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

by Browne, Arthur

  Dozens were hauled to the stationhouse, where, the Age reported, “they found prepared for them a modified form of the Indian torture called ‘running the gauntlet.’” One by one they were shoved into a darkened room in which “police officers with clubs proceeded to beat these upon the head and bodies until they were nearly dead.”

  For weeks after the nightsticks had swirled around Battle and Florence, Fortune trained the Age’s editorial firepower on Police Commissioner William McAdoo, writing: “By no one, except Commissioner McAdoo whose enthusiasm over the force too often outruns his judgment, has the behavior of the police in these ‘riots’ been praised; on the contrary, it has caused blistering denunciation from the most influential members of the metropolitan press, we mean the Times, the World, the Evening Post and the Evening Mail.”69

  As 1905 closed, Fortune published an unsigned letter to the editor under a headline that exhorted, “Become Police and Firemen.” The author detailed the required physical qualifications. Barred were obesity, “rupture in any form,” “fissures, fistulas and external or internal piles,” varicose veins, color-blindness, and much more, including “very offensive breath.” It was mandatory that heart, brain, kidneys, and genitalia be in good working order.

  The author also warned—presciently, as Battle would discover—that an applicant might face medical sabotage after passing the written civil service test: “I am informed that it has been, and is now, the custom when Afro-Americans apply for examination for the examiners to fake up some technical physical defect and thereby reject them, while a white man in similar physical condition would be passed without question.”70

  There was no rush of volunteers. The police department went on as the keeper of an unequal peace and as Tammany Hall’s arm of extortion.

  FLORENCE’S FIGURE GREW round as fall moved into winter. When finally the time arrived, Dr. Roberts delivered the baby at home, in those four rooms with the distinguishing brass bed. The date was January 23, 1906. The infant was a boy in whom Battle vested his own life’s dream, while accepting that, practically speaking, he could not hand down to his son the name Samuel.

  He remembered: “Jesse Earl was our first born. We started to name him Samuel Jesse Battle, Jr. But in that day and time, following the era of the ‘coon’ songs, colored people were becoming very sensitive about names like Rufus and Sambo. Some of our friends persuaded us that Sam was too closely related to Sambo, so we named our son Jesse Earl instead. I had wanted Jesse Earl to be a lawyer—to fulfill a secret ambition of my own.”

  Around this time, Florence chose the name Jesse as term of endearment for her husband as well. The nickname stuck and would often be used by Battle’s closest family and friends for the rest of his life. To them, he would not be Samuel, but Jesse. Battle and Florence had Jesse Earl baptized, and then the redcaps came to a christening party. There were prayers for the baby’s spiritual well-being—and, no doubt, for more. There were likely prayers that he would survive to grow up. Infant mortality was epidemic. With sixteen of every one hundred babies dying before the age of one—and with the mortality rate for black infants almost double that for whites—everyone knew mothers and fathers who had lost children. By comparison, the death rate today is more than thirty times lower: five of every thousand infants fail to pass the one-year mark.71

  After the baptism, the Battles settled into roles they would follow across their six-decade marriage: Florence tended to home and family; Samuel devoted exuberant energy to his work and the social life that flourished around him. He thrived amid Grand Central’s pomp and glamour by studying up on the celebrities whose bags he toted. He became as knowledgeable about opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink as he was about actress Lillian Russell. He read the writing of Richard Harding Davis, who passed through the terminal as he went about becoming America’s first celebrity war correspondent. He greeted John D. Rockefeller.

  Battle told Hughes, who wrote:

  The famous 20th Century Limited, the New York Central’s eighteen-hour train to and from Chicago, arrived at 9:30 a.m. For every hour it was late, passengers were refunded a dollar of their fare. Many of my customers, when the train was late, would simply hand me their refund slip and tell me to keep the money. Red Caps were never sorry to see the Century come in behind time, least of all myself. We were probably the only ones happy when it came in late.

  Sometimes Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge or Broadway Jones, one of the most popular entertainers of his time, would get off this famous train. I was always particularly glad to see Williams and Walker, the Negro musical comedy stars, or Charles Avery and Dan Hart, the popular comedians, step off the Century. They were my friends.

  Sometimes, after carrying their bags, I would join them later for a meal at the Hotel Palm on the corner of 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, the heart of New York’s Negro high life. In front of the Palm or Marshall’s, one might see the young writer, James Weldon Johnson, or his musical brother, Rosamond, or the poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, talking with the composer, Will Vodery. I knew many of the Negro show people of the day and appeared in one Broadway show myself.

  When the musical comedy Honeymoon Express, starring Blanche Ring who sang “Rings on My Fingers, Bells on My Toes” and Irene and Vernon Castle, exotic dancers, was staged, the producers wanted two stalwart Red Caps for the finale. John Mason and I were chosen, both of us being over six feet and about the same shade of brown. As the final curtain fell we were shown putting the luggage of the cast aboard the “Honeymoon Express” to the rhythm of the finale.

  . . .

  Enrico Caruso was a genial person, liberal with money and very good-hearted. He sometimes gave me passes to the Metropolitan Opera where I heard my first operas. Because of my admiration for him, I learned to like Italian food and frequently dined at the restaurant that bore his name at Spring and Lafayette Streets. Caruso traveled with quite a retinue. His arrivals and departures were a major event, with crowds of voluble Italians, including some of New York’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens, always on hand to see him arrive and depart.

  Celebrities who did not tip well were known to all the old-timers among the Red Caps. When such persons entered the station, the senior Red Caps were very hard to find, leaving the younger men to carry their bags. Red Caps often rendered service for nothing to the aged, the infirm, the bewildered, or very poor with no thought of remuneration. In fact, we frequently helped stranded travelers from our own pockets, if the need presented itself. It was only the rich and famous upon whom we looked quietly from behind a remote pillar when they were known to be tight with their purse strings. With people in trouble we sympathized.

  . . .

  Because of the admiration and high regard in which he was held by Negro veterans of the Spanish-American War and because he had entertained Booker T. Washington at the White House when he was President, Negro citizens had a great deal of affection for Theodore Roosevelt.

  One day the Red Caps learned that, having just returned from a hunting trip to Africa, “Teddy” would be boarding the Merchants Limited at Five o’clock for Boston. Quickly a committee was formed. I was chosen as the spokesman for all the Red Caps to express to Mr. Roosevelt our felicitations on his safe return and our gratitude for his interest in American Negro citizens. As he arrived on the platform accompanied by a group of prominent men, a corps of Red Caps stood at attention outside his car. When he approached, I stepped forward.

  “What is it, young man?” Roosevelt asked.

  I replied with the good wishes of my fellow station workers and gave him our thanks for his interest in the needs of the Negro people. He thanked me, and shook my hand and that of every Red Cap in the group with a firm grasp, squinting his eyes into that characteristic sharp gaze that seemed to look right through a man.

  Chief Williams accompanied workplace camaraderie with a family man’s advice. He told Battle that San Juan Hill was no place to raise a child—that Florence and Jesse would be
much better off where Williams had taken up residence, north in an area called Harlem.72 It was worth a look, so, with Jesse swaddled in arms, Battle and Florence paid a call on the Chief, his wife, Lucy, and their growing family. The Williamses now had three children. Wesley was nine, Gertrude was six, and Leroy was three. Their apartment was more spacious than those generally available to blacks downtown. The building and those around it were better kept as well. But decent housing came with a drawback. Virtually everyone in the neighborhood was white, and most wanted nothing to do with African Americans. Taking up residence would demand fortitude of Battle, Florence, and, eventually, Jesse, but no more than was already shown by the Chief, Lucy, and their Wesley.

  Old enough to feel the sting of racism as nakedly as children can express it, Wesley intrepidly took a desk in a public school whose teachers were white and whose students were white, except for a few highly visible children. He knew much that his classmates would never know because great-grandmother Sarah Powell and grandfather James Wesley would tell of things that were closed to white children. Wesley listened raptly when Sarah Powell told of being kidnapped from West Africa and when James Wesley remembered escaping from slavery able to read and write. Taking to heart that his forebears had prevailed over badness that he could only imagine, Wesley excelled at reading and writing, outran and outplayed his classmates, and learned more about them than they would ever learn of him.

  After touring Harlem and finding a landlord willing to rent to African Americans, Battle and Florence settled on a twenty-three-dollar-a-month apartment on West 134th Street, about a block from the Williams family. The first African Americans to live in the building, they became some of the founding citizens of the community that would grow into the capital of black America.

  UNIQUE FORCES of economics and race were coming to bear in the transition of Harlem from a white population to the first place in US history to offer quality housing for the black masses. Seven miles distant from city hall, the area was at one time a rural paradise, complete with farms and marshland that sloped to the Hudson River. The community’s character changed with the city’s relentless expansion up the spine of Manhattan. By the 1870s, it had grown into an early New York suburb, home to upper-middle-class and wealthier families.

  Those families lost their isolation when three elevated train lines reached the area between 1878 and 1881. The next decade brought construction of well-appointed apartment buildings. Many were equipped with elevators; many offered servants’ quarters. Townhouses proliferated. Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the Broadway musical composer of the same name, opened the Harlem Opera House. Milwaukee beer baron Fred Pabst established the country’s largest restaurant, the fourteen-hundred-seat Pabst Harlem, on West 125th Street.

  Then success fell prey to mania.

  As the century turned, the city fathers announced a plan to extend a subway tunnel from Lower Manhattan to Harlem, where the line would run under Lenox Avenue. This territory became a roaring frontier. Residential buildings went up on every available square inch of land, and speculators borrowed extravagant sums to trade in properties.

  John M. Royall, who would emerge as a prominent black real estate man, recalled the frenzy: “The great subway proposition . . . filled the people’s minds and permeated the air. Real-estate operations and speculators conjured with imaginings of becoming millionaires bought freely in the west Harlem district, in and about the proposed subway stations. Men bought property on thirty- and sixty-day contracts, and sold their contracts, not their property for they never owned it, and made substantial profits.”73

  When subway construction fell behind schedule, too many property owners owed too much money and had too many vacant apartments. They became desperate to rent. Into the breach stepped Philip A. Payton Jr., a graduate of Livingston College who found work in New York as a handyman, barber, and janitor in a real estate office before striking out on his own at the age of twenty-four to buy, sell, and broker properties. He advertised: “Management of Colored Tenements a Specialty.”

  Recognizing that fellow blacks would flock to Harlem’s decent housing, Payton offered to deliver tenants to landlords in a scheme that was simple, if cynical: he would fill apartments at rents that landlords were accustomed to charging white tenants while collecting from black tenants the higher rents they were used to paying. Landlords took what they could get, while Payton made as much as a 10 percent premium. The formula led him to establish the Afro-American Realty Company, propelling the movement that Battle had joined early on by following the Chief and taking an apartment on the very block where Payton had gone into business. The advantages were plain. “It is no longer necessary for our people to live in small, dingy, stuffy tenements,” proclaimed an advertisement in the Age, adding, “we have flats of four and five rooms and bath rooms in which there is plenty of God’s air and sunshine.” And Ovington noted, “Here are homes where it is possible, with sufficient money, to live in privacy, and with the comforts of steam heat and a private bath.”74

  Left unmentioned was the intense animosity that greeted blacks. In December 1905, the New York Herald had reported that buildings once “occupied entirely by white folks have been captured for occupancy by a Negro population.” The Herald’s use of the word “captured” reflected the prevailing tendency to describe arriving blacks as “invaders,” an “influx,” or a “horde.”

  The rhetoric was accompanied by antiblack action. First, whites fled, often in panic. The New York Times described the scene in 1905 after the owners of two buildings accepted black tenants: “The street was so choked with vehicles Saturday that some of the drivers had to wait with their teams around the corners for an opportunity to get into it. A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are invading the choice locality is pouring into the streets. Another equally long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the household goods of the whites from their homes of years.”75

  As white departures further depressed real estate values, landlords banded together. Many appended restrictive covenants to their deeds that barred sales or rentals to African Americans. When Battle left for work in the morning and returned at night, he walked by covenanted buildings. When he strolled the neighborhood with Florence and Jesse, he walked by covenanted buildings. He passed them on 129th and 130th streets. He passed them on 131st, 135th, and 136th streets, more than two hundred in all. A typical covenant barred occupancy by “any negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon of either sex . . . excepting only that any one family . . . may employ one negress or one female mulatto, or one female quadroon or one female octoroon as a household servant.”76

  The antagonism surrounding the family was more personal and collectively held than any Battle had experienced. By moving uptown, he had crossed one of the invisible boundaries that circumscribed African American life in New York. He was allotted the space where men toted luggage, but he was barred from the territory where men were professionals. He was shunned in the neighborhood where he lived, but he moved enthusiastically in black society, in the Elks, in the Mother AME Zion congregation, among the bright lights of Negro Bohemia.

  At home, Florence matured from sixteen to eighteen into a wife and mother beyond her years. Jesse thrived under her care and in his father’s big arms. Then, as Jesse approached two years old, Dr. Roberts confirmed that Florence was once again pregnant. Hoping the baby would be a girl, the Battles launched into preparations. Most pressingly, they searched for an apartment better suited to a family of four. At 27 West 136th Street they found a place that accepted blacks and moved in. It was there, on July 8, 1908, that Dr. Roberts delivered Florence D’Angeles Battle, her middle name hailing the baby as sent by the angels. At twenty-five, Battle was the proud father of two.

  But joy was short-lived.

  At little past three weeks of age, Florence contracted cholera infantum, then a terrifying illness likely caused by poor sanitation and
now easily treatable by antibiotics. The condition afflicted children with severe diarrhea, violent vomiting, high fevers, and, eventually, dehydration. Often it was fatal. The only available—and ineffective—treatment was Mixture Cholera Infantum, a compound developed by a New York doctor in 1901 and sold today under the brand name Pepto-Bismol.

  With Dr. Roberts at her side and Samuel and Florence struggling night and day to ease her agony, little Florence fought for life for more than a week. At the age of one month and one day, she died. Her death certificate set the time of death at 3:30 a.m. on August 9, 1908, and the place of death as “tenement.”77

  After a small funeral, Battle and Florence made a mournful pilgrimage across the East River by ferry and then by wagon into the Queens countryside to an Episcopal Church cemetery. Death had never been so close for Battle, and the toll on Florence was severe. To spare her the pain of confinement where the baby had died, Battle insisted that the family should travel by train to a black Elks convention in Detroit. The redcaps turned out in force to send Battle, Florence, and Jesse off with good cheer, and the Elks families did their best to provide comfort. At the convention’s end, Battle took his wife and son for a late summer respite from New York’s heat at the seashore in Atlantic City.

  THERE WAS BAD news while Battle was in Detroit. Horrific white-on-black racial violence erupted in Springfield, Illinois. The police had arrested two black men for unrelated crimes, one on a charge of slitting a white man’s throat after, it was believed, attempting to assault a white girl, the other for allegedly raping a white woman, a claim that was later retracted. A crowd surrounded the jail. Furious that the sheriff had spirited the two men away, the mob trashed black-owned businesses, and killed a barber who tried to defend his shop and hung his body from a tree. Under the watch of as many as twelve thousand people, rioters set ablaze a black neighborhood and cut firefighting hoses.