Research Catalog

Ethel L. Payne photograph collection

Title: Ethel L. Payne photograph collection [graphic].
Author: Payne, Ethel L.
Publication: 1960-1975.

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request Appointment Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person.	Still image	Use in library	Sc Photo Ethel L. Payne Collection	Schomburg Center - Photographs & Prints

Details

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Description

89 items (.3 lin. ft., 1 box); 26 x 21 cm. and smaller.
12 photographic prints : silver gelatin, b&w ;
66 photographic prints : silver gelatin, b&w ;
6 photographic prints : silver gelatin, b&w ;
5 photographic prints : col. ;

Summary

The Ethel L. Payne Photograph Collection depicts some aspects of her career as a journalist, mostly covering events in Washington, D.C., from the period of 1960 to the mid-1970s.

Subject

Genre/Form

Portrait photographs – 1960-1979.
Group portraits – 1960-1979.
Gelatin silver prints – 1960-1979.
Dye coupler prints – 1960-1969.
Inscriptions.

Note

Title devised by cataloger.
Some photographs have photographer's or photography studio's handstamp; some photographs have photographer's or studio's name printed on recto; some items bear date stamp on verso.
Many photographs bear handwritten descriptive information on verso; some items have typewritten captions attached to verso; one item has printed caption on recto. Some photographs have cropping marks; one item bears an inscription; some images are duplicates.
Collection contains work by Robert L. Knudsen, Paul Parker, Abbie Rowe, Maurice Sorrell and Cecil W. Stoughton, among others.

Biography (note)

Ethel Lois Payne, journalist, was born in Chicago in 1911.

Call Number

Sc Photo Ethel L. Payne Collection

OCLC

NYPG99-F774

Author

Payne, Ethel L.

Title

Ethel L. Payne photograph collection [graphic].

Imprint

1960-1975.

Biography

Ethel Lois Payne, journalist, was born in Chicago in 1911. Raised and educated in Chicago, she became a director of an Army Special Services club in Tokyo in 1948. There she kept a diary, recording the events of the Korean War and the segregation of black soldiers stationed in Japan. When a visiting reporter from the Chicago Defender sent her diary entries to Chicago where they were excerpted in the Defender, it caused a national furor. Despite a reprimand from the Army, Payne was offered a job as a reporter at the Defender. After returning to Chicago and completing the journalism program at Northwestern University, she became a full reporter by 1951 and the Defender's Washington, D.C. bureau correspondent by 1953.

Payne covered Washington at the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Her reporting on Congressional, government agency and judicial decisions that either created or enforced policies directly effecting African-Americans would earn her the respect of other black reporters. She also achieved national attention when, in 1954, she asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower, at a White House press conference, when he planned to ban segregation on interstate travel. Eisenhower, annoyed by the question, refused to acknowledge her at subsequent press conferences. However, Payne would continue to cover the White House from 1953 to 1973. During her Washington beat, Payne also chronicled the civil rights movement in the Deep South including the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott (1956); the efforts to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957); the March on Washington (1963); and the march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama (1965). She was also invited to the White House, by President Lyndon B. Johnson, to witness the signing of both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

By the mid-1960s, Payne began covering international affairs which included reports on black troops fighting in Vietnam (1967); the Nigerian civil war (1969); a ten nation tour of Africa with Secretary of State William P. Rogers (1970); and the International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City (1975). She became the first African-American woman radio and television commentator for a national broadcast network when she joined the "Spectrum" public affairs program on the Columbia Broadcasting System from 1972 to 1978, and was commentator for "Matters of Opinion" on the CBS radio affiliate WBBM, in Chicago, from 1978 to 1982. Payne, who was promoted to associate editor of the Chicago Defender in 1973, left the Defender in 1978 and wrote a nationally syndicated column for black newspapers. Payne, who never married, died in Washington, D.C. in 1991.

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Added Author

Knudsen, Robert L. Photographer

Parker, Paul. Photographer

Rowe, Abbie. Photographer

Sorrell, Maurice. Photographer

Stoughton, Cecil. Photographer

Harris & Ewing.

Research Call Number

Sc Photo Ethel L. Payne Collection

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