Payne, Ethel Lois
1911-1991 · Contribution: 1951-1982
Became, alongside Alice Dunnigan, one of the first Black women in the White House press corps, earning the title “First Lady of the Black Press” for three decades of Washington and international reporting for the Chicago Defender that helped set the national civil rights agenda
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Discovered as a writer when a Chicago Defender reporter published her personal diary entries about Black soldiers' treatment in occupied Japan, Payne joined the Defender full-time in 1951 and became its Washington correspondent in 1953, where a pointed 1954 question to President Eisenhower about desegregating interstate travel — which visibly angered the president and made national news — established her signature style of using White House press conferences to force civil rights issues onto the public agenda. Over a 25-year Washington career she covered the Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 March on Washington, the Bandung Conference, and Ghanaian independence, becoming, in 1972, the first Black woman commentator on a national television network when CBS hired her; she openly rejected the norm of journalistic objectivity, later explaining that as “an instrument of change” she could not “afford the luxury of being unbiased” on issues affecting her own community. The White House Correspondents' Association created the Dunnigan-Payne Lifetime Achievement Award in her honor in 2022, and in 2023 the White House press briefing room lectern was formally named the Dunnigan-Payne lectern.
Life & background
Born August 14, 1911, in Chicago, Illinois, to Pullman porter William A. Payne and former Latin teacher Bessie Austin Payne, both children of formerly enslaved parents, Payne grew up on Chicago's South Side and attended Lindblom Technical High School before working years as a Chicago Public Library assistant while taking night classes at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She spent 1948-51 in Tokyo coordinating recreation for Black troops, where her diary of observed racial segregation within the desegregating U.S. military caught a Defender reporter's attention and launched her journalism career at age 40. She never married, worked as a Fisk University journalism professor after leaving the Defender in 1978, continued advocating for Nelson Mandela's release, and died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., on May 28, 1991; the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp in 2002.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine; National Women's History Museum; WTTW Chicago
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