Currie: This is number four; can you believe it?

Payne: Yeah.

Currie: And we're only up to 1955.

Payne: Yeah.

Currie: I think last time we stopped—

Payne: You were going to ask me about Bandung.

Currie: Your first foreign correspondent assignment.

Payne: My first foreign assignment.

Currie: Right. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got the assignment?

Payne: One morning I was in bed at my apartment in Washington, and I got a call from John Sengstacke in Chicago, and he said, "How would you like to go to Indonesia?"

Well, I was half asleep, so I said, "Indo who?"

And he said, "Yes, Indonesia. You know, there's a great conference going to take place there." He said, "It's the first conference of darker people of the world. And we thought that you would be the person to go and cover it."

So I said, "Yes? When?"

He said, "Well, like yesterday." And he laughed. But this was in the middle of March, I think, and the conference was going to open on April 15th, I believe.

Currie: 1955.

Payne: 1955. So I had to rush and get ready, get shots, get visas, because of all of that. In the meantime, with all these complications, I went back to Chicago to get instructions and to lay out the itinerary, and they decided that they wanted me to take in some other places. So we added on—I think it was nine countries in Europe and Asia, and we could include it all in the one-price ticket. So I started out. I left from Washington, and I flew to San Francisco, and I got a—I think it was a TWA flight from San Francisco that was going to Manila, the Philippines. And it was a commercial flight. I remember that the trip was so slow, you know, it was not like today, you get over there in a matter of eight or ten hours. But I think it was

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almost 22 hours, that flight from San Francisco to Manila, because we stopped in Hawaii to refuel, and then we went on to Manila.

When I got to Manila, I got off the plane. I was going to take another airline, I think Singapore Airlines, and the first thing I noticed when I got off was Adam Clayton Powell, the former congressman, the congressman then from New York City, was in Manila. He had come in from some other point in Asia, and he was holding a press conference at the airport. He was talking about the conference and what a great thing this was, because this was going to be strictly all colored people, colored people of the earth, and no Western nations were included, and he thought this was a phenomenal thing, which it was.

At any rate, so while I was there, General Carlos Romulo, who was then the Philippine ambassador to the United States, came to the airport, and he greeted me, and he said that his government was putting a plane at his convenience. He was going to head the Philippine delegation, and so he invited me and Adam Powell to come on board the plane and take the rest of the journey with him.

Let me go back and preface what this conference was all about. It was put together by the so-called Colombo Powers. That was five nations—India, Pakistan, then Ceylon, Burma, and, of course, Indonesia, the host country. They had been talking about this for maybe three or four years, and they had had many conferences preceding it, but they felt that the time had come for these countries, these people of color, to come together, because it had never been done before, and there were problems that were endemic to them and they all shared. And they wanted a greater share in the wealth and the power of the world, because they were predominantly the majority group on the face of the earth. They represented two-thirds of the earth's population. They included Africa. They named it the Asian-African Conference, because the countries of Africa had not yet achieved independence, but they were on the verge of independence, some of them. So they wanted to make it all-inclusive, so they called it the Asian-African Conference. But thereafter, it usually became known as the Bandung Conference.

I went on board the plane. I was so awed by all the array of dignitaries on that plane! There was the prime minister of Ceylon; there was the prime minister of Pakistan and his new wife; there were so many dignitaries on board the plane! I was in awe. And this being my first foreign assignment, naturally, I was just overwhelmed, so I kind of shrank up into a little ball in the back of the plane, and just listened to all of this.

When we got to Djakarta, which is the capital of Indonesia, that was where we disembarked, because to get to Bandung, it's a mountain city, and we would have to take smaller planes to go over to the site of the conference. But Djakarta being the capital, they had a great welcoming reception there, and you saw all these flags of the different countries waving, and there were bands, there was food, and there was drink and everything else. And, of course, all these dignitaries began coming off the plane, and there was this great ceremony. Well, I stayed behind, because I felt that all the VIPs should get off, and then I would. When I looked out the plane window, though, however, I saw these hordes of Indonesian students. I could tell they were students; they just had the student "look." They were all armed with pads and pencils, and I thought they were there to take notes, and they kept waiting around and waiting around. Finally, when I got off the plane, I was the last person off the plane. They surrounded the steps leading down, and most of them spoke English. So I smiled and greeted them, and they said, "Welcome! Welcome!" You know, they were using their best English, and they said, "We want to get your autograph!"

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I said, "Autograph? Well, I'm just a reporter. I'm not a VIP. There are all the VIPs over there."

They said, "No, no, no! We came to see the American Negro." [Laughter.] "We heard you were coming, and we want to talk to you. We want to learn all about you. We want to learn all about what's happening in your country, to Negroes in your country."

Well, I came down the steps, and they thrust their little pads at me, and I began obliging. I was standing there writing, and Adam Powell was standing over on the side. He was a very tall and a very handsome man, but he was very fair, you know. To the Indonesians, he was not identified as an American Negro. And he was standing over there watching, and, of course, being the type of person he was, with the great big ego that he had, after a while he couldn't stand it, so he came over and put his arms around me and said, "Me colored, too!" [Laughter.]

Well, the conference went on for about ten days, and it was exciting. First of all, we all were issued press credentials, because the security was so tight, you had so many heads of state coming, that the security was extra. The Indonesian Army had been put on full duty, and the conference site was a big conference hall. You know Indonesia had been settled by the Dutch for many years, so it retained a lot of the Dutch customs. And the conference site was called the Gedung Merderke; that was where all the plenary sessions took place. We were quartered in various places. I was given a place in a kind of little villa that had three apartments in it, all on one level, but a common sitting room, and it had the Dutch doors, you know, swinging out. You know, the Dutch doors, where the top half can swing out.

Currie: I see. It's like a door cut in half.

Payne: Yes. That was common. That was very common. So I had my quarters in one of these sections.

Well, to go back a little bit, my sister Thelma, my second sister, was great with her hands. She does a lot of ceramics, even to this day. She's very busy with her hands. She's good at handcraft. She had been dabbling in ceramics, and she had made a locket for me. It was blue copper. When she did it, she just added some little squiggles, just little black squiggles, just to kind of decorate it. I loved it. I wore it every place. I wore it every day. Well, I was issued my credentials. And there were hordes of correspondents there from the Western country, because the Western countries were almost paranoid about this conference. They saw it as a great threat, because they were not included, and they just believed this was an ominous threat. So the British had sent just hordes of correspondents, and the Dutch and German and all the European countries. The Australians were almost in hysteria, because it was in their area, and they felt, you know, that they were part of that hemisphere, but they just weren't included, and they didn't know what was going to happen at this conference. The five sponsoring persons were Jawarharlal Nehru of India, he was the leader, and he was the chairperson of the conference; and then there was Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, who was quite a character; and then there was this new Pakistan prime minister, Ali Muhammed; and then there was U Nu of Burma; and then there was Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon. So those were the five hosts. Well, you had Nasser of Egypt, who— [Tape interruption.]

Currie: You were saying that Nasser of Egypt was there.

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Payne: Nasser. Gamal Abdel Nasser. You know, he was quite a controversial person, but he was the most handsome man I've ever seen in my life.

Currie: Really?

Payne: Oh, he was gorgeous! Chou En-Lai of China was there also, and just numerous people that you would look up at, you would see them in magazines, but you never dreamed you would see them in person. The African colonies, Liberia was the only free African nation—sorry Ethiopia was a free nation—but then there were people there from the Gold Coast, people from what later became Nigeria, and from many other African countries, but they were not yet free.

The conference started off, and like I said, there were all these—just maybe 1,000 reporters there.

Currie: Were there many American reporters there?

Payne: Yes, quite a few. One of them was Chet Huntley, who I'll tell you about later. So each morning, I would walk to the conference site, and the Indonesian soldiers surrounded it. They were fully armed; they had bayonets and guns and everything else. And so I noticed that I had my credentials on me, but they would look at me, and they would just smile and lift their bayonets, and I would walk through the line. Nobody stopped me. This went on for several days, and I had free access to the closed conference sessions.

Currie: The sessions the press wasn't supposed to be allowed in?

Payne: That's right. I was going in to them, and I really didn't give much thought to this, except that I was— [Tape interruption.]

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Currie: So you were saying that every morning, you would go in to the conference.

Payne: Yes, I would walk to the conference site. I never was stopped; I just would go through the lines. They would lift their bayonets. Their bayonets were always at the ready, and they would automatically raise their bayonets and I would walk through. And they'd smile at me, and I'd just walk on through. I'd say, "Well, this was fun. I didn't have to show anything."

One morning, as I was walking to the conference, Chet Huntley, who later became quite famous with the Huntley-Brinkley thing—

Currie: He wasn't famous then?

Payne: He wasn't famous then. He was working for the Los Angeles Times. He hadn't yet come into television. But he was very exercised about what was going on; he was really, really concerned. I later found out that he was quite a conservative. But he fell in step with me, and he said, "Listen. I don't want you to be taken in by this propaganda, because it's all a communist plot. It's Russia behind it. It's the Soviet Union behind it." And he said, "Don't be taken in by it." And as we approached the conference site, I was listening to him, but the Indonesian soldiers saluted me and raised the bayonets, and I walked through. And he stepped up, and they brought the bayonets down real sharply and jabbed at him. Well, he became furious!

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Oh, he was so angry! And he started protesting, "You let her through. Why?" They were glowering at him, because, you know, he was giving them such a hard time. And so while he was arguing with them, of course, they didn't speak any English, but they knew enough to know that he was agitated. So suddenly, just like a big light come over me, for the first time in my life, I realized that I was part of a majority; I was not a minority. I was a majority, and it was like a revelation. I just stood there, and I began laughing, and the more I laughed, the angrier he got.

I said, "Hey, Chet, now you know what it's like to be a minority." [Laughter.]

Well, at any rate, in all the confusion, an interpreter came up, and there was quite a palaver between them and Chet Huntley and the soldiers. The interpreter came to me, and he looked at the locket, and he said, "Aren't you attached to the Saudi Arabian delegation?" [Laughter.] That was the first time I realized that the locket was the thing, as well as my color. The locket was the thing; they thought there was Arabic writing on this locket. It did look like that. I hope I can dig it out so I can show you sometime.

Currie: That would be great!

Payne: Yes. But that was really the pass thing.

Currie: So that's why you got in to all those conferences?

Payne: I got into all those sessions that were closed to reporters. So, you know, they debated for days and days, you know, and there were questions of great concern, and I was getting all these notes and writing furiously, and I was just filing as fast as I could. But at any rate, that was another one of those incidents.

Another incident took place during the conference, because wives of many of the heads of state had come with their husbands, and, of course, many of them, being Moslems or Muslims, whatever the term is, they had plural wives. One of the things that was particularly aggravating to Indonesian women was that Sukarno had taken his second wife to be the hostess of the conference, but he had excluded the first wife, who was the mother of his children. She was left behind. Well, she was almost left out of the whole thing. And these women were—I guess they could be described as feminists, but they were very upset about this. And then the Pakistan prime minister had come with his new bride, who was his second or third wife.

Those Indonesian women were the most gorgeous—they were the most beautiful women! And so they came to me, and they asked me to meet with them. They wanted to talk with me about something. So I went, and they served me tea, and some of them were from some of the various islands, Bali and Sumatra, you know. That makes up the whole chain of the Indonesian peninsula. Well, at any rate, they wanted to impress upon me what they knew about America, and so one of them sat down at the piano, and she was playing songs, and they were singing American songs. And then one of the songs that they began singing was Stephen Foster's "Old Black Joe." [Laughter.] And so I politely listened, and after they finished, I stood up and I said—oh, let me go back a little bit. The reason they had invited me was to talk about this situation that had become quite a scandal to them.

Currie: Of all the second wives?

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Payne: All these wives or mistresses. Some of them had their mistresses. So they wanted me to know that they didn't like that at all, and that that was an old custom that had died out, and they were moving toward a new phase where women were respected and so forth. And what did I think of this? I said, "You are predominantly a Moslem country, aren't you?"

"Yes."

I said, "Well, I thought it was a custom to have plural wives."

They said, "Well, that was done during the days when there were so many wars, and so many of the men were killed, and the prophet decreed that each widow should be taken in by another man as an extra wife so that she would be cared for. But that's no longer true, so we don't need that kind of thing." And that was my first lesson in real feminism, you know, for equal rights and everything. It was a great topic of discussion. I learned a lot from that.

Well, then came the entertainment part, and when this lovely young lady sat down and began playing this "Old Black Joe," so I stood and I said, "I thank you for your hospitality. You're so gracious. But let me tell you a little bit about the history of that particular piece of music." I said, "It represents a very sad, a very bleak picture in the history of our country. It goes back to slavery days when my people were in slavery, and "Old Black Joe" represents the kind of denigration that we had. So we don't accept that anymore. We think it's a pattern back to a day that we would like to put behind us." And I explained it very carefully to them, and there was silence.

Then they listened, and then one of them stood up, and she dramatically took the piece of sheet music, and she tore it in half. She said, "We will never again sing that song." It was a high moment, a very high moment.

Currie: How dramatic!

Payne: Yes, that was very dramatic, what she said. And she said, "We understand thoroughly. We did not know." But she said, "This is the type of thing that has been brought over to us by other Americans as typical of U.S. music, and so we did not know that it was offensive."

Currie: That's a touchy situation for you, too.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: Because this was another culture.

Payne: Yes. But, you see, I could feel there was a great—shall I say—-simpatico there because of the occasion, because of the purpose of the conference, and the issue of feminism. I was a woman, and I think I was—well, there was one other black woman there, but she operated under a different kind of thing than I did. But they wanted me to know that there was a relationship there and a feeling. They were the warmest people I've ever met. Of all the people I've ever met in my travels, I think the Indonesians were the softest, warmest people.

Richard Wright, the great novelist, was there.

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Currie: What was he doing?

Payne: He came, because he said he thought the idea of such a conference was one of the most exciting things, and he wanted to witness it. He was thinking about doing some writing on it. Well, we got together and struck up a friendship. I'll have to tell you something very funny. In those days, well, the afro was not in vogue, and black women were very sensitive about their hair, so they used to what they call press the hair, you know, just get the kinks out of it.

Currie: How would you do that?

Payne: With a hot iron. You pressed your hair.

Currie: A real iron, like you iron clothes with?

Payne: No, a hot comb.

Currie: I remember when I was in high school, we wanted straight hair, and we put it on the board and ironed it.

Payne: We used to use the hot comb. So before I left to go there, I had one bag, and I had a straightening comb and my hair grease, and I had about four cans of Sterno, four or five cans of Sterno. And my sisters were helping me to pack, and one of my sisters said, "Now, you're not going to take all this junk over there. You don't need all this junk." And so she reduced it to just the one can of Sterno.

Currie: Sterno is to light the comb?

Payne: Yes, to heat the comb. Well, Bandung was extremely humid, very humid, and so every morning, I would get up, and I would wash my hair because it was so humid, and I'd take the comb and run through my hair. Well, one day the Sterno gave out. [Laughter.] That morning Richard Wright came by. I had put on a little bonnet or hat or turban, and I said, "Oh, I don't know what to do about my hair! My hair is just—"

He said, "What's the matter?"

I said, "The Sterno's gone. I didn't have but the one can of Sterno!"

He said, "Well, don't worry. If there's any Sterno in Bandung, I'll find it for you." So he went his way, and I went my way.

Then late that night, every night there was some social event, every delegation would give some kind of party or something, so you didn't get home until very late. Well, I came home this night. People were always showering you with gifts. And because it was open—everything was open—you'd find things on your table, little gifts, you know, from various delegations. So I saw this bottle. It was a bottle wrapped in white paper. I figured, well, somebody had given me—I was so tired, I said, "Oh, well, I won't open it until tomorrow." I'm not much of a drinker anyway. So I fell in bed, and about 3:00 o'clock in the morning, I heard this anguished cry outside. It was Richard. "Ethel! Ethel! Please answer me! Ethel! Are you all right?" [Laughter.]

So I said, "What is it?"

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He said, "Did you open that bottle?"

And I said, "No, I was too tired."

He said, "Well, thank God!"

I said, "What's the matter?"

He said, "I couldn't find any Sterno, so I got some pure alcohol." [Laughter.]

I said, "Well, what do you do with that?"

He said, "You got any cotton?" Well, I did have some cotton. I got some cotton out and got a saucer, and he poured the alcohol all over the cotton, and then he lit it. Then we took turns holding the comb. [Laughter.]

Currie: Over it?

Payne: The hot comb over it. [Laughter.] He'd pull sometimes, and then I'd pull the next. Together, we were frying my hair. It was the wildest thing you ever heard of! [Laughter.]

Currie: You had to do that every day?

Payne: Yeah, but I stopped it, because after all, it was just getting to be ludicrous. I would just put my little bonnet on, my little turban on, and let it go at that. But that was a hilarious moment, because he was trying so hard to help me out. [Laughter.]

Currie: That is funny.

Payne: Well, at any rate, I think one of the big issues, because the West was so furious and was writing such negative things about the whole conference, they were playing it down as ridiculous. To this day, there isn't the coverage of that conference that it should have had, and nobody has really written too much about it. You see that section there of books?

Currie: Yes.

Payne: The Color Curtain is what Richard Wright did, but it wasn't too much of—he really didn't—because he became ill shortly afterwards. He never really did do the definitive thing that he wanted to do. There are a few other books there. But if you go and look at it, you scarcely find the material on that conference, yet it was probably one of the most significant conferences in the world history, because it brought together so many diverse people, and it brought together people of color of the world.

Currie: You say that most of the Western press approached it very negatively. What were they writing?

Payne: Well, they were playing it down, saying it was a Marxist conference, and they were especially savage about Nasser. Oh, they just—you know, Nasser was a great

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ogre. Of course, I think it was—well, the relationship between Egypt and Israel was so severely strained, you know, and Nasser was the bad guy; he was the real bad guy.

Of course, Chou En-Lai, you know, the Chinese. That's another thing. I went to a reception that Chou En-Lai gave with the Chinese delegation, and in the next room are some of the paintings that he gave me at that social gathering.

Currie: He gave you some paintings?

Payne: Yes, some Chinese prints that he gave me. Oh, Chet Huntley had a lot to say about that.

Currie: What did Chet Huntley have to say about that?

Payne: He said that it was a communist ploy, you know, and I, as a black woman, was particularly vulnerable. So he just hoped that I wouldn't fall victim to that. He was just there—his sole purpose, rather than to report on it, was to kind of what you might call destabilize it. I think he was really working for the CIA, he was so passionate about it.

One evening, the Liberian delegation gave a film showing, and Adam Powell had taken it upon himself to make a mission of inquiring about some American fliers who had been downed in China. And the State Department, you know, was looking into it, but Adam Powell had taken it upon himself to investigate it. Well, in the dark, there were some people seated late, and then the lights went on for intermission, and here was Adam Powell seated next to Chou En-Lai, and so he said, in this loud, booming voice that you could hear all over the place, "How do you do, Mr. Prime Minister? My name is Adam Clayton Powell. I'm the Negro congressman from New York, and I have been wanting to meet you, to inquire about the 12 American fliers that you're holding in your country."

And Chou En-Lai could understand English, and I later found out he could speak English, he says, "No speak English. No speak English," and left the place, just got up and left. But that was, you know, the kind of intrusion that Adam Powell did.

Currie: How did you get along with Chou En-Lai?

Payne: I think the whole thrust of it was perhaps I kind of stood out as a black woman at the conference. And I think it was a way of kind of sensitizing us and wooing us. So he gave me a set of these prints, and, of course, I liked it. [Laughter.] I liked it. I wasn't thinking about the ideology; I was thinking about the fact that these were world leaders, that these were people who were important on the world scene, and that here I was in the company of people who were history makers, you know.

Nehru came up to me and spoke to me very warmly, and I remember that his daughter, Indira, was there. Of course, how was I to know then she would later become prime minister in her own right? So it was a very interesting thing. To me, it was just earthshaking.

The Saudi Arabians came with their own plane, and, of course, they have always been very wealthy. I remember that they brought gold bars with them and left them at the airport as kind of a security thing. When it came their turn to entertain the delegates, they had Maxim's of Paris cook the food and fly it to the conference site.

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And the pilots of the plane were two white Virginians, and they had been hired by the Saudi Arabians to pilot the plane. But Maxim's flew the food in from Paris for the occasion.

Currie: It sounds like the press was treated very well at this conference.

Payne: Oh, yes, because they wanted to make a big impression. They wanted to show clout, and they also wanted to make an effort to have the Western world understand what their purposes and desires were. They adopted the very strong mandate that's in some of those books. Of course, I filed my stories, and I talked about it. I remember that I wrote constantly—the cry of freedom was foremost in it. As a matter of fact, the opening day of the plenary session, Sukarno, who was quite an orator—oh, he was quite an orator—and he made a speech in which he invoked the name of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as models of people who had fought for freedom. Then he said, "Sisters and brothers, this is our goal and our mission." His speech was quite something. It's a classic. It really fired up the conference. You know, he was a great womanizer, so there were all kinds of innuendoes about that. But each day, as each person arrived at the conference site, oh, there were hordes of people that came, and the most popular one of all was Nasser. When Nasser would step out of his limousine, the crowd would just scream, you know. Oh, they were so fired up with enthusiasm about this man, because they looked upon him as a great hero. To them, he was a hero.

So the conference went on for about ten days. I think that they accomplished quite a bit, because they issued a manifesto, and they, of course, called for freedom, for independence for the African countries. And the African delegates who were there made quite a plea for their cause and for their support, and it was two years later that the Gold Coast became Ghana and became independent.

After I left Bandung—

Currie: Before we leave Bandung, can we talk a little bit about the kind of stories you wrote while you were there?

Payne: I have a whole set of them back in another file here. I remember my first one I filed was "Freedom Fever Sweeps Bandung." I talked about the delegates who were there and what they represented, and things that they had in common. And I talked about Indonesia itself and its particular problems—it had not been free that long from under Dutch rule—and the problems of independence that came with each of these. I talked about Ceylon and Sir John Kotelawala, the prime minister of Ceylon, and his goals.

The most aesthetic person at the conference, I would say, was U Nu of Burma, who was a devout Buddhist, very, very religious, and a very peace-loving man, and one who tried to mute the militant tones at the conference with his philosophy of peace and love, you know. So he was the peacemaker among the groups.

Of course, Nasser was viewed as the saber-rattler, you know, and he, too, was a powerful orator. He dwelt at length upon the Middle East situation and the aggressiveness of Israel and the diatribe that was against the United States for having participated in backing the state of Israel. So Nasser was probably—I guess he would be what the Palestinians are today, you know. Of course, under his administration, the Suez Canal thing came about, you know.

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So there were many political issues, and I wrote about most of them.

Currie: Did you have to ask for interviews? How did you actually go about getting your stories?

Payne: I met with the delegations. I didn't always meet with the leader of the delegation. I had a chance to meet Sir John Kotelawala, and what happened was, he invited me to come to Ceylon after the conference was over, so I included that. Nehru—I only had a social encounter with him; I didn't really get into the nuts and bolts of it. But from his handling of the conference, I got a lot. So that was very easy. I had quite a lengthy talk with U Nu of Burma, to talk about his philosophy, his religion, and he was almost monastic, in that he was so deeply religious. I never got to talk to the Pakistan man too much.

Currie: And Chou En-Lai.

Payne: Chou En-Lai. Well, of course, there was a language barrier there, but the very fact that he invited me to the reception was something significant. You could tell that he wanted to learn more. He was considered a rather inscrutable person, but you could tell that there was some great interest there.

Currie: How did you actually physically file your stories?

Payne: I couldn't use the wire services or anything, but they had a special courier that took the stories that you would write for the print media, and they would fly it out every day to Djakarta and then put it on one of the planes going out of Djakarta. So I had fairly good—you know, it would reach Chicago maybe in two or three days.

Currie: That's not bad.

Payne: No, it wasn't bad.

Currie: How many stories do you think you wrote while you were there?

Payne: Oh, Lord! I must have written—I don't know. [Laughter.] Every day I was writing something.

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Currie: What was the difference in covering Bandung and doing your other assignments here in Washington?

Payne: Oh, a great deal of difference. I mean, because it was as much difference as day and night, because this was my first experience, you must remember, at foreign reporting. I just felt like it was such a challenge to me, to bring out the very best in me, and to try to put it into words that would have particular meaning to people back home. So I just felt that—I had a little portable typewriter, and every night when I'd come home, I would be banging away on that typewriter. So it was an exhausting thing, but there was so much excitement about it that I'd never really, you know, felt like I was—I just felt like I had taken on a major thing that was far different from any other experience I'd ever had. So I tried to convey that.

Currie: Were there many other women correspondents?

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Payne: Well, there was one woman, Marguerite Cartwright, who represented a chain of papers, but we didn't have—she wasn't very friendly, and so I never really—when I saw what she was like—she worked for the U.N. When I saw that she was distant, I didn't really try to talk to her too much. But later on, we became quite friendly. She died about two years ago. But she knew so many people in the U.N. who were there, and I always felt that she was kind of excluding me from that particular circle, so I had to make my own way around.

Currie: Which papers was she reporting for?

Payne: She was working for a chain of papers. I don't know where her stuff went into. A small chain of papers, white newspapers.

Currie: She was a white woman?

Payne: No, she was black, but I think she was working for—I think probably she had been asked to do this by this chain of papers, because, you know—

Currie: She had contacts.

Payne: Yes. She had a desk at the U.N., and so she had quite a lot of access that I didn't have. Remember, this is my first time to do something like this. But I was fortunate in that I knew enough to make my own way, and I think I was noticeable, because I was there. Indonesian women are really very, very friendly, so that helped some.

Currie: I wanted to ask you why do you think the Indonesian women sought you out?

Payne: You see, let's say it like this. I was from the United States. Many of them had never been exposed to American people—period. They knew I was there. They knew I had come over on the same plane with some of the leaders of the conference, so I think that gave me a little more status. So they were looking for somebody to have a sympathetic outlook, you know, somebody who could really understand their particular concerns. So I think it just built up that way.

Currie: And these Indonesian women, were they delegates to the conference?

Payne: No, no, no. These were just local Indonesian women, as I said, from all over the country, but women who were there to observe the conference. No, they were not delegates, because, again, this was probably an all-male conference anyway, you know, and they were there to talk about—they were at the beginning of the feminist movement. They were, I think, the first Asian feminists, who were really talking about the concerns of women.

Currie: What do you think you learned from covering this conference?

Payne: It gave me a great—I had a high that I think I carried for a long time. I was just exuberant about it, because I felt that I had really—that's where I coined the term for myself "a box seat on history." Because I felt that I was witnessing something that had never happened before in the history of the world and probably would not happen again. So I was a witness to that. I felt it had a real impact upon world events, about world thinking. I think it brought the Third World—the so-called

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Third World—into focus about the demands. And even though they played down the conference, it was a significant happening. I think it catapulted the surge for independence on the African continent. Ghana became independent, and then country after country gained its independence in the wake of that conference. I think it had a major impact upon foreign relations. I think it influenced some of the change in the politics of Great Britain, because Great Britain was losing her hold. Nehru had been an associate of Gandhi, and Great Britain had lost her hold on India. India had become independent after a bloody battle, a bloody campaign. And Gandhi's Civil Disobedience, which Martin Luther King was a disciple of that. So the whole thing had a tremendous effect upon global politics and upon the whole shape of the world. That's the way I felt about it. I still say I wish I could really bring it all into larger focus now and make a comparison of what the Bandung conference was all about and the world today as we know it, and how it changed the shape of the world.

Currie: After you are finished with that, why don't we pick up the travels of Ethel Payne?

Payne: I left there, and, as I said, I stopped in nine different countries. I stopped in what is now Libya—Tripoli. I went to India, Bombay, and I didn't get to New Delhi. I think it was Madras, the other city in India. I went to Pakistan, Karachi; I went to Ceylon. Sir John Kotelawala, who was then the prime minister, presented me at the Parliament. I left there, and where else did I stop? I left there and flew to Germany, I think. Germany and France and Italy, Switzerland, and then I came on home.

Currie: Filing all the way?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: What kinds of stories were you writing?

Payne: Well, in Germany, I think I wrote about the climate following the end of World War II, what the German people were like, and some latent sentiments about Hitler. Then, of course, there were U.S. troops stationed in Germany, so I wrote about that. Then, of course, Paris is Paris! [Laughter.] I wanted to write about France, you know, and the gay Parisians. Oh, I went to Austria. I made a stop in Austria. No, not Austria—Zurich, Switzerland. I talked about the prosperity of the Swiss people and about the beauty of the country. Well, those were just sort of picture words about these various countries. In Rome, I went to the Vatican, and I wrote about the impact, and, as I saw it, how the church was losing its grip upon the Italian population. In other words, the Italians were not so dedicated to the church as they had once been; they had kind of swung away from the authority of the church.

Currie: That's really a lot of reporting. How did you prepare yourself to write those stories?

Payne: How did I prepare myself? Well, simply just by observing things and taking in what I perceived as the trend of the times, and absorbing as much as I could, and then writing my impressions. I didn't have any formal background in foreign correspondence; I just had to write the way it came to me, the way it impressed me.

Currie: How long were you gone altogether?

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Payne: Well, let me see. I started off in April. I think it was about the third week in May before I got home, after all the stops in these various places.

Currie: When you'd go to various places, did you have contacts you would make in those cities?

Payne: In some places, I didn't have any contacts whatsoever. So I just had to go in and try to explain what I wanted. Sometimes I would go to the American consul or the American Embassy and explain what I was there for. Sometimes they would give me help; not always. Sometimes American embassies can be quite cold. But I just tried to make my own way around, and I think I called the bureaus of various papers. I remember when I was in Italy, I called the—what is that Roman paper? I can't think of the name of it now. But somebody had given me the name of a contact there, so I called, and they were very helpful. So you just had to use your own ingenuity to go about it.

Currie: So in May 1955, you were back in the United States.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: On your regular beat?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: Covering just about everything in Washington.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: What was the next big story for you?

Payne: May 1955. The next big story, a real big significant one, was in 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott. That happened in December 1956.

Currie: Can you tell me a little about how you covered the Montgomery bus boycott?

Payne: Well, when the news broke about the arrest of Mrs. Parks, Rosa Parks, I phoned Chicago, and I said, "I think this is a major story. This is a major thing coming up, and I want to go."

And so they said, "All right, go on down there and see what's happening."

So I went down shortly after the arrest, and it so happened that the man who really launched this thing—and sometimes he's not given the credit for it—was a Pullman porter. His name was E.D. Nixon, and he was head of the local NAACP. He was very active in the NAACP. And Mrs. Parks had been working for that. She was a very quiet woman, you know, just mousy, almost. And that's why it made such news as it did, this quiet, meek woman who had suddenly become tough enough to just stand up and defy the whole system. Well, when she was arrested, she was so well respected in the city that everybody became alarmed about her arrest. Mr. Nixon had been on one of his runs, and when he came in and he found out that she was in jail, he immediately got so fired up about it that he got on the phone, he and his wife got on the phone, and they started calling around. And they called preachers, and they called business leaders. People, everybody was saying, "We can't let this thing happen, that Mrs. Parks is treated like this! We're all abused!" He was a man of a very limited education, but

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he was smart. He decided that the way to get the protest organized was to call some of the ministers.

My throat is really bad.

Currie: Do you want to stop a minute?

Payne: Yes. [Tape interruption.]

Mr. Nixon got on the phone, and he started calling the ministers, and he said, "I think we should meet. I think we should call all the preachers together. I think we should all get together and decide what we're going to do." In the meantime, I think he posted bail for Mrs. Parks. I'm not quite sure about that, but anyway, the ministers met, I think, within the next two days. And the story goes that Martin Luther King was a newcomer, fairly a newcomer in town. He was a minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It so happened that this church sat right at the foot of the state capitol. George Wallace was governor. But the church was a historic black church and just sat there.

The ministers met, and they all agreed that something should be done, but the system had been so oppressive for so many years that it's hard to get people to buck the system collectively. Of course, they were indignant about what had happened, but they were also afraid of the power of the system. But Mr. Nixon pressed them and said, "We've got to do something about this." And they were rather ashamed to have Mr. Nixon, a respected person, tell them about their responsibilities. There are several versions of this, but the version that I know most about is that Martin Luther King was late getting to the meeting, and when he appeared in the doorway, somebody looked up, they knew he was fresh out of Boston University Divinity School. He was a new person. He was young; he was 27 years old at the time. "Here's a man—why don't we make him the leader of this?" And that's really how it got started.

Once it got started and the ministers all became coalesced around the idea, then the next move was to vitalize the community so that the community would be—well, of course, the professional group. they were leery of it, but then the most vocal people were the plain, common folks who worked for the white people as domestics. And it was the women domestics as much as anybody who were the catalysts, and once they got fired up and indignant about it, then the churches had nothing else to do but go along, because that was their congregation. And that became the story.

Currie: When you went down there—

Payne: When I went down there, what I found was the beginnings of what I called a revolution, because every night in the churches, there was a rally, and the people came. They took turns in the different churches, and each minister would then really pull out all the oratorical stops, to tire the people up, to get involved. It became a spiritual thing, a great spiritual experience, and people began to realize that they were involved; every person was involved in a personal way. This was their life; this was their dignity at stake. And so they had a part of it; they felt a part of the whole thing.

Somewhere I have a copy of Life magazine that portrays these women, a woman with a basket of greens on her head. and she was called the "peaceful pilgrim." And she was walking with this basket of greens, and a car was driving by her, and there were some white women in the car, and they were peering out the window at her. This was symbolic, because, you know, in that town, which is a typical Southern town, the women turned over the care of the children to the domestics, who were black. And the women

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were the type who would lay up in bed, you know, 'til all hours, while the black women came in and took care of the household and took care of the children, the small children. Their white mistress would gossip over the phone—typical Southern white housewives who had nothing to do. Their husbands were busy, and so they just had an idle life. It was almost like "Gone With the Wind," you know, the mammies taking care of the kids. So to them, when these women domestics got involved and refused to come and work, you know, and take care, it was a shattering thing to the white women; it upset the whole system. So this was the beginning of something profound. And as the boycott progressed, it went on and on. Finally, the white women got very exercised, and started putting pressure on their husbands, because they were saying, "We just have to do all the work! We have to take care of the kids, and we have to do all the housework," that they'd never been accustomed to.

Currie: And the boycott itself was what? Who was boycotting?

Payne: The bus company. Because it was an abominable system that required blacks to board the bus at the front, drop their dimes (or whatever the fare was) in the fare box, get off, and go to the rear door, and get on, and take what seats were available. The system worked where the whites boarded the bus, and if it became crowded, even at the back, where the blacks were sitting, if enough whites got on, blacks had to get up and give the seats to the white person. That's what happened with Rosa Parks. She was coming home. She was a seamstress, and she had been working somewhere, and when she got on, the bus was crowded, and she took a seat in the black section. But it became crowded, and a white man got on, and he stood over her and automatically she was supposed to get up. She decided she wasn't going to get up that day.

It was a cruel system. It meant that sometimes, depending on the mood of the bus driver, who could be a nasty cracker, that you'd get on at the front, you'd drop your dime in, and you'd get off, and he would deliberately pull away and leave you standing there after you'd put your fare in the box. Nasty! Just vicious, nasty. And it just got to a point where emotions, you know, were just boiling over. It was just like a tea kettle, just boiling over. And that's what precipitated it—the indignity of it. There might not have been a boycott in Montgomery if there had been more humaneness and more decency, but the rudeness of it and the absolute, total disregard of people's feelings was the thing that led to it.

Currie: When you went down to cover the Montgomery bus boycott, were there a lot of other press there?

Payne: Oh! Well, pretty soon, after Martin Luther King became involved, he was expounding his non-violent disobedience theory, and the Montgomery Improvement Association came into being, with Ralph Abernathy. Then it began to take on much larger proportions, national and international. And pretty soon, it attracted people from all over the world, because it was going on and on and on. Martin Luther King had captured the imagination of the press and, in turn, captured the imagination of the world. Every news organization in the world was there.

Currie: Was the press operation that Martin Luther King organized a good one?

Payne: It was just a natural thing that evolved because of his activities. He didn't organize it. The press was just drawn to it, because it was a major story, a major event. And it signaled a change in the whole race relations history of this country.

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Currie: So there wasn't a central place where press could go and get briefed?

Payne: Oh, I guess they set up their own system. But he became the focal point of it.

Currie: When you went down to cover the boycott, again, how did you go about getting the story?

Payne: Well, there was a certain advantage in being colored. [Laughter] And, of course, we couldn't stay at the hotels. Fortunately, I knew a few people. I stayed at the home of a doctor and his wife. They just opened the doors to me and to others. People just took you in. And so the gathering place for most of us was a drugstore near the heart of the downtown section, because blacks had some little businesses there. And we'd gather at the drugstore for lunch, and it got to be a thriving business that we'd all—first it was all the black correspondents who came down, and then the whites got in. It got to be a real camaraderie. That drugstore just became famous. I can't think of the name of it. I can't think of the name of it, but it was a gathering place for us, and we'd all sit there and exchange notes. They would fill us in sometimes about what the white power structure was saying, and, in turn, we'd give them little bits of information that they hadn't yet gotten access to.

Currie: So the white reporters would tell you what the white power structure was saying, and the black reporters would say, "Well, this is what is going on with black leaders."

Payne: Yes.

Currie: You cross-fertilized that way.

Payne: Yes. But you know, interestingly, there was a great camaraderie between the press. I think they were all universally sympathetic with the spirit of the movement and what had happened. Mrs. Parks, overnight, became a heroine, and she was a symbol. So it was something that everybody was drawn to. Everybody felt they had a part in it, so much so that, you know, I guess there was more a spirit of camaraderie there than I'd seen on any major story. I think they were all—I don't remember—well, Montgomery, yes, I do. I take that back. The local papers had to follow tradition, so they had to write negative stories. But I think, in retrospect, even some of them didn't have the heart for it.

Just this year, earlier this year, we had a reunion at the University of Mississippi, and a recall of the civil rights days, and that drew people from all over the country, some of the old veterans of the civil rights days, and it was quite a reunion, white and black.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Currie: Which other reporters do you remember covering the civil rights movement?

Payne: Oh, Claude Sitton, he was with the New York Times. I think he later started his own paper, the Chattanooga Times. Murray Kempton, New York Post. I don't remember if John Chancellor was there or not; he may have been. Can you cut that [tape recorder] off?

Currie: Sure. [Tape interruption.]

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Payne: There were so many down there.

Currie: For you, this is a story that had a lot of personal significance, I would assume.

Payne: Yes, it had a great deal of significance. Somehow, I felt I was woven into the drama that was going on. This was something taking place for me and for all the people that I knew, and we were all drawn into this thing. It was like a historic battle being drawn out on a field, and you were part of it. You were not the audience, but you were part of it. You just felt drawn into it. It was a great human event, and it was something that you knew was going to change things, was going to have a profound effect. It just grew and grew and grew on its own and had a life of its own.

Currie: And you continued to cover the Civil rights movement in Montgomery?

Payne: Oh, yes, but that was preeminent for the whole year of 1957, even; it was preeminent. And then, you see, that precipitated the legislative battle in Congress to get the civil rights bill passed. So you had an operation on two fronts; you had it going on in Montgomery, in Birmingham, too, because Birmingham became drawn into it, and you had two fronts that opened up—Congress and the South. And then there were the school integration issues that were heating up. You know, the 1954 Supreme Court decision had already been enunciated, and there was the drive to open up higher education to blacks, and you had the Charlayne Hunter case, who is now Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Autheriene Lucy at the University of Alabama. Of course, James Meredith came later, but the battleground shifted to the higher education universities. Ada Sipuel Fisher in Oklahoma.

Currie: Who was she?

Payne: She was the one who was the plaintiff in the suit against the University of Oklahoma and the Regents to admit her to the law school. She's the subject of that documentary "Searching for Justice," one of the three stories. Well, hers is the case.

Currie: During this long battle for civil rights, what were the stories that you covered that have a particular resonance with you?

Payne: Of course, the whole continuing drama of Montgomery was one. Secondly, it was the trials of the defendants. And the drama of that was so intense, because here they were on trial for disobeying a cruel and unjust law.

Currie: You mean the people who were arrested.

Payne: Yes, who were arrested. It was the effort, the strong effort to break down their resistance.

Currie: The people who were arrested, for not moving to the back of the bus.

Payne: Wouldn't ride the buses!

Currie: How could they be arrested for not riding the buses?

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Payne: No, no! I mean, after Rosa Parks and the boycott began, the pressure was on for the whole community of blacks stopped riding the buses.

Currie: How could they be arrested for not riding the bus?

Payne: Well, they were. They were arrested for inciting the boycott.

Currie: Oh, I see.

Payne: I told you about the woman with the basket of greens on her head, walking? She was a symbol of that. She refused to ride the bus. The white women would offer to pick up the maids, and they refused that. So you had, for the first time that anybody could remember, a mass civil disobedience. The white power structure claimed that they were violating the city ordinance, and they brought up all kinds of things. They spent lots of money. But the frightening thing was just as the impact of the miners in South Africa, the gold mine strike, when you had 250,000 miners staying off the job, that's a phenomenon. You had 50,000 people in Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to ride the buses. Then they said that they were participating, had been coerced into not riding the buses, so they were put on trial, 96 of them. And they hoped to break the back of that by putting them on trial. It only strengthened it, because the people were more determined than ever that they weren't going to. There's a famous saying that came out about the woman who was asked whether she was tired, or wouldn't she want to—she said, "My feet's tired, but my soul is happy," because she was a pilgrim. and she was a pilgrim in the non-violent movement. And that's where Martin Luther King's fame came, because of his putting into practice the non-violent theory.

Currie: How did your editor and publisher react to the stories you were filing?

Payne: Couldn't wait to get enough of them. Sometimes I would just have to pick up the phone and call in a story. It was just such an ongoing thing that they were hungry for it, would grab everything they could. And I had a way of making stories a little more personal by telling little anecdotes, instead of just a straight story. I built anecdotes into it about personalities and everything, so it was good copy.

Currie: Of course, the civil rights movement was ongoing.

Payne: Oh, yes. All this was building it up, you see. All this was fermenting it, so to speak, and so you had the brutality in Birmingham, Alabama. Bull Conner—you remember Bull Conner? And you had the slayings of civil rights workers. In Mississippi it was the terrible thing that happened when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and I forget Goodman's first name [Andrew], and here were two dedicated young men from prosperous families who just got caught up in the fever, went down to Mississippi to just make their physical presence, and they were brutally murdered along with this James Chaney, a black guy, their bodies discovered under a dump. And this braggadocio sheriff boasted about it, you know. Oh, it was horrible. To me, to this day, I think it's one of the most repugnant things in history.

Currie: Did you write about that?

Payne: Oh, yes. I wasn't there when it happened, but, you know, it was all in character with what was going on. There were a lot of martyrs in those days; James Reeb, a white minister was one of them. Viola Liuso, a woman from Detroit, Michigan, she was shot to death, and there were any number of blacks that fell by the wayside.

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Currie: Were you ever afraid for yourself when you were down there covering this?

Payne: I really don't think I was exposed that much, but the climate of it, you could just feel the hatred; it was just like an enveloping cloak around you. Ooh, I remember when we marched from Selma to Montgomery, and, you know, Lyndon Johnson was President, and this was '65 or '66. He had ordered out the National Guard, and he'd ordered all this military presence to protect the marchers after the incident at the Edmon Pattis Bridge, when the horses would trample down people. They were just so brutally put upon because they marched. Lyndon Johnson said, "Well, they will march, and they are going to have the protection." So he federalized the Alabama National Guard, and he brought in troops from the 82nd Airborne, and there was just a blanket of military presence. That's what infuriated the whites so, but we marched. Of course, I'll never forget the faces, the contorted faces of housewives, standing out and screaming like they were just lunatics from the asylum, you know, just screaming such terrible epithets and hatred.

Currie: What did they say?

Payne: All kinds of things. Of course, "Nigger, nigger, nigger!" And, "Go to hell," and they were cursing Lyndon Johnson. This was a madness, just a total madness. This was a time when all—it was a purging of the white South, all the venom that came out, and perhaps it was good, because it was just boiling over, and it was such an excess. It was a preparation for later acceptance of what they knew was inevitable. Maybe some of them never accepted it, but at least they knew they had to go along with it. But the reaction of the people was so vitriolic. You never realized how deep human hatred can be. And that was the way it was all along the march. Had it not been for the protection of the military, it could have turned into a blood bath.

Currie: Were there other reporters who marched, too?

Payne: Other reporters, they went right along, because it was a story, a major story. There were entertainers from Hollywood who flew in. I remember Paul Newman and his wife were there, and Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck was very present. You know, Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, all of them. It was a great thing that was happening, and everybody was there to cheer the marchers on.

Currie: A lot of times press are afraid to become involved, because they want to remain objective.

Payne: [Laughter] This was something that everybody was caught up in the tide of. You were swept along in the tide of it, a tide of human emotions. It was something that you just got drawn into. I saw some white reporters crying, because they were taking notes, you know, because, I think, they felt—it became so personalized. They felt that this was a mirror of the ugly America, and they knew that this was America at its worst. Maybe it would be like I, as a black, would see the performance of some blacks who were just absolutely, totally obnoxious, and I would be looking on, and I would be ashamed of what was taking place, as one black to another. I think some of the reporters felt like, "If this is what it's like, we don't want to be a part of it. We want you to know that all whites aren't like that." I like to call it the purging of America, a time when America had to face up to its faults. It was like a cleansing of horrible wounds that had been festering for a long time. So that was it. That was the mood of it.

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Currie: All during the time that we've covered, to Johnson, it's almost a decade from the Montgomery boycott to the march.

Payne: Yes, the march.

Currie: During this time, were you covering the civil rights movement and still in Washington?

Payne: The civil rights movement was just an ongoing thing. There were so many things happening. You see, like I said before, the momentum had come for a push for legislative breakthroughs, and so you had a fever. You had a fever in Congress, gearing up for it. Clarence Mitchell, Jr., was one of the great figures in the legislative battle; he was leading the charge on Capitol Hill.

Currie: Of course, he was a good source for you.

Payne: Yes. Then you had other people who stood out. The NAACP was probably at its most effective point because of the way that it was really pushing ahead. NAACP, I think, was probably in its finest period of the NAACP. Washington was a great place to be, because you saw so many people who were involved in the civil rights movement coming to Washington as a people's lobby. You saw so many. You had a great in-gathering of other organizations—Americans for Democratic Action, the AFL-CIO, Walter Reuther, and the United Auto Workers. You had the churches who were mobilizing. I mean, the big churches, the organized denominations. You had Jewish groups involved in this, rabbis. Rabbi—what was his name? Tanenbaum, I think it was—Marc Tanenbaum. And so you had young people like John Lewis, who's now a member of Congress. John Lewis, at the time, he started with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and he became kind of a hero in his own right, because he had been involved in the battle personally, and he had been beaten so severely that he had to have a plate put in his head. And he never let down; he just stood out. He was just so dedicated to the cause. Of course, you had the wild ones like Stokeley Carmichael and Rap Brown, who wanted to go the other way into violence. But it was a great tide. It was, indeed, a revolution.

When the Vietnam War began reaching its peak, then Martin Luther King began to take up that cause, and he began to be condemned for speaking out against the war. He had a great break with Lyndon Johnson, because Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war. I'm anxious to get Tip O'Neill's book. Oh, yeah, I've got to have it, because he tells so much about what happened in that period.

Currie: During this time. then, one of your beats was the civil rights movement, but you were still covering legislative things and still going to White House press conferences?

Payne: Yes.

Currie: So you'd been through Eisenhower and Kennedy, and you were now to Lyndon Johnson.

Payne: Yes, Lyndon Johnson. Of course, you know, great press for that was the strengthening of the Fair Employment Practices Bill, because Lyndon Johnson felt that was necessary legislation to relieve some of the grievances. And, of course, the voting rights thing. Thurgood Marshall tells us in this documentary, which I hope you'll get to see, Thurgood Marshall makes a unique assessment of this. We all say

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that Lyndon Johnson got snagged, was really just speared by the Vietnam War; we blame the Vietnam War for his decision not to run again, and which eventually led to his death. Thurgood Marshall says that he thought the Vietnam War was just an excuse for his enemies, and he used that to cover up the fact that they hated him for all the fight that he put on for civil rights, the passage of civil rights legislation. And as he says, they used the Vietnam War to just cover that up.

Currie: Interesting. Next, we will want to move on to your coverage of the Vietnam War.

Payne: Yes.

Currie: Maybe we should save that for next time.

Payne: Okay.

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