One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611)

by Browne, Arthur

  Anne and Battle traveled by boat, a ticket on an Old Dominion steamship being less expensive than going by train. The Old Dominion’s service to New York from Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, was then becoming a primary transportation for early black migrants on the Eastern Seaboard. In 1898, the year before Battle and his mother made the voyage, one New York man commented, “Negroes are coming on every boat from southern waters.” Another said, “Nobody knows how it happened but on every Old Dominion Steamship that docked there (were) from two to three hundred Negroes landed in New York.”14

  The route took Anne and Battle across Albemarle Sound to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on a steamer and then by rail to Norfolk. They were a pair who would have drawn glances. Battle towered over his mother, his broad shoulders showing the results of fieldwork, masonry, and the sport of boxing, which had become a favorite. Skin tone distinguished the two as well. Battle’s face and eyes were deep brown. By surface appearance, he seemed little related to a woman who had inherited fair skin and blue eyes from her father. In the strange calculus of race, his blood was at least one-quarter white, while hers was at least half Caucasian. Yet for legal, social, and economic purposes, they were equally and totally black—and equally covered by the Jim Crow strictures that greeted them on crossing into Virginia.

  The harshness of Jim Crow was a revelation to Battle, because North Carolina was still a year away from introducing fully systematic repression. Battle told Hughes: “In Virginia I saw my first separate waiting rooms, marked WHITE and COLORED. We also experienced segregation on the Old Dominion Line’s Norfolk-to-New-York boat. My mother was assigned to a filthy hole with a large number of other colored people.”

  He would not allow Anne to be so degraded: “It was a long overnight trip, almost twenty-four hours, as I took a part of my money to secure a stateroom for her. Once that was arranged, I spent the night there, too, and nobody bothered me.”

  FIRST HE SAW the Statue of Liberty—that inspiring monument to promises kept, towering rebuke for promises broken, at the mouth of New York Harbor—and then the full sweep of America’s largest city appeared before Battle as the steamer rounded Manhattan’s tip. Everything was bigger than Battle had ever seen. More than three hundred buildings stood nine or more stories tall as the invention of the elevator and development of steel skeletal construction allowed for the creation of real estate in the air.15

  A golden dome sat atop the tower Joseph Pulitzer had built for his newspaper, the New York World. At a height of 309 feet, the gilded tip was meant to attract the eye, and it surely drew the look of a small-town Southern teenager with scant possessions. Surrounding Pulitzer’s pride were the chest thumpings of America’s nineteenth-century capitalist titans: John D. Rockefeller, oil; J. P. Morgan, finance; Andrew Carnegie, steel; James Buchanan Duke, tobacco; Henry Havemeyer, sugar; Jay Gould, railroads. These men had made Lower Manhattan into a landscape of seemingly limitless wealth. They competed and conspired, profited and profiteered, and then they went home to decorous townhouses or fabulous mansions. As recounted by the authors of Gotham, an encyclopedic history of New York up to the brink of the twentieth century: “But with outspending one’s rivals the only definitive route to preeminence, a steady inflation in extravagance ensued as members of opposing cliques scrambled to convert Wall Street revenue into Fifth Avenue social standing. Dinner parties corkscrewed upward in lavishness—black pearls in oysters, cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, lackeys in knee breeches and powdered wigs.”16

  The engorgement of riches grew from America’s westward expansion and productivity-improving inventions, such as Edison’s light bulb and Bell’s telephone. Its scale was certainly beyond Battle’s understanding. So, too, the lesser world beneath the skyscrapers’ rule, one that was teeming and grimy on land and water.

  As the Old Dominion steamer chugged up the Hudson River, Battle and Anne looked out on the traffic of a world metropolis. Barges laden with crops paraded downstream in lines four, six, and eight long. Railroad cars floated improbably on flat boats. Ferryboats traveled back and forth to New Jersey like “the shuttle in the loom,” as one contemporary writer put it. After a last slow push, the ship angled cross-flow and eased toward a wharf. Shoreward, the water grew thick with oily refuse. Battle led Anne down timbered planking and onto a street spread with the manure of wagon horses and clogged with “cab drivers and expressmen whose vehicles and manners” seemed even then “to belong to a more primitive age.”17

  He had answered the North’s call, and now his summoning dreams met inglorious reality. Turn-of-the-century New York throbbed with the white-faced, strange-tongued poverty of European immigration. Peasants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe shared the privations of life in a city that scorned help for the poor. This was the era of the tenement house, four- to six-story buildings with common bathrooms and small, dark living quarters whose windows looked out on shadowy airshafts. Here was where “the other half” lived in the chronicling of journalist Jacob Riis.

  As of 1890, Riis estimated that the city’s 37,000 tenements were home to 1.2 million New Yorkers. He took his readers into a building on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that overflowed with more than 700 people per acre, the highest rate of population in the world:

  Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. . . . All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to be free. . . . Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell—Oh! a sadly familiar story—before the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. The dark bedroom killed it.

  For blacks, too, New York was anything but the Promised Land.

  Commerce with the West Indies had made New York a key player in the slave trade. A market for the sale of humans opened at the foot of Wall Street at the start of the eighteenth century and, finding that forced labor enhanced the quality of life, more than half of the city’s households owned slaves by the mid-eighteenth century.

  Down through the decades, subjugation produced episodes of horrific violence. In 1712, slaves gathered in an orchard to plot a murderous rebellion. One set fire to a shed. Whites who ran to fight the blaze were met by gunfire and hatchet attacks. Nine died and a half dozen were wounded. Twenty-one slaves were brought to trial and condemned. According to the official report, “Some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheele and one hung alive in ye towne.”18

  THE UPRISING WAS well remembered twenty-nine years later when nine fires broke out in quick succession, sparking rumors that slaves were conspiring to destroy the city. A white girl reported under pressure that she had overheard blacks planning a massacre. Scores of slaves were arrested and tried without regard to legal or evidentiary standards. Eighteen were hanged and fourteen were burned alive.

  After the Revolutionary War, New York confronted the question of abolition, but it was among the last of the northern states to approve even a gradual move toward liberty. Not until 1827 did the legislature grant African Americans the benefit of full emancipation.

  In 1860, as the United States approached the Civil War, the census counted just 49,005 blacks among a statewide population of 3.9 million, a total equal to slightly more than 1 percent of all New Yorkers.19 Still, they were resented by many whites, and all the more so after the outbreak of hostilities.

  Two years into the fighting, Congress enacted a draft that did not sit well in a city divided over the merits of forced Southern emancipation. Adding to outrage, the law permitted privileged young men to buy their way out of serving by paying $300 as a bounty to attract
less-fortunate cannon fodder.

  New York was called upon to deliver two thousand conscripts, their names to be chosen in a public lottery. Before the drawing was finished, hundreds of men marched to the site, set the building ablaze, and ignited four days of violence. Rioters targeted Lincoln’s Republicans and other symbols of support for the war. Gangs pummeled blacks, ransacked businesses that blacks owned or patronized, and, yelling, “Burn the niggers’ nest,” attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum. The 237 children inside were rushed to a police stationhouse as a mob torched the building. When, finally, federal troops restored order, the death toll stood at 191.

  For decades after the war, the number of African Americans in the city remained constantly small. Blacks clustered first in the notorious Five Points section of Lower Manhattan; then they were pushed north into Greenwich Village and then further north into a rough-edged place on Manhattan’s West Side called the Tenderloin. By modern standards, it was not a ghetto. The city’s black population—counted at 60,666 in the 1900 census, less than 2 percent of the total—still lacked the heft to claim a large area. Instead, blacks lived scattered on a block here and a block there.20

  As would long be the case, their buildings were the least well-kept and carried the highest rents. As also would be the case, blacks had few employment opportunities. The census put the number of working black men at 20,395, with well more than half holding jobs as servants, waiters, porters, or laborers. In contrast, there were but thirty-two black doctors and twenty-six black lawyers.

  An African American pioneer, William L. Bulkley, educated at Claflin, Wesleyan, and Syracuse universities in the United States, as well as at Strasburg University in Germany and the Sorbonne in Paris and soon to be named principal of an elementary school that served the black children of the Tenderloin, described the dynamic:

  The saddest thing that faces me in my work is the small opportunity for a colored boy or girl to find proper employment. A boy comes to my office and asks for his working papers. He may be well up in the school, possibly with graduation only a few months off. I question him somewhat as follows:

  “Well, my boy, you want to go to work, do you? What are you going to do?”

  “I am going to be a door-boy, sir.”

  “Well, you will get $2.50 or $3 a week, but after a while that will not be enough; what then?”

  After a moment’s pause he will reply: “I should like to be an office boy.”

  “Well, what next?”

  A moment’s silence, and, “I should try to get a position as bell-boy.”

  “Well, then, what next?”

  A rather contemplative mood, and then, “I should like to climb to the position of head bell-boy.”

  He has now arrived at the top; further than this he sees no hope. He must face the bald fact that he must enter business as a boy and wind up as a boy.21

  For now, Battle was a country teenager come North with wide eyes. At Anne’s side, he navigated the hustle and muck of the streets and absorbed the shock of the new. Trains thundered and clanged overhead. Forerunners of the subways, their steam engines belched smoke and showered sparks. Where the sun came into view, the sky was etched with cables strung helter-skelter to carry electricity every which way.

  Crossing Manhattan’s busiest north-south thoroughfare, he encountered the New York Police Department for the first time in the form of the best the department had to offer: the Broadway Squad. All the men were at least six feet one. They stood resplendent in brass-buttoned uniforms. Battle was duly impressed. As one writer of the day said of this elite cadre: “They hold the peace of Broadway in their arms, and under these broad arms tens of thousands of frightened New Yorkers and strangers pass in safety each day.”22

  Far beyond Battle’s view were the darker truths that New York Police Department was infused with brutality, corruption, and racism. Its ranks, 7,500 strong, were filled largely by ill-educated Irishmen who were given to the liberal use of a club called the “locust,” so named for the close-grained wood from which it was hewn. They took orders from the bosses of Tammany Hall, the all-powerful Democratic Party machine. Many blurred the distinction between cop and criminal.

  Vice was rampant, and nowhere more so than in the Tenderloin. There, New Yorkers indulged baser appetites away from the scolding of stiff-necked clergy and the daytime rectitude of proper citizens. There, sellers of sin shared their bounty with the police, and the police shared the wealth with Tammany chiefs.

  The area drew its name from a joyful remark uttered in the last decade of the nineteenth century by Captain Alexander Williams on being assigned to the local precinct with all its gushers of graft. “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin,” chortled Williams, an immense former ship’s carpenter who was renowned as “Clubber” because of his frequent use of the baton.

  There were gambling halls. There were nightclubs with curtained rooms for prostitution and galleries for watching sexual “circuses.” There were rows of bordellos and brightly lit avenues where prostitutes paraded: white women on the “Ladies Mile” along Sixth Avenue and black women on “African Broadway” along Seventh Avenue.

  Battle’s trek with Anne took them in front of City Hall to the western landing of the Brooklyn Bridge. He remembered the span as “a wonderful thing in those days,” and admitted to a touch of hayseed gullibility: “I heard about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and I wondered how it was sold, and asked some questions about it.”23

  As much as it was a feat of engineering, the bridge stood also as a symbol of a new urban identity. Only a year before, in 1898, the city of Brooklyn, on the east side of the river, and the city of New York, on the western bank, had been wed, Brooklyn playing the reluctant bride and Manhattan the rakish groom. There was one city now—Greater New York—with a single police force, a single fire department, and a single seat of political power.

  What Battle thought on crossing the bridge will never be known. Nor can it be said what transpired after Battle and Anne descended to the Brooklyn shore, there to complete the journey to Anne’s dashing relatives, William and Killis Delamar. Battle shared with an interviewer only these slim impressions: “Brooklyn was a great big place. The elevated made so much noise you couldn’t hear. There was so much traffic. Of course, I came from a nice quiet little town where everybody spoke to you, but here if I knew somebody and wanted to speak to them they’d think you were fresh or something.”24

  He stayed in Brooklyn for only two days. The parting with his mother came quickly and sadly. Many long years later, pencil in hand, he wrote of Anne: “I admired and idolized my angelic mother, I loved her better than anyone in the world . . . and always said to myself if and when I married I would choose a girl as near like my loving mother as I possibly could.”25

  Likely, Anne embraced her son’s big body, the body that had been so large at birth and that was going to carry him forth into the world as a sixteen-year-old claiming manhood. Likely, he spoke of the dream he was setting out to pursue, that of going to college as soon as he could earn the money for tuition and then on to becoming an attorney. Likely, they spoke with earnest optimism of reunions to come. There would be some. They would be few. Mother and son would rarely feel one another’s touch again.

  AFTER AN OVERNIGHT voyage on a steel-hulled steamer, Battle’s sister Nancy and her husband, Alexander Taylor, met Battle at a Connecticut River wharf in Hartford. Taylor had built a painting business. The summer being his busy time, he hired Battle at a salary of $1.50 a day, an amount that seemed princely. When Taylor’s trade fell away in the fall, Battle began picaresque travels in search of work. An early excursion took him to the all-white town of East Glastonbury. A German couple owned the local boarding house. They gave Battle dinner and put him up for the night, marking the “first time I had ever been lodged with white persons.” In the course of the evening, Battle met the superintendent of the nearby Crosby Woolen Mills. Battle
told Hughes:

  He was a dapper little man, friendly and talkative, and after dinner we got into a conversation that lasted quite late into the evening. We discussed every subject under the sun except a job. Finally I got around to that, broaching the subject of possible employment in the mill.

  “I would be willing to employ you,” he said. “But I don’t know how the owners would take it, or the other employees. We have never hired a Negro.”

  “Why don’t you hire one and learn how it would take?” I asked.

  Battle wound up with a job in the dye house—at least partly because the dye master jealously guarded his formulas and believed that an African American would lack the intellectual capacity to steal the secrets. In fact, Battle learned the art of fabric dying well enough to run production when the dye master fell ill. A team of mechanics also taught Battle how to operate equipment they had newly installed.

  “The result was that when the mill reopened, I was retained in the carding department as a kind of unofficial overseer in charge of the maintenance of the machinery,” Battle remembered. “I got more pay than my fellow workers but, since I was colored, the superintendent did not wish them to know this. I received two pay envelopes, one of regular wages at the pay window and the other at a different time.”

  Despite his accomplishments, Battle’s wanderlust took hold. He arranged for his brother John Edward to come North from New Bern to take the job at the mill and moved on, first working on the farm of a prominent judge, who cheated Battle out of pay, and then as a waiter on side-wheelers that ferried the well-to-do on overnight trips between New York City and a rail connection to Boston at Fall River, Massachusetts. He found the job enjoyable, especially summer excursions to watch the 1901 America’s Cup sailing competitions between the J. P. Morgan–backed Columbia and the Shamrock of the Lipton Tea Company’s millionaire founder.

  Off hours in port, Battle explored New York. The city was still intimidating to a wayfarer barely eighteen years old. Fellow blacks dispensed cautionary advice. There were things that African Americans did in New York at their peril. It was wise to avoid the police; it was foolhardy to cross them. Hard experience taught that New York’s cops readily applied the locust, and a police riot that had erupted in the Tenderloin less than a year earlier lived vividly in memory.