Painting China

A plate from the 1876 exhibit (courtesy of Rogers Museum.)

One of the joys of writing a biography is learning about tangential things in the course of one’s research. For example, while researching Ethel Payne’s childhood, I learned that her mother Bessie was a china painter, an art form I knew nothing about.
    It turns out to have been a very popular pastime. The hobby of hand painting and firing china, which some made into a profession, took hold in the United States in the late nineteenth century. An exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition exposed millions of Americans to this new art form. “In the early 1900s there were hundreds of unnamed and unknown fine female china painters and artists who lapsed into obscurity because no one felt their lives needed documentation,” according to the Journal of Antiques. “Allowed creative occupations and hobbies, they were never allowed to achieve professional status like their male counterparts.”

   Bessie Payne was among those women who took up the hobby after taking a class, one of many that were taught after the art form gained popularity. She would do her work by drawing patterns on blank china and then fill them in with color. She favored fruits and flowers, according to Ethel. After completing her painting work, she would bake the item in a small kiln she kept in the house.
    “People began asking for these pieces, and at first, she was giving away pieces, and then somebody said, ‘No, Bessie, you should be getting money for this.’”
    “So then she began—she never did it on a large scale, but it was enough to bring in a little extra change,” said Ethel. “But she did beautiful work. Incidentally, she handed it down, the profession, down to one of her grandchildren, who became quite adept at it.”

Addendum to the November 27 posting

After I wrote the last posting, I ran across this article that appeared in the August 15, 1953 issue of the Chicago Defender.

Taking to the Air

As a pioneering black female journalist, Ethel L. Payne was a rarity in her day. She was also unusual among African-Americans in taking to the skies.
    In her day few African-American flew. Until the Civil Rights movement gained traction, air travel remained primarily the province of white travelers. Domestically and internationally, seating in airplanes was not segregated but airports in the American South, where most African Americans lived, certainly were. This included Washington’s National Airport. As early as 1948, U.S. Representative Charles Diggs, of Michigan, tried to persuade Congress to desegregate the airport, which was a federally owned facility. He failed but President Truman interceded to at least force the restaurant at the airport to open its seats to blacks.
    But barriers mattered little to Payne. Starting in 1951, when she flew home from a three-year tour as a service club hostess in Japan, Payne began a lifelong accumulation of air miles that might even exceed that of the modern traveler.
    In 1955 Payne went back to Asia as a journalist to cover the remarkable Bandung Conference in Indonesia and followed it up with a round-the-world journey. In 1957, she was off to Ghana to cover the celebrations, as it became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence. In the years that followed she went to Vietnam, to cover the war; Nigeria, to cover its civil war; on two multi-nation African trips with U.S. Secretaries of State; Europe, for peace and disarmament conferences; Mexico, for the International Women’s Year conference; China, where she among the first group of journalists to tour the nation after Nixon’s historic 1972 visit; and, countless other trips. The only continents that did not see a visit by Payne were Australia and the Antarctic.
     Payne never remained still right up until her death in 1991.
(Below is a certificate given to her by Pan American World Airways for crossing the International Date line on her 1955 trip to Indonesia.)

   

Presidential Pens

Payne (left) at the 1965 Voting Rights bill signing.

Ethel Payne is certainly among the very few journalists, and perhaps the only one, to have received a pen used by a President to sign a bill into law. I bet she is certainly the only one to have been given two.
     Pens used in signing bills have been given by presidents to those who helped make the bill into a law ever since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When, for instance, President Obama signed his health care bill into law he used 22 pens, according to the New York Times.
     The pens go mostly to lawmakers and then a few to those behind the movement or cause that gave rise to the new law. Journalists, who report on events rather than shape them, aren’t among the recipients of these prized political items.
     In Payne’s case, however, her reporting on the Civil Rights movement in the black press, which both enlightened and activated readers across the country, was seen as so important by President Lyndon B. Johnson that he presented her with a pen when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and again when he signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
     You can see a video of Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights act on YouTube.  He used between 72 and 75 pens (you can see them lined up in special holders on the desk) and gave them to politicians such as Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen and Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and one to Ethel Payne. You don’t see that moment in the YouTube video as it cuts off before the end of the event. But if you look carefully you can spot Payne, wearing one of her distinctive hats, as she makes her way through the crowd to the desk. (The scene occurs at about 3 minutes and 40 seconds into the tape just before Johnson gives King and A. Philip Randolph their pens.)
    Incidentally, the pens are not only politically valuable, usually displayed prominently on the walls of one's office, they are also financially valuable. One of the pens used by Johnson in signing the Civil Rights Act is being offered for sale by the autograph dealer Sign of History for $75,000.

A Day in Shanghai

I love this photo taken in 1973 when Payne was among the first American journalists to visit China (we called it "Red China" back then) following President Richard Nixon's historic visit the previous year.
Among those who traveled in Payne's group was Reg Murphy of the Atlanta Constitution. Here is how he recalled the afternoon the photo was taken.
"Ethel Payne is a fairly large black woman and by Chinese standards worthy of long stares. One day on a Shanghai street she wore a coat which looked like leopard skin and in the land of the blue Mao jackets she could be mistaken for a foreign potentate.
A group of mischievous white American reporters traveling in the same journalistic tour came up with a great idea. They hustled around into her intended direction. As she came past, the reporters began a slow and solemn salaam.
The crowd of Chinese following Miss Payne turned big-eyed in wonder. Their suspicions had been confirmed: This was the potentate of some rich country visiting the land of militant equality.
A lesser person would have lost her poise and either laughed or castigated her 'subjects.' Ethel Payne did neither. She accepted the deep bows with a trifling nod of her head and swept on past in her leopard-skin coat. Only when the troupe was back in their cars did she finally lose control and laugh until great tears rolled down her cheeks."