Wednesday, November 30, 2011

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.


Sunday, November 27, 2011

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.)