Les Payne

Leslie Payne (July 12, 1941 – March 19, 2018)

Biography

Early years Payne was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1941. In 1954, Payne moved with his mother to Hartford, Connecticut, where she remarried. According to DNA analysis, he was descended in part from people from Cameroon.

The first member of his family to attend college, Payne graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1964 with a degree in English. He was interested in pursuing a career in journalism, but as an African American he found no opportunities in the mainstream press. Instead, Payne joined the U.S. Army, where he eventually became a captain. He ended his Army career with two years as an information officer, writing speeches for General William Westmoreland and running the Army newspaper. Next year, it was published as a book credited to the newspaper staff, The Heroin Trail (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975).

In 1975, Payne and other African Americans working in the media established the National Association of Black Journalists. Payne served as the group's fourth president.

Payne co-wrote a series of articles about the Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. These became the basis of his next book, The Life and Death of the SLA (Ballantine Books, 1976), credited to "Les Payne and Tim Findley, with Carolyn Craven". Payne's reporting from South Africa during the 1976 Soweto Uprising was selected by the jury for a Pulitzer Prize in International Journalism, but the group's advisory board overruled their decision with no explanation. Despite being barred from the country, Payne returned to South Africa in 1985 to chronicle the changes that had taken place during the intervening years. It was syndicated in 1985. In his retirement, he co-wrote a biography of Malcolm X, which was published in 2020 as The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X and won that year's National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book is framed by essays from Tamara Payne, Payne's daughter and primary researcher, who completed the biography after her father's death. The book is described as a "powerful and revelatory account of the civil rights activist, built from dozens of interviews, offering insight into his character, beliefs and the forces that shaped him."

Les Payne died on March 19, 2018, following a heart attack. In 2019, the Society of Professional Journalists - New York City Chapter (also known as The Deadline Club), which had previously named Payne to the 2017 New York Journalism Hall of Fame, named a category of the annual Deadline Awards after Payne: Les Payne Award for Coverage on Communities of Color.