On the "Deseg" Beat

Meanwhile Autherine Lucy, fighting to become the first Black graduate student at the University of Alabama, was facing a mob of 2,000 angry white protesters. The Defender sent Payne South in February 1956, where she interviewed students in Tuscaloosa and followed developments in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King had just been named President of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Despite the threat of violence, Payne worked tirelessly to follow Lucy’s case and King’s movements, gaining interviews with key figures and reporting on important moments of this new front in the Civil Rights Movement—at a time when few white-owned papers had reporters on the scene. Unfortunately, by the end of 1956 the Defender could no longer afford Payne's salary, forcing her to resign and seek new prospects elsewhere.