Ethel Lois Payne is born - August 14th, 1911

On this day in 1911, pioneering Black journalist Ethel Lois Payne was born in Chicago, Illinois.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that pays tribute to people of the past by
telling their stories. Today, I'm Gabe Lucier, and today we're
celebrating the life of Ethel pain a prolific writer and

(00:21):
civil rights activist who dared to cover the stories and
ask the questions that no one else would. The day
was August fourteenth, nineteen eleven. Pioneering Black journalist Ethel Lois
Payne was born in Chicago, Illinois. She was one of

(00:43):
six children born to William A. Payne and Bessie Austin.
Her father worked as a pullman porter and her mother
was a Latin teacher turned homemaker. From an early age,
Ethel Paine loved to read, especially the poetry of Paul
Laurence Dunbar, and her parents encouraged her to pursue her
education and to start writing herself. As a teenager, Ethel

(01:07):
was one of the first black students to integrate LYNDE.
Blum High School, which was located in a white neighborhood
on the South side of Chicago. The environment was unwelcoming,
to say the least, the young girl endured taunts, racial slurs,
and even had rocks thrown at her while walking to school.
She was also barred from working on the school newspaper. Then,

(01:30):
one month into her first year at Lynn Bloom, in
nineteen twenty six, Payne's father passed away unexpectedly, making her
home life just as fraught as her days at school. Understandably,
Paine had trouble adjusting, and her grades began to slip
in every subject except English. Her teacher in that subject,

(01:50):
Margaret Dixon, had once taught a young Ernest Hemingway at
nearby Oak Park. She had encouraged him in his writing,
and she did the same for pain. Dixon even helped
her draft her first magazine submission, which was accepted for publication.
By the time Payne graduated in nineteen thirty, her experiences,

(02:11):
the good and the bad, had convinced her to become
an advocate for the oppressed and underprivileged. As she later explained, quote,
I had a strong, strong, deeply embedded hatred of bullies.
I just felt that if you're strong, you had no
right to pick on weak people. With that in mind,
Payne set out to become a lawyer, but she faced

(02:34):
discrimination again when she was denied admission to the University
of Chicago Law School because of the color of her skin. Undeterred,
she looked for other ways to further her education and
to confront the racial justice issues of her day. She
studied English and history at Crane Junior College and Garrett
Biblical Institute, and although the Great Depression had made it

(02:57):
harder than ever for a young black woman to find
work outside of service, she was able to take a
job as an assistant at the Chicago Public Library. In
her off hours, Payne pursued activism at the local branch
of the NAACP and helped organize community programs at her
church to combat juvenile delinquency. She also continued writing, including

(03:19):
several short stories based on events from her own life.
Ethel Paine kept herself very busy, but by the mid
nineteen forties she was feeling frustrated by how many avenues
still felt close to her, especially a career in law.
Ready for a change, Payne took a job with the
US Army Special Services Club and moved to Tokyo in

(03:41):
nineteen forty eight. She spent the next three years coordinating
recreational activities for Black troops stationed in Japan. The role
opened Paine's eyes to the unfair treatment of African American soldiers, because,
even though President Truman had issued an executive order for
the military to be integrated, General McCarthy had refused to comply,

(04:04):
insisting that his troops remained segregated. When the Korean War
began in nineteen fifty, Payne started writing down all the
incidents of discrimination that she witnessed in Japan. She eventually
shared these entries with Alex Wilson, a reporter for The
Chicago Defender, the first black newspaper in America to have

(04:25):
a circulation over one hundred thousand. The two first bumped
into each other at a Japanese press club, and after
reading a few excerpts from Payne's journal, Wilson asked permission
to take her notes back to his editors. Impressed by
her talent, Defender editor Lewis Martin offered Paine a full
time job in nineteen fifty one. It was the beginning

(04:47):
of a twenty seven year career with the paper, during
which she strived to cover stories that had been historically
ignored by the press. She detailed the struggles of unwed
mothers and black orphans, and exc disposed the racial disparities
in Chicago's labor, housing, and healthcare systems. In her national assignments,
Payne covered a host of historic events related to the

(05:10):
civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties. Among
them were the Brown Versus Board of Education case, the
Montgomery bus boycott, the horrific murder of Emmett Till, the
Little Rock Nine desegregation, and the nineteen sixty three March
on Washington. She also became the first black woman journalist

(05:31):
to focus on international news coverage. In nineteen fifty five,
she was the only black correspondent to attend the Bandung
Conference in Indonesia, which was the first major conference between
Asian and African states. Around the same time, Ethel Payne,
along with Alice Dunnegan, became one of the first two

(05:51):
black women to be issued a White House press pass.
She quickly developed a reputation for asking hard hitting questions,
including at presidential press conferences. One of her most memorable
exchanges came in nineteen fifty four, when she asked President
Eisenhower what he was doing to address racial inequality in America.

(06:13):
Mister President, she said, we were very happy last week
when the Deputy Attorney General sent a communication to the
House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee saying that there was
legal basis for passing a law to ban segregation in
interstate travel. I would like to know if we could
assume that we have administration support in getting action on this.

(06:37):
Clearly annoyed, Eisenhower responded gruffly, saying, quote, the administration is
trying to do what it thinks and believes to be
decent and just in this country, and is not in
the effort to support any particular or special group of
any kind. Ike's kurt response made headlines the following day,

(06:58):
with many interpreting it as proof that the Eisenhower administration
considered equal rights to be little more than a special interest.
The backlash further enraged Eisenhower, and he refused to call
on Pain again for the rest of his presidency. His
Press secretary also tried to revoke Paine's credentials, but even

(07:19):
after going through her tax returns, he could find no
defensible reason to do so. As a result, Ethel Pain
continued to cover the White House through seven presidents, and
thankfully not all of her relationships with them were contentious.
For example, President Lyndon Johnson invited her to the signing
of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four and

(07:42):
the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He even
gifted her one of the pens he had used to
sign them. For the rest of the decade, Paine continued
to report on civil rights events for The Defender. She
interviewed prominent figures in the movement, too, including doctor Martin
Luther King, Jay Junior, Nelson Mandela, and Senator John F. Kennedy.

(08:04):
In nineteen sixty six, Payne traveled to Vietnam to report
on the war, then the following year she covered the
Biafran war in Nigeria. In nineteen seventy two, pain broke
yet another barrier when she became the first African American
woman to appear on a national network as a radio
and TV commentator. For the next ten years, she made

(08:26):
frequent appearances on CBS programs such as The Morning News
Spectrum and Matters of Opinion. She retired from The Chicago
Defender in nineteen seventy eight and later taught journalism at
Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She also continued writing throughout
the nineteen eighties, including reporting on apartheid and on the

(08:48):
plight of refugees within Africa. Payne took one last trip
to South Africa in nineteen ninety in order to interview
Nelson Mandela, shortly after his triumphant release from la Prison
the following spring. On May twenty ninth, nineteen ninety one,
Ethel Payne died of a heart attack in Washington, DC

(09:08):
at the age of seventy nine. She's remembered today as
the first Lady of the Black Press, a fearless, unapologetic
advocate for her people, or, as she described herself, an
instrument of change. I'm gay, Blues yay, and hopefully you

(09:30):
now know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with the show,
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TDI HC Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions,
feel free to send them my way by writing to
this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Kasby Bias

(09:52):
for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in history class at the Painting of Putre,