From 1939 to 1947, Payne worked as a library assistant at the
Chicago Public Library. In May 1948, Payne left her job as a senior library assistant at the Chicago Public Library to move to Tokyo, where she had a job as a service club hostess at the Army Special Services club, an organization similar to the Red Cross. She began her journalism career rather unexpectedly while in Japan. She allowed a visiting reporter from
The Chicago Defender to read her journal, which detailed her own experiences as well as those of African-American soldiers. Impressed, the reporter took the journal back to Chicago and soon Payne's observations were being used by
The Defender, an African-American newspaper with a national readership, as the basis for front-page stories. In 1951, Payne moved back to Chicago to work full-time for Sengstacke Newspapers, the publisher of
The Chicago Defender. She worked as an Associate editor and reporter from 1951 to 1978. After working there for two years, in 1953, Payne took over the paper's one-person bureau in Washington, D.C. and became the Washington correspondent for Sengstacke Newspapers, a position she held until 1973. In this position, Payne was only one of three accredited African Americans on the
White House Press Corps. She and the African American author
Richard Wright attended the 1955
Bandung Conference, and Wright showcased some of his exchanges with her in his 1956 book
The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Payne earned a reputation as an aggressive journalist who asked tough questions. She once asked President
Dwight D. Eisenhower when he planned to ban segregation in interstate travel. The President's angry response that he refused to support special interests made headlines and helped push civil rights issues to the forefront of national debate. In 1964, Payne attended the signing by President Johnson of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, where the President gave her one of the pens he used to sign the legislation. WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. In 1978, she was appointed as a professor for the School of Journalism at
Fisk University in
Nashville, Tennessee. In an interview a few years prior to her death, Payne said, "I stick to my firm, unshakeable belief that the black press is an advocacy press, and that I, as a part of that press, can't afford the luxury of being unbiased . . . when it come to issues that really affect my people, and I plead guilty, because I think that I am an instrument of change." On May 28, 1991, aged 79, Payne died of a
heart attack at her home in Washington, D.C. ==Legacy==