The intensity of the violence was greater than anyone could remember. The eruption had occurred not in the South but in the North, and not just anywhere in the North, but in the city that had sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House and in which the Great Emancipator was entombed. After visiting Springfield, journalist William English Walling wrote a magazine article headlined “Race War in the North.” He concluded with words: “Yet who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid?” In New York, Mary White Ovington took the question as a challenge and began gathering allies to meet it.
AT ROUGHLY THIS moment, three African American men gathered with history-changing purpose in Doyle’s Saloon on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 136th Street.
J. Frank Wheaton—a friend of Battle’s from the Elks—was born in 1866 to a father credited with having been the first black to vote in Maryland after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Wheaton graduated from Storer College in West Virginia and studied at Howard University before becoming the first African American to graduate from the University of Minnesota Law School.
A gifted orator, he won election in 1898 to the Minnesota legislature, another first for a black man. He represented a district whose population of forty thousand included only one hundred African Americans. He won passage of a civil rights law that expanded equal access to public places and transportation. In 1905, Wheaton moved to New York, served as an assistant district attorney, opened a law practice, and became “the most loved man in Elkdom.”
Bert Williams—a comrade from Battle’s nights at the Marshall Hotel—was born in 1876 on the island of Nassau in the Bahamas. His father brought Williams to New York at the age of two and then to Riverside, California, where Williams graduated from the public high school. He let pass an ambition to become a civil engineer to go into show business. He began by playing the banjo in minstrel shows, moved into vaudeville, and teamed with fellow performer George Walker.
The duo, Williams and Walker, introduced New York to a two-stepping dance called the cakewalk. Their rendition, performed with two women, became a craze. In 1902, they made black theatrical history by opening a musical comedy in a Times Square theater. They took the hit to London and were invited to Buckingham Palace to entertain the Prince of Wales on his birthday.
J. C. Thomas was born in Houston on Christmas Day, 1863, and worked as a steamship cabin boy, eventually moving to New York at nineteen. While serving as a steward in private clubs, Thomas took a course in embalming and then opened a funeral parlor for African Americans in the Tenderloin, becoming the dominant funeral director in the region. He also invested in real estate, scoring a windfall when the Pennsylvania Railroad bought up the neighborhood for construction of a majestic Penn Station. His six-foot frame and Van Dyke beard reminded many of a Virginia planter.
Wheaton, Williams, and Thomas each put a hundred dollars on the bar at Doyle’s Saloon as a contribution to forming the Equity Congress, an organization dedicated to seeking social equality in practical terms. The proprietor, Doyle, a neighborhood Irishman whose first name is lost to time, also kicked in a hundred dollars, earning a place as the Equity Congress’ fourth founding member. Whether Doyle did so out of principle or simply to buy goodwill among a growing black customer base will never be known.
Wheaton, Williams, and Thomas set two goals. The first was to force open to blacks those areas of the civil service that had been closed: the New York City police and fire departments. The second was to persuade New York’s legislature and governor to establish a black National Guard regiment that would give the state’s African Americans entry into the US military.78
IN THE FIRST week of 1909, Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, and social worker Henry Moskowitz began planning to issue a “call” on the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. They recruited white progressives, including Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the New York Evening Post and grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and then they enlisted blacks, including W. E. B. Du Bois, the intellectual spirit of the modern civil rights movement, and Battle’s pastor, the Reverend Alexander Walters. On February 12, the group issued a manifesto that concluded: “We call upon all believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.”
Now seen as the founding event of the NAACP, the call was a ray of light for African Americans. Fully twenty years earlier, Reverend Walters had joined Timothy Thomas Fortune to form the National Afro-American League and had renewed the failed dream of founding a national civil rights organization after the US Supreme Court endorsed the concept of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson. But now the Lincoln’s birthday call of 1909 engendered fresh hope, because committed whites had for the first time joined the cause.
“I did not know personally Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary White Ovington or W. E. B. Du Bois but I rejoiced in their courageous action,” Battle told Hughes four decades later.
The call led to conferences in New York in 1909 and 1910, out of which the NAACP emerged. Battle closely followed developments. His readings, his associations with blacks of achievement, and his experiences in the superior and inferior worlds had schooled him in America’s racial crimes, from the slavery that had chained his parents to the ingrained prejudices that chartered less for his life and threatened to do the same for Jesse. A young man who was now drawn to action, he joined the nascent NAACP.
“I am a life member,” Battle said. “I have been a member since the organization was founded.”
AS THE NAACP was germinating, on the morning of March 30, 1909, the 20th Century Limited rolled into Grand Central carrying America’s most cheered and feared black man. Arthur John Johnson—Jack Johnson—was the newly crowned world heavyweight boxing champion, the first African American to win the title. Battle pulled rank for the privilege of carrying his bags.
Johnson was a figure of great fascination to the onetime bullyboy who now sparred in the gymnasium of St. Cyprian’s Church on San Juan Hill. The big man from Galveston, Texas—six feet tall, 190 pounds—punched with precision and evaded blows feinting backward. Much more, he had broken America’s most jealously guarded color line.
“I will never fight a Negro. I never have and never shall,” champion John L. Sullivan had pronounced in 1892, reinforcing a seemingly eternal understanding that blacks were welcome to fight blacks and could match up against whites in lesser bouts—but never for the heavyweight crown.
Those restrictions notwithstanding, boxing was the single professional sport in which African Americans had a shot at making a living. Some excelled, and white society grew wary. In 1895, New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana gathered the inchoate fear into words: “The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.”79
Johnson embodied Dana’s fevered imaginings. He won fight after fight until there was no one left to defeat—except the world champion, if ever the world champion would grant a match. Outside the ring, Johnson reveled in celebrity. Smiling through gold-capped teeth, he favored flashy clothing and drove fast cars. Most combustibly, he kept company with women, many of them white.
In time, Johnson would pay dearly for his “unforgivable blackness,” as Du Bois would famously write. Now, though, he had goaded titleholder Tommy Burns into a fight in Australia by branding Burns a coward.
“I’ll fight him even though he is a nigger,” Burns finally declared, and the Sydney Truth blared, “De Big Coon Am A-Comin.”
News stories made clear that white America vested combat between men of two skin colors with mythic significance. Something deep in its psyche dictated that the better race, rather than the better man, would win. Blacks, on the other hand, had rooted for a Johnson victory as proof that African Americans would succeed in any fie
ld if given the opportunity.
So, Battle had thrilled to read press accounts of the fight: Johnson knocking Burns to the canvas in the first and second rounds, Johnson drawing blood and closing Burns’s eye. Johnson taunting, “You punch like a woman, Tommy.” Johnson seeming to support Burns round after round so the pummeling could continue. The police entering the ring in the fourteenth to spare Burns further punishment. The referee declaring Johnson the victor. The crowd plunging into mournful silence.
Three months later, Johnson came to New York to entertain at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre with displays of athleticism and boxing prowess, doing five shows a day and earning $7,000 for a two-week run. When the 20th Century Limited pulled in, cavernous Grand Central was jammed by thousands of people, most of them black.
Red-topped cap on his head, Battle wove a hand truck down the platform. Tenderloin cabaret king Baron Wilkins, who had backed Johnson with money, led a welcoming committee. Well aware of both the man and his nightclub, Battle greeted Wilkins and stood by to serve.
Johnson disembarked into an uproarious swirl. Perhaps the only man there who was larger in height and weight than the champion, Battle pushed through the jostling crowd to collect Johnson’s bags and followed the entourage to the street. A dozen large open-topped touring automobiles waited at curbside. Johnson and Wilkins climbed into the lead car while a brass band played “Hail to the Chief.” They pulled away for a drive to Wilkins’s Little Savoy cabaret, where Johnson was accustomed to staying in a rose-and-gold-hued room. Battle watched them go, thinking about a black man who had upended the world.80
SIX MONTHS LATER, in August 1909, while the NAACP was still gelling, Battle saw the drive for national activism merge with rising calls to integrate the New York Police Department. First, in the pulpit of the Bethel AME Church, the Reverend Reverdy Ransom urged the appointment of black police officers in a sermon that illustrates how constricted American racial attitudes were. He declared that African Americans belonged in the NYPD not as a matter of equal opportunity but to better crack down on the misconduct of blacks newly arriving in the city from the rural South. “We who are continuously denouncing the whites should show our honesty, broad-mindedness and sincere desire to see that the laws are not broken by being as equally willing to condemn and seek to bring to justice the disreputable members of the race,” Ransom said.81
Fortune’s Age played Ransom’s sermon on the front page—only now Timothy Thomas Fortune was gone from the great paper of his founding. He had succumbed to a problem with drink, and there was a new force in the ownership: Booker T. Washington had covertly invested in the Age with the aim of countering rising criticism of his leadership in other organs of the black press. Washington installed as editor Frederick Randolph Moore, the son of a slave mother and a white father who had started his career as a US Treasury Department messenger. Moore accompanied the Age’s report on Ransom’s sermon with an editorial whose thoughts were more apologetic than acidic: “The resentment of the loafing Negroes of 127th street Sunday afternoon against the policeman performing his duty was entirely uncalled for and vicious. The Negro has copied this method of resisting the law from the foreign colonies in New York and it is to be vigorously condemned by every respectable and race-loving Negro.”82
A week after Ransom’s call, congregants packed the pews of Battle’s Mother AME Zion Church, now moved from Greenwich Village to a house of worship at the corner of West Eighty-Ninth Street and Columbus Avenue, for an appearance by New York’s second-highest elected official. Standing in for a vacationing mayor, Board of Aldermen President Patrick McGowan announced that he supported opening the police force to African Americans. The Age reported: “The Acting Mayor declared that he long had been of the opinion that Negro police in certain sections would end the clashes between the police and the blacks and, therefore, favored having Negro police.”
Moore’s approving editorial was vested with wishful thinking: “The Negro has had a deep and deterring suspicion that politics play the important part in the selection of the policemen. Now to be assured by the city government that the Negro passing the examination will be treated with absolute fairness will doubtless encourage numbers of qualified Negroes to try for the force.”83
At this point, a new figure stepped to the fore with an appeal to Age readers. As a lieutenant of Tammany Hall Democratic boss Richard Croker, Edward E. “Chief” Lee was the city’s most powerful African American political operative. Before the turn of the century, Croker had realized that persuading blacks to vote for Democrats rather than for Republicans, still seen as members of the party of Lincoln, could be crucial to gaining an edge. He promised to “place at least one colored man in every department of the city government,” and he installed Lee as head of a patronage-dispensing Tammany club called United Colored Democracy.
On September 2, 1909, Moore’s front-page headline challenged: “Chief Edward E. Lee Tells The Age That Negroes Refuse to Qualify for Positions—September 11, Last Day for Filing Applications.”
The story went on: “Chief Lee contends that the absence of negroes from the police force of Greater New York is not due to color prejudice existing in the Police Department, but because in the past members of the race have been backward and unwilling to take the examination. Within the past four years but two Negro applicants have taken the examination and they failed to prove equal to the test.”84
AMID THIS SURGE of advocacy, Battle decided to be the one. He set his mind on joining the New York Police Department, fortress of a closed white circle guarded by clubs and guns. Decades later, he portrayed his decision as one of routine economics: with a growing family, he saw no chance for advancement as a redcap and no hope of a pension. He also knew that he was smarter, better read, stronger, spoke clearer English, and knew far more about New York and America than many of the Irish cops he encountered on the street. If they could do the job, so could he.
The police department’s nightstick racism frightened Florence, but she gave her blessing to a job that, by rights, should have been anyone’s to claim. Battle then raised the possibility with a handful of friends. They predicted defeat and counseled against fighting a lost cause. Wary of failure, he retreated into privacy. He chose to be just another applicant and not to stand out as the black man who was daring to try for the police department. At all costs, he wanted to avoid having it known that he had washed out. Hundreds of men fell below the hiring mark every time the department replenished the ranks. That was expected. But he would become a black man who wasn’t good enough, confirming what so many whites said—that blacks just weren’t good enough.
The test was competitive. Ranking toward the top on the hiring list would be crucial. Among the exam topics were the Penal Law, the Code of Criminal Courts Act, the Dance Hall Law, the Civil Rights Law, the Education Law, the General Business Law, general city ordinances, arithmetic, and expertise in getting around the city. A good memory was a big plus.85
Would-be police officers typically took classes at the Delehanty Institute, a school that readied candidates for civil service tests. Battle found his way there, only to be barred from admission. Director Michael J. Delehanty would not allow a black man into a course for the police department, nor would his white students. Except for Florence, Battle was on his own.
He told Hughes, who wrote:
I bought a book, “How to Become a Patrolman,” purchased from “The Police Chronicle” for fifty cents. My new book indicated other volumes, lists and useful materials which I secured. I used every available moment of free time for study. I carried my books in my pocket while on duty at Grand Central and I spent most of my lunch hour concentrating on them. After I had swept up behind the horses at the cabstand and finished my other cleaning duties, I read while waiting trains. By the time I got home in the evenings it would often be after eight o’clock. As soon as supper was over, I would tackle my studies again. I sometimes fell asleep in my chair after a hard day’s work.
My
greatest difficulty was in memorizing addresses, streets, place names and locations. For memory training, my wife used to read to me paragraphs from newspapers and, an hour or two later, I would see how much I could repeat to her word for word.
At the age of twenty-six, Battle strode into the test center on the appointed day in 1910. He was alone among 637 white faces. They could not turn him away because blacks were entitled by law to sit for civil service tests. At home afterward, Battle told Florence that he seemed to know the material. They would have to wait to find out whether he had known enough. When the city published the roster of results, Battle found his name at the 199th place—in the top one-third of the pack, easily high enough to be called for the mandatory physical.
He had work to do. Knowing better than to report as just another rookie, Battle turned for advice to the men who knew what it was like to be black in a police department. Wiley Grenada Overton, Philip W. Hadley, John W. Lee, and Moses P. Cobb told Battle that being a good cop would not be good enough. They told him that he would have to be better than the best white cop. And they told him that he would have to weather mistreatment with silent grace, because the department had too many ways to get a man.
While Battle waited to be called for his physical, The Reverend Reverdy Ransom made a fresh push to open the department. A new president of the Board of Aldermen, John Puroy Mitchell, had stepped in as acting chief executive while Mayor William Gaynor recuperated from an attempted assassination. Ransom won an audience with Mitchell.
“We presented a request to him first, to appoint some Negro policemen, not only on regular patrol duty, but also to the city parks,” Ransom recalled in a memoir. “Mayor Mitchell throughout the whole interview was both evasive and not committal, and finally disgusted, I said to him, ‘Mr. Mayor, it looks like you refuse to appoint Negroes to police duty, even in the parks of the city. Is it because you are afraid they might spit on the grass and kill it?’”86
One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Page 8
