And they had it at the Arena, so they would bring in stars and celebrities. They had asked three choirs to come and sing. One was Duke University, the other one was Emory University, and Howard University. Well, when Howard University came up in a special van or bus or whatever, some officious person turned them away, told them that they couldn't enter. I don't know the exact details, but they were turned away. Warner Lawson, the director, was so incensed that

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Later on, the biggest thing that came up was the integration crisis, and we'll get to that later. But at times, he would shift roles, it seemed to me, and become the military person, rather than the presidential person. That happened one day when I asked him—what had taken place was the Interstate Commerce Commission had handed down an opinion that it was time to end segregation in interstate travel. The opinion said that it was costly, it was ineffective, and it was just not right, and that it was time to end the practice of segregation. Well, that was very important, very important. So I talked with Clarence Mitchell, and we agreed that I would raise the question. So I got the President's attention, and I asked him. I told him about the opinion, and I said, "When can we expect that you will issue an executive order ending segregation in interstate travel?"

Well, that just touched a nerve, and he became very angry. Oh, he was so angry. He drew himself up to his full military posture, and he barked at me, and he said, "What makes you think I'm going to do anything for any special-interest group? I'm the President of all the people, and I'm going to do what I think is best for all the people." Well, his answer startled even the press corps, you know, and I was taken aback. I thought I had asked a perfectly legitimate question.

When the press conference was over—it usually lasted a half hour—I came out of the room, and Ed Folliard of the Washington Post caught up with me. He was the dean of the White House press corps; he was the one who said, "Thank you, Mr. President," you know. And he said to me, "Young lady, don't be upset." He said, "I remember one time when I asked President Roosevelt a question that he didn't like, and he almost leaped out of his wheelchair." He said, "You asked the right question. In fact, we should have asked those questions sooner." So he said, "Don't worry yourself." Well, I appreciated his kindness.

I went straight away to the office on Massachusetts Avenue, and I told Clarence about what had happened, and he got so mad, he sat down and he fired off a letter to Jim Hagerty, and he accused him of harassing a member of the press corps because she was a black woman and she had asked an intelligent question.

So a little later, I was called into the White House press office by Jim Hagerty and his associate Murray Snyder. I was accused—this is the interesting thing—they never touched upon the question and the reaction of the President, never said that. What they did was they accused me of violating the rules of the White House Correspondents Association by doing some outside work for the AFL—no, it wasn't the AFL-CIO; it was the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, headed by Walter Reuther. Walter Reuther was president of the UAW, as well as president of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was considered a dangerous liberal, far left. He wasn't, but that's what he was considered—a dangerous liberal. He was a redhead, and they called him "that redheaded bastard."

Currie: Who called him that?

Payne: In the administration, that was a favorite epithet for him. He was quite an orator, and he could stir up crowds, and he could hammer away, you know. So he was an anathema to the administration. Well, they accused me of writing—which I had. I had done some freelance articles for the journal that the CIO had, and I just did it on an irregular basis, but it wasn't a full-time thing by any manner or means.

Currie: And you had been paid for it?

Payne: I'd been paid for it, yes. But I was sure that other members of the corps

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Currie: She also says in her autobiography that often the two of you didn't get support from black men reporters.

Payne: Ooooh! I was pilloried by the black press as being over-assertive. They wrote columns about it, that I was an embarrassment, that I had gone down and I was showboating, you know, just disturbing the President. Well, as a matter of fact, to go back to the reactions that came in the wake of that question about the interstate travel, the Evening Star carried a box on the front page, and it said, "Negro Woman Reporter Angers Ike." And that went out all over the wire services and everything else. My mother, in Chicago, who was an old-fashioned Republican, she called me, and she said, "Sister, I don't think you ought to be down there making the President mad." [Laughter.] You know. She chided me, but at the same time, she knew I was really down there trying to do a job.

Louis Martin called, and John Sengstacke, the owner of the paper, called, and said, "What are you doing down there, picking on the President?" [Laughter.] They thought it was a great joke. They thought it was a wonderful story, and they were very proud of me, really, for asking the question. Because you know what happened later? That reaction to that issue on the front page, I mean, it brought it alive.

So then the general media began to pay attention to this, and I really think from that time on, civil rights was moved to the front burner, because, like Folliard said, they hadn't paid that much attention to it. They were talking about the Middle East or whatever, you know. Everything was more important than civil rights. They didn't pay that much attention to it. But then suddenly, civil rights began to be the big issue.

Currie: There's a guy I think you mentioned before—Louis Lautier.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: He was a reporter?

Payne: Yes. Did she talk about Lautier in her book?

Currie: The way she put it was that he—this is paraphrasing—that he gave both of you a bad time.

Payne: He did!

Currie: And went and complained.

Payne: Yes, he did. He was kind of like a water boy for the administration. He curried favor. His great asset was that he had been a court reporter, and he was an expert stenotypist. He could take copious notes, and he would sit there in the press conference and take notes, never ask questions. And then the lazier people in the big newspapers sort of used him to do the work that they should have done. They weren't taking notes. They would come out in the hallway, and he'd stand there, and he'd transcribe the notes. I saw that happening week after week.

Currie: Interesting.

Payne: He was servicing them, and they were just using him as a lackey. He wasn't getting anything; he was just currying favor with them. Then he would take after me, or once in a while take after Alice, as she says, and he didn't particularly like

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for CBS "Spectrum," so I took after him. I said, "Sarah McClendon has as much right to speak her mind as any other person in the press corps, and we should be indebted to her for raising questions that other people don't. She rushes in where angels fear to tread. Bully for her." Then I said, "Let Sevareid drown in his own pomposity." Well, CBS got inundated with letters about their commentator. [Laughter.]

Currie: You were in a little bit of a special position, but did you ever have problems separating yourself as a reporter and an advocate? It sounds like you were doing some advocacy.

Payne: I was doing advocacy. I was always doing advocacy. Everything I did was from an advocacy standpoint. I felt that that was my duty and my responsibility. You see, if you have lived through the black experience in this country, you feel that every day you're assaulted by the system itself. You are either acquiescent and you go along with the system, which I think is wrong, or else you just rebel, and you kick against it. That was just my feeling, that somebody had to do the fighting; somebody had to speak up. So I saw myself as an advocate as much as being a newspaper person. I always tried to be factual, as I said. I just felt that I had no right to libel anybody, and I had to tell the truth, so I had to do some extra research. But then I wanted to constantly, constantly, constantly hammer away, raise the questions that needed to be raised. So if that made me an advocate, yes, I was an advocate.

Currie: From my reading, I understand that the black press was in fact founded as an advocacy press.

Payne: That's what they were born for. That's why they came into being, for the very reason that there was no other outlet to address the grievances of black people in this country.

Currie: Since black newspapers, by their very existence, practice advocacy journalism—

Payne: Advocacy press, yes.

Currie: Advocacy press. Did that give you the freedom to be more of an advocate as a journalist?

Payne: Well, I don't know that it gave me extra freedom, but I felt that I was working within the purpose, the historical purpose of the black press. It was my own personal feeling. Nobody told me I had to do this; nobody suggested it to me. I just went for it in a very strong way, and maybe bruised a lot of people in the process, but I felt that it was necessary.

Currie: Had you read the Chicago Defender growing up?

Payne: I grew up in Chicago, and the Chicago Defender was the paper, was the paper. You couldn't grow up in Chicago and be black if you didn't know the Chicago Defender. Then besides, there was another interesting thing. Pullman porters who were black used to carry bundles of the Chicago Defender on their runs, particularly down the Illinois Central Railroad, and they would stop and drop off these papers, collect a little money. Those papers would be read, some say, as many as 25 and 30 times over, each issue of the paper. So the Defender became really an agent for change, and the masthead of the Defender was "American race prejudice must be destroyed." So that initiated the exodus of blacks from the South in World War I and World War II, who

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Payne: No, I think, essentially, it follows the same pattern of news. It has broadened a great deal. I notice that they're doing far more with sports than they used to. I think that they're lessening on the criminal element. You know, it used to be at one time that the black press felt that the only way they could sell newspapers is to tell gruesome stories of crime, and they would have savage pictures on the front page, caskets, and all the rest of that. I think that era has passed. They don't deal with that so much now. I'm happy to see that pass. There's a great deal more emphasis on community news, what's happening in the various neighborhood areas, which is a good thing. The editorials are not as strong as they should be. I used to do editorials, but I'm not into that now. But once in a while, I have advocated that they come together jointly and have a joint editorial on some particular burning issue that's affecting the black community throughout the United States. I think that such a tactic would be very effective in that it would solidify the black community—it would speak as one voice. There are times when you can do that. I advocated that some years ago. I will be doing it again in October, when there will be a meeting in Baltimore on the black press and its future. I'm going to advocate again.

But overall, the black press is still around, and it still is a form of advocating we have. It's been diminished a little by the fact that now the major media, television, has had a great impact, and they come out with stories on South Africa and stories on some brutality that's occurring down in Mississippi or someplace; they're coming out more on the rise of blacks in the political process. So that, in a way, this has kind of diminished the black press, because they used to be our exclusive domain, you know. But there's room, still room, for a great deal, and that's what I try to preach all the time, that there's still room for more inside stories, the story behind the story. I would like to see a little more investigative reporting, just turn someone loose to go behind the scenes and see what's happening in the Pentagon, in the procurement program, where all the money is. Are black contractors getting a piece of the cake? And who controls it? And so forth. If I were an editor, that's what I would do.

Currie: Have you ever thought of trying to become an editor?

Payne: No. I used to do the editorials, but I was just doing them, because sometimes you wore a lot of different hats. I used to do quite a few editorials, but I never wanted to become an editor. No.

Currie: How come?

Payne: It would tie me down. I want to be free to roam.

Currie: Had you ever thought about working for, say, a white newspaper?

Payne: No. As I told you once before, I think, I wouldn't have fit into the white media. The reason why is because I'm too independent and too assertive. I could not write a story within the parameters of what the styles and the rules and the editorial policy of a particular person, whatever the person next to me would say. They'd chop it to pieces. I think I stayed with the black press particularly because I had this freedom. Not the money, but the freedom.