Scope and Content Note
The papers of Ethel Lois Payne (1911-1991) span the years 1857-1991, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1973-1991. The papers mainly document the later part of her career as a commentator with the Columbia Broadcasting System's Spectrum radio program and as a syndicated columnist with the Sengstacke and Afro-American newspaper chains. The collection also includes substantial material on her earlier career, especially as a foreign correspondent in the 1950s. The papers are organized into Personal File , Subject File , Speeches and Writings , and Classified series.
Major elements of the Personal File include correspondence and family papers. The correspondence spans 1942-1991, with the bulk of the letters concentrated in the period 1968-1991. Correspondence with family members, colleagues, friends, and news sources are interfiled. The pre-1968 material includes early correspondence with A. Philip Randolph related to Payne's leadership of the planning committee of the Chicago division of Randolph's "March-On-Washington Movement" for fair employment practices and her attempts in 1944 to overcome discrimination and obtain a position in the Justice Department library. Also in the correspondence is a letter from Richard M. Nixon after his attendance at a party Payne gave for participants in the vice presidential mission to Ghana for independence celebrations in 1958. Other correspondents include Clifford L. Alexander, Faith Berry, Hyman Harry Bookbinder, Dennis Brutus, Ofield Dukes, Joseph C. Dumas, John H. Hicks, Mal Johnson, Fatima Meer, Charles R. Sadler, Mal Whitfield, and Aurelia Norris Young. Commencing in 1967, when she covered the war in Vietnam, Payne wrote yearly letters to family members and friends in which she summarized her activities and voiced concerns about social and political issues. She corresponded regularly with family members, especially with her sisters Thelma E. Gray and Avis Ruth Johnson, and her nephew James A. Johnson, a physician who, when a teenager in 1959, integrated the Congressional page staff. Files on these and other family members, and on the Payne, Austin, and Boswell families, are included in the family papers file of the Personal series.
The Subject File , the largest series in the papers, documents Payne's involvement in African and Third World causes as a journalist and activist, including the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, her first assignment as a foreign correspondent; Southern Africa; and Africare, the service organization on whose board she served from 1985 to 1991. The biographical file contains material on Payne and on persons both prominent and lesser known, from Jesse Jackson to Colin Moyano, a South African student whom Payne sponsored in the United States. The biographical file is a rich source of information on Payne correspondents.
The archives, museums, historical societies, and exhibition file contains correspondence and inventories related to Payne material in other archives. Payne worked with her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, to aid South African activist Winnie Mandela during the years of Mandela's official banning. Correspondence related to this effort, including letters from Mandela, are included in the Delta Sigma Theta file of the Subject File series.
Payne's year as a visiting professor at Fisk University, 1982-1983, in Nashville, Tenn., is documented in the educational institutions file of the Subject File . Her activities as a Democratic party official are especially well represented in a file related to the Metropolitan Women's Democratic Club of Washington, D.C., an organization she helped found.
Of special note in the Speeches and Writings series are transcripts of interviews of Payne in 1987 by the Washington Press Foundation oral history project which cover her family background, her work before she became a reporter, and her journalism career. Files related to the "Spectrum" radio program contain transcripts of Payne's broadcasts during 1972-1977, as well as correspondence from the public responding to the broadcasts.