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.