Eye on the Struggle

December 1, 2014
Biographer Morris (Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, 2010, etc.) resurrects the career of Ethel Payne (1911-1991), journalist, labor union and civil rights advocate, traveler on the African continent, journalism professor and pioneer in the American race wars.Struggling to obtain a formal education during an era when women, especially African-American women, found most schooling off-limits, Payne did not find her calling as a journalist until she was nearly 40. Before that, she labored in a Chicago library and found employment in Japan helping African-American military personnel stationed by the Pentagon adjust to life abroad. All along, she wanted to become a writer. Growing up in Chicago, Payne was aware of the Chicago Defender, the most prominent newspaper in the country owned by an African-American and devoted to writing about them from a perspective radically different from that of the Caucasian-owned media. While working in Japan in 1950, Payne met a Defender reporter who had served the United States during World War II and at the time was writing about the role of African-American soldiers in the Korean War. Payne, an impressive individual by any standard, parlayed the acquaintanceship into a salaried job. During a journalism career that began at the Defender and resumed there after a hiatus caused by the newspaper's sometimes-mercurial publisher, Payne wrote about U.S. presidents, African nations, the Vietnam War and her hometown of Chicago. Due to her gender and race, Payne always stood out at presidential press conferences and just about everywhere else, but she rarely flinched from any obstacles that stood in the way of the story. Morris does not flinch from his status as a white male chronicling the life of an African-American female, and he discloses that he received unstinting support from Payne's family members and acquaintances. His access allows him to reveal intriguing subtleties about her work and her personal life. A deeply researched, skillfully written biography about a previously underappreciated individual.

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November 1, 2014

A biography of Ethel Payne, who broke new ground as the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender during the 1950s and 1960s and later became the first black female commentator on a national radio and television network.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2015
Morris (Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, 2010) is the first to tell barrier-breaking journalist Ethel Payne's (191191) complete story in Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press. Among this biography's many disclosures is the crucial role this book-loving daughter of a Pullman porterand constant patron of her South Side Chicago public library branchplayed in the success of the Chicago Defender, a tremendously influential African American newspaper distributed in the Jim Crow South by Pullman porters. Harassed on her way to high school when she passed through a white neighborhood, Payne was encouraged to write by her English teacher, who had also taught Ernest Hemingway. Payne had stories published in a Defender spinoff, Abbott's Monthly, while she attended the Chicago Public Library Training School and became a junior library assistant. After qualifying for a government-documents librarian post at the U.S. Department of Justice, she was turned away because of her race. In a neat turnaround, Payne signed on as an assistant service club director, shipping out to an army post in Japan in 1948. There, intrepid, ever-curious, and truth-seeking, Payne investigated the plight of the stigmatized children of black GIs and Japanese women. She lost her military job when the Chicago Defender published her expos' but was hired by the paper. Thanks to Alice Dunnigan's mentoring, Payne established a presence in Washington, D.C., quickly ascending as the Defender's unquestioned star political reporter . . . and civil rights authority, until the paper abruptly closed its Washington office in 1958. After stints with the AFL-CIO and the Democratic National Committee, Payne returned to journalism as the first African American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and the first African American reporter invited to China. Morris' straight-ahead chronicle of Payne's extraordinary front-line life reveals how invincible and incisive she was as she forthrightly combined journalism with advocacy and made the most of the box seat on history she fought so ardently and courageously to occupy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)