>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Guy Lamolinara: Good
afternoon everyone and thanks
for joining us today for
our Books and Beyond.
I'm Guy Lamolinara and I'm
from the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress.
The Center for the Book is
a division of the Library
that promotes books, reading,
libraries and literacy
and we also administer here at the
library the young reader center
in the Jefferson building and
poetry and literature center,
which is also in the
Jefferson building
and which recently named a new
poet laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera.
Additionally, we administer the
Library of Congress' literacy awards
and will be announcing new
winners this fall in October.
The way we carry out our mission
nationwide is with the assistance
of our affiliated centers
for the book.
We have a center for the book in
every state in Washington, DC.
And if you're traveling to
the Virgin Islands I recommend
that you visit the Virgin
Islands Center for the Book,
they will greet you
very warmly there.
We also have a partnership of
80 like-minded organizations
and they play an important role
in helping us fulfill
our mission as well.
We also are a big part of
the National Book Festival,
which this year is September 5th
in the Washington Convention Center
and I urge you to attend
that if you've never attended
before, it's a great event.
And you can find out more
about it at LOC.gov/bookfest.
Before we get started I ask that
you please turn off all your
electronic devices.
And I need to let you know that
we're filming this for a webcast,
so if you ask a question you
will become part of that webcast.
And those webcasts are available
on our website which is read.gov
and you can find more than 200
of those webcasts on that site
and they cover a broad range
of topics and subjects.
So pretty much any kind
of topic you're interested
in you will find on
that webcast site.
I should tell you that today's
author's book will be for sale
at the entrance to this room.
And following the presentation
he will sign the book
at the table located at
the back of the room.
And you'll also get a chance to
talk to him more about his work.
The chief criterion that we use in
selecting books for our series is
that there must be a strong
connection with the Library
of Congress and that
usually means in most cases
that the writer did research here,
which is certainly the
case with our author today.
And today's author presentation
by the way is cosponsored
with our manuscript division,
which brought this to us.
So thank you for doing that.
And with us from the manuscript
division is Adrienne Cannon
who is the Afro-American history and
culture specialist for the division
and she has been in
that role since 1996.
Her duties include developing
and promoting the division's
African-American collections
and providing reference
services to researchers.
She helped strengthen the library's
unparalleled resources for the study
of 20th-century civil rights
movement and the acquisition
of the papers of Jackie Robinson,
Louis Martin, Leon Sullivan,
James Foreman, Herbert
Hill and Roger Wilkins.
Adrienne also was the lead
curator for a current exhibition
that I really urge you to go see,
it's the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
a long struggle for freedom.
And she was the curator of the 2010
online presentation NAACP Century
in the Fight for Freedom.
Adrienne was a co-lead
curator for a 2004 exhibition
With an Even Hand,
Brown versus Board F50.
Adrienne came to library from
a position as associate curator
in the Special Collections
Department
at the University of
Virginia Library.
She also worked for the
Smithsonian Institution
and the African-American Museum in
Philadelphia and she is a graduate
of Oberlin College
and Brown University.
Please welcome Adrienne Cannon
who will introduce our speaker.
[ Applause ]
>> Adrienne Cannon: Good
afternoon and thank you Guy
for that gracious introduction.
It's my pleasure to
introduce James McGrath Morris
who will discuss his new
best-selling biography,
Eye on the Struggle, Ethel Payne,
The First Lady of Black Press.
Ethel Payne was the
Washington correspondent
for the Chicago Defender and
syndicated columnist with Sengstacke
and Afro-American newspaper chains.
She made history as the
first African-American woman
to be included in the White
House press corps, become a radio
and television commentator
on a national network CBS,
and cover the Vietnam War.
She was respected for her
coverage of civil rights
and international affairs,
but not widely known.
Ethel Payne was as professor
and author Paula Giddings
observed quote,
a pioneer who experienced the
challenges but little of the glory
that comes with the title.
With this book her legacy
is assured unquote."
Khalil Gibran Mohammed noted in his
review for the New York times quote,
Morris has written a fast-paced,
engrossing biography weaving
the details of Payne's personal
and infinitely intriguing
professional life
against the backdrop of
20th-century race relations,
the civil rights movement and
Cold War anti-colonialism.
In the Washington Post book review
Elizabeth Varon commended quote
Morris' research on Payne as
meticulous and exhaustive.
The biography draws not only on
her writings and recollections,
but also on those of her colleagues,
employers, readers, rivals,
students, family and friends.
Mr. Morris conducted much of his
research in the manuscript division,
which is the home of approximately
63 million primary source documents
of American history and culture
spanning the colonial period
to the present.
The manuscript division
holds the papers of more
than 200 reporters,
editors and publishers.
Counted among these holdings
are the papers of Ethel Payne,
we have the principal
collection of Ethel Payne papers.
Also the papers of Ruby Black,
William Safire, Mary McGrory,
Hendrik Smith, Eric Sevareid,
Nancy Dickerson, Irving R. Levine,
Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Henry
Luce and Clare Booth Luce,
Katharine Graham, Louis
Martin and Joseph Pulitzer.
Mr. Morris is the author of
the claimed biography Pulitzer,
A Life in Politics, Print in
Power which booklist placed
in its 2010 list of the
10 best biographies.
Mr. Morris presented that biography
at a Books and Beyond event in 2010
and also at the Library of
Congress National Book Festival.
His other books include the Rose Man
of Sing-Sing, A True Tale of Life,
Murder and Redemption in the
Age of Yellow Journalism,
a Washington Post best book of the
year in 2004, Jailhouse Journalism,
the Fourth Estate Behind Bars, and
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman
and the Plot to Kill
Henry Clay Flick.
He is currently writing the
Ambulance Driver's Hemingway
and Dos Passos, Literary Lives and
War in Peace which will be published
in 2017 by Da Capo Press.
Mr. Morris is the host of Collected
Words, a radio show produced
by Collected Works Bookstore
and Cafe that airs on KVSP.
He is also the editor of
the Biographer's Craft,
a monthly online newsletter
and one of the founders
of the Biographers
International Organization.
Please join me in welcoming
James McGrath Morris.
[ Applause ]
>> James McGrath Morris:
That was a surprising honor,
I hear praises all the time about
the collections you brought here.
And so when you were sitting next
to me just chatting I had
no idea you were going
to say all these nice
things about me, thank you.
I've learned my lesson the last
time I gave one of these talks here
at the Library of Congress
was the morning
after Snowmageddon,
do you remember that?
And so I had a real
challenge getting here,
getting down the streets.
This time my challenge was
getting here not looking
like I had been in a swimming pool.
So I parked at Union
Station, took off my jacket
and walked really slowly.
It is doubly fun and a little
nerve-racking to speak here.
The pleasure comes from the
fact that this institution has
so lovingly cared for
Ethel Payne's papers.
And if it weren't for the Library
of Congress' care this book
couldn't have been written.
The fear factor comes
when I speak in Washington
and Chicago invariably there
are people who knew Ethel Payne
in the audience, so that
certainly puts me on my toes.
I want to start the story
that I introduce you
to Ethel Payne in February of 1954.
Obviously, a significant year
because in a few months Brown
v. Board is going to come
down from the Supreme Court.
But on that day Ethel
Payne is an angry soul.
She's really furious and she's
on her way to this building,
the old executive office building.
And she particularly
wants to speak to this ma.
Eisenhower had been in
the White House for a year
and Republicans were just so happy.
It was the first time
since the depression
that a Republican inhabited the
White House and as you know,
control of the White House
means a lot of appointments,
a resurgence for that
particular party.
And so the Republicans were
gathering around the country
for their Lincoln Day dinners.
Lincoln of course being a person of
central importance to Republicans
when Lincoln's birthday comes
around from small courthouses
in the Midwest to Washington DC
there are Lincoln Day gatherings
like this.
And this one was held in the
old Uline not auditorium,
but you know a building
the one that is long gone.
And they'd invited three
choirs to come and perform.
Two were from white private
universities in the south
and the third choir was a
choir from Howard University.
The choir from Howard University's
bus was banned and blocked
from entering into the facility.
Now I was born in Washington
and anyone
who knew Washington back then
would've understood exactly why it
was the case.
The only group of black kids
approaching the building somehow
couldn't get in.
So Ethel Payne was
furious about this.
She was also furious about the fact
that they had a black face
performance during this ceremony
and she had already written
to the Republicans about this.
But now she wanted to come to one
of Eisenhower's press conferences
to take it up with the man himself.
He had been the speaker,
he's the head
of the Republican Party what does
he have to say about what went
on over the weekend at
the Lincoln Day event.
And how did she get to do
that, how did she get to be
in the White House press
corps to ask that question?
Well Ethel Payne was then
the Washington correspondent
for the Chicago Defender,
the most widely circulated
and significantly important
African-American newspaper
at the time.
Now often when I give these
talks or interview people talk
about whether I discovered
Ethel Payne.
And it's an uncomfortable moment
because Ethel Payne didn't
need any discovering.
The truth of the matter is that
our segregation from that period
in a sense continues in our history.
That just like many African-American
institutions the black press
operated in complete
invisibility to white America.
But it's a story press it
goes all the way back to 1827
with the Freedom Journal of
the Baltimore Afro-American.
Many of these papers that, you
know, valiantly crusaded not only
to end slavery, but to work
against Jim Crow to end segregation.
And Ethel Payne had a particularly
lovely connection to the paper
because her dad was
a Pullman porter.
You're seeing a photograph
of Pullman porters.
Well Pullman porters
played an interesting role
in the life of the Chicago Defender.
If you're unfamiliar with the
Chicago Defender do not think of it
as merely a Chicago newspaper
any more than we might think
of the New York Times as
merely a New York paper.
Chicago Defender was circulated
nationally after it started in 1905,
but to get the Chicago Defender
in some southern counties
was not only illegal
where there were actually
laws against reading
and circulating the
Chicago Defender.
But more seriously it could
involve the loss of life.
You did not want to be seen as
an African-American in the south
with a copy of the Chicago Defender
sticking out your back pocket.
So you were not going to
subscribe to it by mail.
Yet Pullman porters who traveled
the nation would then take bundles,
Chicago being the nerve center of
the rail system, would take bundles
of the paper south with
them and leave them in towns
and they would be set
up in the barbershops
of the towns as a weekly then.
So when the men came in to
have their Saturday shave
or haircut they could pick up a copy
of the Defender and
take it back home.
And it was read by at least six or
seven different people after that.
Well Ethel Payne's dad
was a Pullman porter.
Now I don't know if he
carried the papers too,
but I've often loved
that connection.
But being a Pullman porter also
offered certain advantages.
She and her dad and her
mom settled in a part
of Southside Chicago
called West Englewood.
West Englewood is different than
the rest of Southside Chicago.
Here's a picture of
Ethel at her birth.
And here's a picture of their
house and those people who are
from Chicago in this audience now
I'm petrified because there's an H
in the name of her street, but
it's pronounced Troop Street.
What was significant is that
he could afford to buy a house.
Very few African Americans
could buy houses at that point.
Those Pullman porter jobs and post
office jobs were the best to have.
But more significantly than owning
the house West Englewood was a very
different community
in Southside Chicago.
Payne described it as being an
island in a sea of whiteness,
meaning that all the
neighborhoods on all four sides
of West Englewood were white.
The significance of that because
segregation Chicago was done
through economic means, through
social means, but not by law.
If you were in that school district
you could walk to the school,
so she was in white
school districts.
Now isn't that white schools
were necessarily better
than black schools, although in
many cases that could be the case.
But more significantly, she lived
next door to Lynn Bloom High School.
Lynn Bloom High School
was the jewel in the crown
of the white school
system in Chicago.
So it wasn't she was just going to
a white school she was getting to go
to the best high school in Chicago.
And early on when I was doing
this research somebody had told me
that Ethel Payne had had
Ernest Hemingway's teacher
as an English teacher at
Lynn Bloom High School.
Now I'm trained as a journalist
and my editor always said to me,
if your mother says she
loves you check it out.
So I operate from a position of, you
know, critical thinking or cynicism.
Well, it turns out that
in fact was the case.
But what was more significant
for me wasn't
that I had now a great anecdote
is how did she get to be there.
Why had she left Oak Park to
come and teach at Lynn Bloom?
Because when Lynn Bloom was opened
right after the Chicago riots
in 1919 it was simply
the best school to be in.
So any teacher her
caliber which gladly move.
And I use that because I want you
to understand how significant
getting to go to Lynn Bloom was.
It's a school that takes
up an entire block it
looks like a college.
Not only was it built in
such an important fashion,
but it attracted the best teachers.
Now a little moment of
social justice here.
When Ethel Payne went to
Lynn Bloom she was allowed
to write some articles
for the school paper,
at least one that I know
of, maybe some more.
But she made it clear that just
even the thought of asking to be
on the staff of this school
which was 99.9% white
was out of the question.
So her journalistic achievements
there were never recognized.
Well I was invited to come
to Lynn Bloom and speak
and the journalism room has now
been renamed the Ethel Payne
Journalism Center.
And I love the idea of succeeding
generations of kids coming
in with their smart
phones and saying,
who's this Payne fellow assuming
it's a guy looking her up
and discovering who she
is and thus being inspired
to perhaps do the same kind
of journey that she did.
That's her graduating
from high school.
When she graduated from
high school she went
on to get some various
forms of education.
She went to Crane Community College,
which is now Malcolm
X Community College.
She went to Garrett, which was --
it actually had a long name then
it was called the Mission School
for Social Training and
something else and rather.
It was a religiously-based free
college that was opened to blacks
and whites to basically teach you to
be a social worker or a missionary.
She used that training to work in
a corrections facility for a while,
but she couldn't get work.
She couldn't get the
work that she wanted.
She did publish in Abbott's Monthly
which was the premier black magazine
of the time in which Richard Wright
published his first short story
at the same time Ethel Payne
was publishing her friction,
a remarkable achievement.
But to get a professional
job, particularly one
that involved writing
in Chicago was as rare
as a warm day in winter
in that city.
Seven out of 10 African-American
women according
to a labor census I found
who had a job in Chicago
at that time worked
as domestic servants.
So Payne looked quite
far away for a job.
She had heard that they
needed service club employees
in occupied Japan in 1948.
Now if you remember it's like
USO there were these clubs all
around the world for troops.
And you're going to say 1948.
Of course, Truman has desegregated
the military through his order.
Well, there was this General
MacArthur in Japan who had a habit
of never listening to his
president, his commander-in-chief.
As you know, that ends up one
of the reasons he didn't
get to keep his job.
So he had no intention of
disaggregating the troops.
And if I remember I'll tell
you a funny story I found
in your archives about it.
But Ethel Payne got a job then as a
service club hostess to go to Japan
and leave Chicago and
work in a service club.
Now this is an extraordinary
journey,
I mean she's leaving
Southside Chicago to go halfway
around the world to
work with troops.
There's a photograph of her with
a group of young black troops
about to go into Tokyo and here
she is organizing a birthday party.
So many things happened to her
and the other soldiers there.
For many of them it was the
first time to live in a society
without the kinds of
segregations they had at home.
One and I won't quote
it exactly right,
but it's in my book right here.
But one soldier wrote back and said,
you know, I'm not a Negro here.
Now the Japanese are xenophobic and
they're not wild about foreigners,
but they didn't have
the kind of racism
that the southern troop
leaders certainly did.
So as soon as they left the confines
of their base they experienced a
kind of life that was very different
and it changed a lot
of their viewpoint
of the United States
when they came back.
But one of the things Ethel Payne
observed while she was there
in the destitute days of Japan's
occupancy was that a lot --
there were a lot of single Japanese
women either widows or young women.
And remember it's a very destitute
country who were quite eager
to enjoy the economic might
that the young American white
and black soldiers had.
And so they dated quite
freely the American troops.
Well black soldiers also
dated Japanese women.
This created a whole new
problem because it created
like as you know the
result of dating often
in those periods were children.
And these mixed-race orphans,
I mean these mixed-race
children became orphans
because the Japanese
women rejected them
because they were partially
African-American,
sometimes actually engaged in
infanticide or just abandoned them
and they ended up in an orphanage.
From the point of view of the
military this was another horror
because remember most of
the military command come
from southern states where the
idea of any form of communication
between an African-American
and a woman outside
of the African-American
race was a crime.
And so they viewed Japanese women
almost in the sense as being white
and having this relationship.
So these poor children were
completely abandoned and ignored.
And Ethel Payne took a
great interest in writing
about them and learning about them.
She'd taken an interest
in everything in Japan,
but she had no place to publish it.
So in a sense I like to think
that her diary became
her place of publication.
She went to see the war
tribunals, she wrote about it.
She went to learn about these
poor orphans and wrote about it.
Well the Korean War broke out
and the only way you could get
to the Korean War as a reporter
was to come through Japan,
that's where the central
headquarters were.
So Alex Wilson of the
Chicago Defender,
James Hicks from the Baltimore
Afro-American came to write.
Because remember the troops
are segregated so their conduct
in the war is a big story
for black newspapers
in the United states
virtually ignored
by the white papers in the states.
And they were facing
some unusual problems
since the black troops
couldn't be relieved
by white soldiers they
weren't getting relieved
at the same rate on the front lines.
And if you remember your history of
the Korean War it's not going well
for the first few months.
And so and let's not forget
these are kids essentially 18
19-year-olds, kids facing the
barrels of North Korean rifles.
So a lot of them fled
the front lines.
They were, I shouldn't say
lines, but a fair number.
And they were immediately
court-martialed with a potential
of being executed for their actions.
Thurgood Marshall came
to defend them,
he was then a young
lawyer with the NAACP.
It took him two tries
to win permission
from General MacArthur to come.
And here's the little story,
it's in an endnote inside my book
if you want to get it completely
right because I'll probably screw it
up a little bit, but I found it
downstairs in the manuscript room.
He's having a conversation with
MacArthur outside of his building
and it's one of these typical
black-and-white power discussions
of that time where Marshall
says something like, you know,
there's this black soldier who's
killed more people as a sniper
than any white soldier now
why he can't he be doing this.
And there's a soldier who
has this, you know going
through the whole list
and McArthur kept saying,
no I can't find anyone
that's good enough.
What about this and no, I can't
find anyone that's good enough.
And the band comes out, it's
all white and McArthur says,
God I just love the
music of that band.
And I wish I had it in front of you
because I won't get it quite right.
Marshall turns to him and says,
now you're not going to say
to me Mr. General that
you couldn't find a Negro
who could blow a horn
as well as these guys.
I couldn't get it in the
book, but my editor allowed me
to sneak it into the end notes.
So Ethel Payne this is
her upon return to Chicago
at one point wearing
her Japanese clothes.
She meets with Alec Wilson and
James Hicks, these reporters
at the press club in Japan and
tells them about this fraternization
between the soldiers and these poor
orphans that have been stranded.
And Alex Wilson says,
can I borrow your diary
and as a result the Chicago
Defender publishes the first
of two byline pieces by Ethel Payne.
It says, Japan girls playing
GIs for sucker says fate
that awaits war babies is
tragedy of yank Oriental unions.
Jet Magazine gets into it with
a photograph of these poor kids
who are being taunted by other kids
and being called half-breed
Americans.
Well the story was a
sensation back home.
Her sister placed a cross
specific call to her saying,
do you realize you're on the
front page of the Defender.
It also got her into
a lot of trouble
because as you can
imagine the central command
in Japan was not happy
with this kind of coverage.
So they yanked her from her job,
they put her a dead-end desk job
and MacArthur before he left Japan
after defending their soldiers
got her out of trouble.
Well the Defender true to its
word having got her deeply
into trouble offered her a job
and she headed back to Chicago
to work for the Defender.
Now let's not think that the
Defender is being merely charitable.
Louis Martin, the editor,
and others there clearly knew
that Ethel Payne was a journalist.
She had a keen eye for stories
what she didn't have was training.
She'd taken a couple courses
on writing at [inaudible],
but she was not trained
as a journalist.
And I was on a radio show one
day and the host said something.
I wish he had told me this
before I had written the book
because I would have put it in it.
He said that reading her
struck him that she was much
like a jazz artist,
learning in the band
and in the playing,
but not in the schools.
So she came back to Chicago,
worked for the Chicago Defender.
Here's a picture of her with Adlai
Stevenson, the governor of Illinois,
two times candidate for
President of the United States.
I assume you all know
quip about why he lost.
Somebody said to him once you're
the thinking man's candidate
for president.
He said yes that was the problem.
And she's really doing well,
she's writing terrific
coverage in Chicago.
She attracts the attention
of other papers.
One paper offers her part
ownership of the paper
if she would come to work for them.
She gets ready to go
and Louis Martin says,
unless they offered her 49%,
unless you offered 51% don't go.
And instead he says, why
don't you go to Washington.
She comes to Washington, you can see
her there interviewing Roy Wilkins.
The man to the right
with the cigar is,
my mind's gone it'll take a second.
Gosh, this is really embarrassing.
He's the first African-American
correspondent
in the White House
press corps and in
about three seconds he'll come back,
so please excuse my senior moment.
He's Republican and he's quite
nervous about what Ethel Payne
and Alice Dunnigan,
the two black women
in the press corps are going to do.
And I'll tell you a little
more about that later.
So anyways, so let's
get back to that moment.
Here we are in February of 1954,
Ethel Payne is really furious
so she says to the president,
Mr. President, what's happened
with this business of the Howard
University choir not being able
to get in.
Now you don't become president
without being somewhat smart.
So Eisenhower says, well
if they were in fact barred
because of race I apologize all
I'll have my people look into it.
So he got out of that one.
But what Ethel Payne noticed is that
the next day the Washington Post,
the local paper which prides itself
on covering news of the locality,
had failed to cover that
story now wrote about it
because it had been mentioned at
a presidential press conference.
In other words, bringing up topics
at the presidential
press conference,
which had 197 white
reporters, 3 black reporters.
If you brought up topics of
interest and civil rights
or race matters it forced the other
reporters to have to cover it.
Now it wasn't necessarily that
these reporters were racist
as Ethel Payne would simply say,
some were but most of them weren't,
it just wasn't part of
their daily experience.
When Ethel Payne got up
to get to the White House,
getting to the White
House was a challenge.
Finding a bathroom she could use in
Washington in 1954 was a challenge.
Finding a place to eat was a
challenge not for the white reports.
In a sense she felt that she was
part of the problem every day.
She used the word problem, that's
a 1950's word for that issue.
So she in a sense dropped
this notion of being objective
and instead decided to be fair.
But working with Louis
Martin, the Washington lobbyist
for the NAACP nicknamed
the 101st senator
because of his effectiveness.
Every few weeks they would work
on crafting really good questions
and the questions weren't simply to
elicit from the president a response
on an important policy stance
regarding civil rights whether it be
housing, busing or
federal money or jobs.
But also to educate the
president and the press corps
because they didn't
know about these issues.
So when she would ask a question
sometimes the questions were really
long out of necessity because
the guy up front didn't,
I mean you know today you
get a [inaudible] together
and they immediately start talking
shop because they know everything.
Section eight housing,
all these terminologies,
what are you doing
about the other thing.
But Eisenhower knew nothing
about these civil rights issues
and nor did the press corps.
So she continued to ask
these questions until one day
in 1955 she said to him,
Mr. President you know
under the commerce clause
of the constitution,
again I'm paraphrasing you'll
find the exact words in the book,
congress could desegregate
interstate bus travel.
Are you in favor of doing
something like that,
we really need your support?
Well he rears up in his sort of
military posture and he says,
I don't know where you get
off asking that question.
And you're thinking oh James
he's just getting excited
up here having a chance
to talk to people
and I'm exaggerating the
you could do what I did.
But there's an even better
option I drove to Abilene,
Kansas to hear the audio tape
and you can hear his anger,
the timbre of his voice.
He is clearly ticked
off at the effrontery
of her to ask this question.
Now if you want you
can just go to NPR
because Karen Grigsby
Bates has the audio tape
on a story about Ethel Payne.
You can hear him going where do
you get off asking this question.
And then he goes on to say, you
know, I'm president of all Americans
and I want to do what's in the best
of all Americans not any just
little special interest group.
The room went dead quiet.
Eisenhower had said on the record
before the nation that the quest
for equality by a large group
of Americans was tantamount
to a special interest lobby
like let's say the farm lobby.
A reporter quickly says, Mr.
President let's talk about Hawaii,
you know, really uncomfortable.
The next day of course,
there were headlines
across the country a
reporter irks Ike, you know,
the old days when they had
that wonderful literation.
And so Eisenhower learned
his lesson that day
and the lesson was you don't
call on Ethel Payne anymore.
So she was basically frozen out.
Alice Dunnigan had the same
treatment over time too,
her questions ceased to be asked.
And we might not have heard much
more about Ethel Payne except
for this woman who then as we
might have[inaudible] said,
sat in the wrong part of the bus
and triggered the Montgomery
bus boycott at the same time.
So Ethel Payne left Washington
and went to the front lines
of the civil rights movement
in Montgomery and in Alabama,
much to the consternation of her
paper who were quite unwilling
to send her south until
this had happened.
Why was that?
Well let's think this through.
She's black and she's female,
the two most expendable forms
of life among white
segregationists in the south.
But she carries something even more
fearful to them a reporter's pad.
She was going to go south
and report to northern folks,
particularly Afro-Americans
what was going on.
So she arrives in Montgomery
where these two men are
basically introducing themselves
to the nation, Martin Luther King,
Ralph Abernathy you see in the back.
And she's just landed in
Montgomery and she does something
that I think is incredible, I mean
having studied journalism history,
incredibly important and overlooked.
Which is now as a white guy writing
civil rights history 60 years later
I can tell you the turning
moments, the turning points.
But no one knew how
significant Montgomery was
at that moment the
boycott had just begun.
And more importantly, no one knew
yet about the extraordinary shift
in the leadership of the
civil rights movement.
Prior to that moment if you go back
to the 19th century you had people
like Frederick Douglass or then
labor leaders like W. D. Boyce,
you had the movement into
the legal arena with people
like Thurgood Marshall,
the NAACP or the March
on Washington movement
led by A. Philip Randolph.
By the way, for whom she worked
with on the original March
on Washington before she became
a reporter in 1940 and 41.
But now it was shifting to the
clergy and it was the birth
of the nonviolent movement.
And so she writes this sentence
her first week in Montgomery
and she says, this
new gladiator goes
into battle wearing a reverse
collar and holding a Bible.
This new Moses is the
Negro preacher.
Now two things to notice about that.
She's the first to perceive this
from the ground floor as opposed
to the luxury of a
history book years later.
But notice her language
and this is one
of the reasons why Ethel Payne
is not necessarily remembered.
We look at history
anachronistically,
we look at it from the
viewpoint of today.
So when the Library of America
assembled its two volumes,
a collection of civil
rights reporting,
Ethel Payne's not in
that collection.
And why is that, because
historians looking back today,
primarily white historians,
are looking for these great analytic
pieces written at enormous length
with convoluted sentences and
analysis that might have appeared
in say the New York Times.
They dismissed Ethel Payne because
they forget who she was writing for.
She was writing for an audience
that when the paper started 50%
of its potential readership
could not read.
By the 1950's African-American
literacy rates had risen,
but nonetheless she was going to
write for her audience no different
than Jimmy Breslin in the Post
or Ernie Pyle in World War 2,
you write for your audience.
So she makes these
religious allusions coming
out of St. John's AME
Church and she writes
in a particular style and it worked.
She became this conduit
between the front lines
of the civil rights movement
and black readership all
around the United States serving
to activate, as well as to inform.
Because one of the things
about journalism is merely
reporting can trigger activation.
Think about it, one
of the great powers
of reporting is illuminating
the dark recesses in society,
telling people about poverty,
telling people about things
and that often triggers things.
So there she was doing this,
but I want to tell you another
anecdote that I just love.
White reporters began to
show up in Montgomery,
it was a big story right.
So they go to these church
meetings and when Martin Luther King
or Ralph Abernathy are up on the
podium do you think they would say
to the audience who knows
them hi I'm Ralph Abernathy,
they started talking.
But who didn't know who they were,
the white reporters lining
the side of the wall.
They would lean and say,
Abe Abernathy how do you
spell that guy's name.
And so the black reporters
and the white reporters formed
an alliance in Montgomery.
Black reporters couldn't
talk to sheriffs,
they wouldn't give them the time
of day the white reporters could.
But the black reporters
who were embedded
in the black community could
tell the white reporters what was
going on.
So every day at Morton Dean's
Drugstore, I think that's the name
of it, no it was Dean's
Drugstore not Morton.
They would meet and
exchange information.
So here's the little secret bit
of civil rights reporting
history I love.
When white liberals in the north
opened up the Washington Post
and New York Times, the Boston
Globe they were reading coverage
that was being shaped by
the Negro press of the time,
the press they didn't
even know existed.
So even their own coverage was
being shaped by the black press.
Ethel Payne then did
something quite remarkable.
She decided that the
black freedom struggle
in the United States was not merely
a domestic struggle it was tied
intimately to an international
struggle for freedom.
If you have a map of Africa
in 1950 all you see are colonies no
black rulers, the same with Asia.
So there was this remarkable
gathering going on in Bandung,
Indonesia where folks from all
around the world were coming
to meet together in an international
summit and they were doing
so without permission and
without inviting the two countries
that were carving up the world,
the United States and the USSR.
This was not something
the US was happy about.
Here's a headline by the way
that gives you a sense of it,
Afro Asia meet first confab
of world's darker people.
Adam Clayton Powell said
I'm coming, hang on.
The State Department
said, no you're not.
He looked at them and said I'm
an elected member of the House
of Representatives you don't
tell me where I can go.
So then they tried tactic number
two, we'll give you a plane
and a tour of Africa and you can
come back a hero, no thank you.
So he went.
Richard Wright abandoned
everything in Paris
where he was writing a
book and hopped on a plane.
Everybody who's anybody, including
this wonderful moment in the book
with Chet Huntley, do you remember
him, the Huntly and Brinkley?
Just before he became a TV
anchor he was out there.
And Ethel Payne sent back
her exclusive photographs.
And a lot of history
of international relations dismissed
the significance of this conference
because it didn't necessarily
produce anything.
Well it did produce something,
it was the first time all the
future leaders who were going
to liberate their countries
were coming together,
again without permission, without
approbation, without being part
of the two countries
carving up the world.
So the focus began for her
to look elsewhere and outside
of the United States, as
well as to connect things.
So in 1957, Ghana became the
first sub-Saharan country
to become liberated
from colonial rule.
I should exclude South
Africa and Rhodesia
and have a black government
take power.
And so Eisenhower sent Richard
Nixon off to his vice president
to represent the United
States at the gathering.
Now this is quite a feat because in
those days Air Force One if we were
to call the plane that,
getting there is not so easy.
In fact, one of the planes that
went had to stop in Morocco
and basically have
its engine replaced.
So just getting was quite a feat.
Everybody who was anybody in the
civil rights movement showed up,
including Martin Luther King.
This photograph is anachronistic,
it's actually not taken in Ghana,
but it's the only one I could
find of the two getting together.
So here's the delicious moment
that Ethel Payne witnesses,
the first time the Martin Luther
King gets to meet the vice president
of the United States,
not in the United States
but all the way over in Africa.
So King says to him, you
know, it's really neat
to see you here celebrating
black freedom.
If you really want to see the black
freedom struggle Mr. Vice President
might you want to come south
and visit us in Alabama,
Nixon [inaudible] do that?
But why don't you come to
Washington and have a meeting
with me, which is a big deal.
So Martin Luther King does come
to Washington subsequently,
meets with Nixon and then
meets with Eisenhower,
it's the first high level
meetings that occurs.
Now what was also going
on in 1957 is the debate
over the 57 Civil Rights Act.
And the photograph you see up there
you've got Kennedy on the left,
Hubert Humphrey in the
middle and LBJ on the right.
You ask any young member
of our society who's had a
history high school textbook
and they would immediately
say, oh of course, Kennedy,
Johnson great heroes of the civil
rights movement, they're the ones
who kind of got it through right.
Well, that might be somewhat true
for 64 and the legacy of Kennedy
and of course he's dead, but
people voting for the bill.
But in this moment those two people
are gutting the 57 Civil Rights Act,
they're taking all of
the good parts out of it.
And the one person who
is there bugging them
when it comes off the floor
and asking these questions
is Ethel Payne,
challenging LBJ, challenging
Kennedy.
Now sit tight because you may
fall off your seat when I suggest
that the hero of the moment
is none other than this man.
The man who brought us Watergate
and Vietnam, brought us the law
and order campaign, which
was certainly a subterfuge to
and please don't feel offended, but
this is the way I think [inaudible]
to put blacks back in their place.
You know by calling it law
and order in the 68 campaign.
He's on the good side
at this moment,
he wants that bill
passed much more in time.
Now why might that be,
he could be a nice guy.
But he could also be a Republican
who's thinking back 25 years
because black voters in the
United States had only been voting
for Democrats since 32.
In 57, that's 25 that's
one generation.
So he and a number
of African-American Republicans
thought we could lure them back
by supporting the 57
Civil Rights Act.
It does get passed, it's a
completely gutted and decimated
and useless piece of legislation.
So what happens after that is
that Ethel Payne is meeting
with Simeon Booker from Jet
Magazine and he had gone
to Ghana with them on the trip.
Remember I told you it's a
really big ordeal for reporters
to go all the way to Africa.
So because these jet trips didn't
occur very often they said let's
have a reunion of everybody,
let's meet at my new apartment
and get everybody together.
And Simeon says, yeah that's
great why don't you invite the
vice president.
[Inaudible] a funny
idea, so she invites him
and he says yes and comes.
So Pat Nixon and Richard Nixon show
up at her apartment for the party
and they just don't show up and wave
they stay for the whole evening.
You don't think that's a big deal,
here's what Jet Magazine says.
Marking first time a vice
president, just look at the words
from the 1950's, has socialized at
the home of a Negro in Washington.
And there's another picture
of her and the gather.
So at that moment Richard Nixon
in a sense was a good guy,
but after his election she also
realizes that JFK has changed
and he becomes a good guy.
And subsequent to his death she
becomes an enormous admirer of LBJ.
She leaves the Defender for a while
after a fight with her editors
and she's working in
voter registration
with the Democratic Party
that picture you see.
By the way, if you look at
the device in front of LBJ,
that's what they then
called a teleprompter.
He was the first to
use such a device.
And in 1964, famously when
they gather for the signing
of the 64 Civil Rights Act that
did have much more in the way
of teeth the woman who
is asked among the people
to be there is Ethel Payne and
there she is receiving a pen.
She also receives a pen from
the 65 Civil Rights Act.
What's significant about her
reporting and what I want you
to take away from today is an
understanding that particularly
in what's been happening
in the last two years.
The events that we have seen
in Ferguson and other places,
we learn most of it
through the media.
Well there isn't a the media.
The legacy of segregation
from that point still endures
in the media today.
Yes, the Washington Post
has a more colorful staff,
New York Times has minorities of all
sorts, but they're still primarily
in a sense white institutions.
And why that's so significant is
if you have the honor as I did
to read the black press in the 50's
and 60's and read the white press
at that time you learn
something to me as a white guy
that was fundamentally shocking.
Which was that the New York Times,
the white papers that I grew
up with you, viewed the 64 Civil
Rights Act, 65 Voting Rights Act
as munificent gifts being given
to disenfranchised people.
If you read the Defender,
the Afro-American,
you read Ethel Payne what you're
seeing is these are victories,
hard-fought victories
by everyday people
like portrayed the movie Selma
winning it, wrestling it,
taking it away from the government
who has refused to give those to us.
And that legacy still endures today
because if you look at the tone
and look at the way we cover things
there's I think a high distrust
of the major white papers.
Because if we go back a generation
it was a complete misunderstanding
of what was going on.
She didn't remain completely
out of journalism.
In 1967, Sengstacke at the
paper calls her up and says,
we'd like you to come back and she
says, well under what conditions.
Well we'd like to send you to
Vietnam, so this is the headline.
Chicago Defender to have its own
man in Vietnam, but she's a girl.
So Ethel Payne was sent to Vietnam
for three months, a long period,
and her job was to cover
the fate of black troops.
She was perfect for the job because
the Korean War had been segregated.
This is the first desegregated war.
She found instances of black
commanders sending white soldiers
off, black and white
soldiers working together,
black doctors in villages,
found all kinds
of to her really remarkable things.
I mean, think about that war,
Colin Powell and others advanced
because the military in a sense
was much more meritocracy.
She also found problems there, but
she did not focus on the war itself
and years later she regrets the fact
that she focused solely on the fate
of African-American soldiers.
And like so many other reporters
was manipulated by the White House
and nobody was doing, I
don't know if you remember,
but no one was doing
the math back then.
At that point the body count we'd
wiped out North Vietnam, China,
Korea and several other nations.
And 67 is the turning
point when reporters begin
to question what's going on.
So she spent the rest of her
life traveling for the Defender.
They brought her back to Chicago
and I like to say her favorite seat
when she was an editor at
the Chicago Defender was not
in the newsroom, but
was in an airplane.
She went to Africa with
this man, Henry Kissinger,
on one of those whirlwind tours.
She went with Secretary
of State Rogers.
I'm convinced that if there was a
thought bubble above Ethel Payne
in this picture it is that
my mama said to be polite
under all circumstances because she
was not fond of Henry Kissinger.
She got on this trip for
instance, the Henry Kissinger trip
because as they got
ready to go to Africa.
This is the 1970's, we're not
talking about 60's and 50's,
one of the people looking at the
press list said Mr. Secretary,
you don't have anyone whose
African-American on this trip
as a reporter and you're
going to Africa.
So he said, oh call up that woman
who always gives hell
about me on CBS.
So they called up Ethel Payne,
she scrambled to get her suitcase
together and she and a couple
of other black reporters went.
But this was always the case.
There was also the case in
1973, when China was opened
and the Chinese noticed
that the group of reporters
who were being sent to come for
one of the early visits they said
to the Americans politely, you
don't have any blacks on that list,
don't you have blacks
in the United States.
I mean you can imagine what
fun the red Chinese were,
so Ethel Payne was invited to join.
Here's a picture of
her on the streets
of Shanghai wearing
her leopard skin,
no leopard died it's
fake leopard skin.
But and notice everybody's
looking at her.
Remember how closed China was at
this point, so they had no idea
if she was a ruler from
some African nation or what.
The other reporters noticed
what was going on in the street,
so they all got out of the
car as she walked by they all.
When she got in the car she was
just crying tears of laughter.
Here's a picture of the group and
it's really interesting, you know,
that photographs can tell a story.
If you see there's another woman
in the group and she's looking off
and the body language is sort
of like I'm really not part
of this group, that's
the intellectual
from New York Susan Sontag and in
a sense it really captured her.
Ethel Payne continued to report
all over the place from the south,
there she is with Shirley Chisholm,
there she is reading a Wire copy,
we have her with Jimmy
Carter early on.
In 1984, at this point she's
a self-syndicated columnist,
so she's much freer to support
people on their campaigns.
She was a strong supporter of
then Jesse Jackson who also lived
in her house here in Washington.
And in 1990, when Nelson Mandela
was freed she went at a very,
I mean in 1990 she'd be 78, 79 then,
she went to South Africa
to interview him.
And if you notice in the
photograph how he's dressed,
he'd come in overnight
from someplace
and he was dressed in his bathrobe.
And this what I find so charming
about Ethel Payne's sense of humor
and self-deprecating humor.
She said lots of people got
to interview Nelson Mandela
I'm the only one who did
so while he was in his PJs.
Before she passed away that's an
exhibit at the Anacostia Museum
and you notice they're beginning
to call her the first lady
of the black press repeatedly.
She was uncomfortable with
that kind of iconic status,
but she understood the power of it.
She placed a lot of women,
young women into jobs.
She'd come and visit them
their first day on the job
and say, now you be quality.
I've met these women who have
never forgotten what she did.
Here she is at her
typewriter, she always stuck
to it even though she had
been given a word processor.
And after her death a postage
stamp was issued in her honor.
And to end I just want to tell
you two little thoughts about her
that I think really represent.
As a writer, I've always had the
rule that I like to end books
with my own words because, you know,
frankly I put in all 400 pages
the last taste like the dessert
if you come to my house you're going
to eat my dessert and
leave with my taste.
But I kept finding that other
people had a much keener sense
than I could ever get of Ethel Payne
and one of them was James Joseph.
And here's what he
said at her funeral
when it became his task
to speak about her.
She used her skill not to
acquire power for herself.
Think how different that is
in Washington these days.
Not to acquire power for herself,
but to activate power in others
at a time in which our world seemed
to be fragmenting into
we and they groups.
Ethel was searching for the
social blue of civil society,
affirming the connectedness
of humanity.
She made the case in all
sectors of her society that fear
of difference is the
fear of the future.
In her own work she was not
simply reporting the news she was
stretching the horizon of the heart,
widening the circle of community,
seeking to transform the
laissez-faire notion of live
and let live into a moral
imperative of live and help live.
In 1983, she was a professor
at Fisk University in Nashville
and she was asked to give
a sermon at the AME Church
and she probably felt very
comfortable there having grown
up in an AME Church
across the street,
although she by her own admission
was not a regular churchgoer later
in life.
And she said something there
that I translate a little bit.
She said to the all-black
audience that day
that ours was the generation
who put our lives on the line
to send our kids to college, but
we forgot to tell them our story.
And as a white historian I kind of
rework that sometimes and I say,
we're all forgetting
to tell a story.
The single most powerful
story of the United States
around the world is
not our Declaration
of Independence no matter
how lofty the ideals are,
not our revolutionary war,
but the civil rights movement.
If you leave the United States
that's what people ask you about.
That's what inspires because
its grassroots changed
from the bottom up.
And so many people face
oppression around the world
that a document signed by people
against England doesn't invoke the
same kind of inspiration than people
who are portrayed in
a movie like Selma,
just everyday people
getting together.
And Ethel Payne was
part of that group,
she's part of that second
rung of change makers.
And I particularly want to bring
that message to younger people
because I taught high
school for 10 years
and the version our next
generation are getting is
that there was this awful
period of segregation,
along came Martin Luther King
and everything is better now.
And what's wrong with that message
and I'm not diminishing
Martin Luther King in any way,
but it's leaving children to believe
that we have to wait for somebody
to come and change
the circumstances.
You have the power to
change lives in those kids.
And you read about Ethel
Payne's story you get that sense.
She rose up from Southside Chicago,
went halfway around the world
to make her mark, came back and
served as this critical link
in journalism seeking to advocate
and inform and change the world
with the power of the pen.
And she's part of that group and
I think our next generation need
to know that story because
we're forgetting to tell it.
Thank you, you've been
really patient with me.
I obviously could go
on for six hours.
[ Applause ]
Yes, there's a question.
Please.
>> There's a comment the gentleman
with the cigar in earlier photos.
>> James McGrath Morris:
You can help me with my.
>> Yes, he was the
first black reporter
to lead the White House press
corps Louis [inaudible].
>> James McGrath Morris: Thank you,
so I was having a long [inaudible].
Yes, I was having a hard -- I don't
know why, you know, [inaudible].
And let me tell you about him.
He's a really nice guy,
but he was uncomfortable
with Ethel Payne and
Allison Dunnigan.
He was the one who first complained
that their questions were too long.
And of course it's 1950's speak,
so he'd write them gals, you know,
he'd refer to them going on.
But he was also, he was
like many men who had broken
through professionally
who was nervous
about his position vis-a-vis whites.
And so he never was asking
these tough questions
that if you pardon me
the two gals were asking.
Until finally he says Mr. President,
a lot of people been asking me
to ask you this question and
I'm sorry, but I have to ask it
and then he asked a question.
And I really say that
defensively I'm not attacking him.
But what was so great for
me going back and looking
at that world is they're all
three such different people trying
to navigate the shoals of
racial life in Washington
and the press corps and
each had a different thing.
People don't understand today when
Ethel Payne and Ray, my mind's gone,
Mitchell were walking the halls
of congress not only are they
senators using a word on the floor
of the house that I would
not repeat in public to refer
to African-Americans, but
they would brush by them
in the hall as if they didn't exist.
You know that kind of just knock
into their shoulder slightly.
So, you know, Louis Lautier was a
male, Ethel Payne had two things
when she sat in the
back of the press corps,
she was black and she was female.
And so when you want to understand
her courage and say Mr. President,
I first I thought it was her
confronting the great white leader
of the United States, no there
was something else going on.
As she said Mr. President hundred
197 male white faces turned around
and looked at her, all
with the implications
of where do you get the
chutzpah to ask a question.
And if I were her I would have
been wearing Depends every day
that I went into that audience.
I mean it's a terrifying thing.
And so I've tried to reconstruct
that because I mean most
of you obviously know your history.
But trust me when I talk to
younger audiences they're clueless
to how daring an act that
was for a black woman
to challenge the president in
front of 200 other white reporters.
That was an act of courage.
I guess I can take more questions
and I'm more than one glad
to answer more, I don't
want to keep people here.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Yes.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Oh yes, including Kathleen
who's right next to you.
The two things, the sadness
of her self-syndication was
that she had very little
money, she got social security.
And I found letters where she was
writing the paper saying, you know,
you haven't paid me my 50
bucks for those columns.
And the black press also
at that point was losing
the power it once had.
The white press had robbed the
black press of its best reporters.
And let's think about one of the
reasons the Chicago Defender was
so successful in 1905 and up to the
50's is that the Chicago Tribune
and I'm telling it for
Chicago, it could be Baltimore.
The white press had completely
ignored the black community.
And what do we want to see in
newspapers, high school graduations,
obituaries, wedding announcements.
Well once the white
papers began to do
that it took away a lot
of the economic basis.
So when she was self-syndicating
those papers didn't have much money
and didn't have the
same kind of readership.
I did have a chance to interview
and talk to members of her family,
including her nephew
who's featured in the book
who became the first
African-American page
and was barred from doing that.
And I'll be glad to tell you
that story later when we're done.
And I did so for a
number of reasons.
One, I was approaching the story
with enormous trepidation, you know,
I'm an aging white guy
who am I to write a story
about a black woman in the 1950's.
I made a joke at one point
to myself and, you know,
when you make a good joke it's
usually not good for everybody else,
but I'm walking around the
house laughing up a storm.
And I said, you know, why
can't a white guy write a story
about a black woman who
became famous writing
about a white bald president,
I actually said a white
kind of white bald guy.
But anyway and the
truth of the matter was
that even though I
thought Ethel Payne
and I if we got together we'd talk
about cooking because we both cook.
We'd talk about the editors
who messed up our stories.
We'd have all this shop talk.
I still was nervous and I wasn't
going to proceed unless those
who knew her thought I was okay.
And so it wasn't just interviewing
them it was getting approbation
from those who knew her and then
they could look at my books and say,
you know, the book
could be very different
if a young black woman had
written it, but at least it's fair.
And then lastly and then I'll answer
your question, then we'll break
up is that I also discovered
in two of the three places
that held her papers,
[inaudible], at Howard
and Schaumburg Collection New York
the papers had never been processed,
25 years after her death they
were still sitting unopened.
And I thought that was an
invitation, I thought, you know,
I've got the skills as a storyteller
I'm going to go and do this story.
So those are all the
things that empowered me.
Quick question then
because you folks.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
No, I never did.
The closest I think I've come and
I'm looking for a photograph is
in 1981 when the hostages were
freed and there was this big event
on the south lawn of
the White House.
Anybody who had a press
pass went to it,
including me I was a reporter then.
And I want to get one of those
photographs with a magnifying glass
and say, I was 72.5 feet away from
her, but I never got to meet her no.
>> So what made you start writing
about her if you also [inaudible]
if she was inspired
at all by [inaudible].
>> James McGrath Morris: She
was, she didn't meet her,
at least I never found out.
But how could she not
be, they lived very close
to each other, she knew of her work.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
She knew her [inaudible], see
family already here to help me out.
And, you know, when
she was struggling
to become a writer the only black
woman in Chicago who made any money
from writing was Ida B.
Wells, so she certainly was.
There's a different risk that
they took, but I think I often --
I spoke at the Ida B. Wells
conference that was held this year
and I think in many ways Ethel Payne
was the 20th century version of her.
I was -- I came to her because
I was desperate for a book,
I had worked on a book
for a year that fell apart
and I had written books
about journalists.
So I went to the Google and made a
list a hundred famous journalists
in the 20th century, Walter
Cronkite, all these people
and Ethel Payne's name
showed up on it.
And I used to like pat myself and
say I had some idea who she was,
the truth of the matter
is I was clueless.
So I began looking into her life and
thought this is too great a story,
somebody's bound to
be working on it.
And then as I found out the
papers had never been processed
and all these kinds of things
it seemed to me an invitation
that if no one else was going
to do it I better get cracking.
So I love journalism, I like
the power of journalism change
and I also I am one of
those people who was swept
up by the story of the civil rights.
I've always studied
it, I wrote a piece
about how Arlington was the
instrumental place in breaking
down massive resistance, so
[inaudible] original scholarship
about and I'm interested
in the civil rights
movement from the bottom up.
I'm not writing a biography
of some famous person.
So those all combined to do it.
And when Kathy and others said yeah,
you're okay you could
probably do it, then I was.
>> You did an excellent job.
>> James McGrath Morris:
Well thank you, well thanks.
So I'm glad to stick around.
You guys, you know, you want
to get a sandwich before you
get back to work or something.
But I'll be signing books and
I'll stay and answer questions
as long as anybody wants.
And thank you for letting
me rattle on so long.
>> This has been a
presentation of the Library
of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.