Ethel Payne

Ethel Lois Payne was known as the "First Lady of the Black Press" — a journalist whose pointed questions at White House press briefings made presidents uncomfortable and made history. As a correspondent and later columnist for the Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in America, she asked Eisenhower about civil rights with a directness that stunned the press corps and infuriated the president. No other journalist was doing that in the 1950s.

Born in Chicago in 1911, Payne attended local colleges and worked as a library assistant, social worker, and hostess at a military club in Japan before a diary she kept about the experiences of Black soldiers came to the attention of the Chicago Defender. They offered her a job, and she spent the next four decades asking the questions that white journalists wouldn't.

Payne covered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement from the front lines. She was the first Black female commentator on a national television network (CBS) and traveled extensively in Africa, covering independence movements and meeting heads of state. She understood that the Black press served a fundamentally different function than the mainstream press — it was not just reporting the news but bearing witness to injustice.