Ethel Payne: History maker, history follower and “First Lady of the Black Press”
One of the best parts of coming to Washington has been getting to know more about my grandma’s sister, Ethel Payne, who I always knew as Aunt Ethel.
She was one the first black woman White House correspondents, starting her career in Japan, publishing work that started in her journal and ended in the pages of The Chicago Defender.
Over a career she would cover the White House through seven American presidents, starting with Eisenhower, eventually earning her the nickname “The First Lady of the Black Press.” She would become America’s first female African-American commentator employed by a national network on the CBS show “Spectrum.”
Her job, she said, was a “box seat to history.”
No question that’s where she was.
She was there for the Montgomery bus boycotts. Desegregation at the University of Alabama. The 1963 march on Washington and several trips around the South and rest of the nation reporting on the Civil Rights movement.
As I understand it, she was the only black woman in the room when the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. A decade earlier, her willingness to ask questions others wouldn’t got her in trouble with President Eisenhower when she questioned segregation on interstate highways. Eisenhower wouldn’t call on her again. But she knew who she was writing for, and sought answers on issues her readers wanted to know or should know about.
In today’s stumbling media, her work was a testament to the need for a diversity of perspectives in media. That a well rounded group of people are necessary to pose questions to the powerful.
She filed datelines from Vietnam, Taiwan, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Denmark, Brazil, China and other countries around the world.
Though a citizen of the world, Aunt Ethel’s parents were part of that Great Migration north. She was always a loyal child of Chicago’s South Side, growing up in the Englewood neighborhood with my grandmother and four other siblings. That’s less then five miles from Obama’s old Hyde Park neighborhood and less than 10 from Grant Park where Obama accepted the nomination for president.
Posthumously, she would have her letters, possibly her dining room set and other artifacts moved to places like the Howard University archives, the Anacostia Community museum which is ran by the Smithsonian and the Washington Press Club Foundation.
In 2002 her face was put on a postage stamp as part of a series of stamps for women journalists.
I purposely kept from learning too much about her writing style and works in journalism so I could humbly take the necessary lumps and lessons to become a journalist. If there were shoes I felt needed to be filled, I didn’t want to pressure myself into them. I have my own path to follow.
Now out of school and more comfortable with my own abilities, I sought out people she used to know while I’m in town covering the inauguration. I always knew about here sense of duty, reputation for being a fearless independent voice and unquenchable wanderlust but I’m just beginning to learn more about the details of her life. More to the person she was beyond the rattling, impressive life’s work.
I’ll continue to interview her friends in DC after the inauguration and sift through archives but I wanted to speak with Ethel’s good friend Kathy Brown ahead of Jan. 20 to ask how she thinks Aunt Ethel would have felt to see such history when she spent so much of her life following history and championing progress.
Kathy Brown met Aunt Ethel (we both knew her as Aunt Ethel) in 1964. They would remain good friends until Ethel passed away in May 1991.
The two of us met for an interview after the sermon at Shiloh Baptist Church Sunday. I didn’t count at the time but she’s wearing more than 20 Obama buttons on her hat.
She’s also wearing a mink coat given to her by Aunt Ethel shortly before she died and was able to explain more to me about how Aunt Ethel kept a correspondence with Winnie Mandela and went to South Africa to visit shortly after he was released from prison. How she was close with Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
And that it wouldn’t surprise her at all if she knew Barack or Michelle Obama, especially since Aunt Ethel went to Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama’s old church, when she was in Chicago.
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