He lay without speaking while the officer noted that Battle had never complained and always did more than his share of the work. The officer also said that some of the precinct’s cops were starting to regret his silencing.
“I thought, these boys haven’t got such a bad heart after all; they’re just a little weak-kneed, that’s all,” Battle concluded with great generosity.
FLORENCE BROUGHT HAPPY NEWS. Once more, she was pregnant. Almost four years after tiny Florence D’Angeles fell prey to cholera infantum, Battle looked forward to welcoming a new life into the family. He was twenty-nine, Florence was as yet only twenty-three, Jesse was six.
The baby was due by Christmas. Florence’s oldest sister, Elizabeth, came from Virginia to help care for the infant. The holiday passed. Then, finally, while Battle was on duty and with Dr. Roberts at her side, Florence gave birth at home on January 17, 1913, to Charline Elizabeth Battle. Christened at Mother AME Zion Church, she was Battle’s pride from the start.
“My daughter, Charline Elizabeth, was such a pretty born child that I bought for her a special rubber-tired baby carriage with an elegant hood,” he wrote. “In this I used to push her all over Harlem, accepting for myself compliments paid the child’s beauty.”
AROUND THIS TIME, a young man by the name of Robert Holmes stepped forward to follow Battle onto the police force. Square-shouldered, stocky, and athletic, Holmes lived with his parents, Henry and Ella, a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. Like Battle, he was a member of the black Elks.
Henry and Ella had brought their son north from South Carolina around the turn of the twentieth century.15 Settling in Harlem with hope, they had taken their places among the whites whose tolerance was growing thin. Now, Henry was forty-four years old and afflicted with deteriorating lungs. Ella, who was forty, was losing her eyesight while eking out a living as a laundress. Fearing for his parents’ futures, Holmes was drawn to the police department’s pay and benefits.16 After the Delehanty Institute denied his admission, he studied for the test by correspondence course. Battle happily helped Holmes master the rules, laws, and procedures he would face on the exam. In shared purpose, they became friends, each understanding that this was the way it had to be, one becoming two, two becoming four, accepting the indignities that had to be accepted until they were large enough in number to refuse to accept any more.
Holmes came through with flying colors. So, on August 25, 1913, Battle celebrated Holmes’s appointment as the department’s second black officer. He was proud to have opened the door and was buoyed in knowing that more young black men appeared to be coming behind him. They sought him out, and he gave all the guidance he could. Then, abruptly, Commissioner Waldo propelled Battle to a new milestone.
To root out the corruption that came with excessive familiarity between cops and the public, Waldo ordered every patrolman, sergeant, and lieutenant transferred from three Manhattan precincts, and he replaced them with freshly promoted superior officers and five hundred newly sworn cops. The West Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse was among those cleaned out. Waldo dispatched Battle to Harlem.
The shift marked the department’s first venture into assigning a black officer to patrol a community with a substantial black population. Waldo’s motivations are hidden to history, but there is one indication that African American leaders pressured City Hall to establish a black police presence in Harlem. In a memoir, the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen recounted lobbying the mayor and police commissioner to assign Battle to the community. Cullen was the founder of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and the adoptive father of Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance wunderkind poet like Hughes. The Reverend Cullen recalled that the Reverend Charles Martin, a prominent fellow black church leader, and John B. Nail, the respected black saloonkeeper, joined in the cause. Misspelling Battle’s name, Cullen stated: “We succeeded in having the first colored policeman, who was Policeman Samuel Battles, appointed to Harlem.”17
Battle bid farewell to Abraham Stewart, who had shared the flag loft, and to Jimmy Garvey, who had paid no heed to the conspiracy of silence. Garvey was newly married and was ever more known as a cop who went the extra mile.18 Battle wished his friend well and promised to stay in touch. His last duty on West Sixty-Eighth Street was to square Holmes away on a lonely inaugural assignment. “Holmes was given my squad and post,” Battle wrote. “I gave him my bed and mattress and he occupied the flag loft as I did.”19
The stationhouse covering Harlem was at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. To many longtime white residents he was an “invader,” but, with the influx of blacks growing by the day, Battle’s fellow officers discovered that he was useful.
“They needed me as much as I needed them and sometimes more because some of them were on posts where there were all Negroes,” he remembered. “Then, too, this story had gone out that, ‘He’s a decent fellow,’ and they began to treat me nicely and spoke to me and asked me to join their organizations and things of that kind.”
No more an on-duty pariah, Battle took obvious satisfaction both at being treated more like a peer and at watching Holmes surmount isolation in grand style. They shared pride and amazement at an episode in which officers fired their pistols in the cavalier way of the time. Battle remembered for Hughes:
Holmes first came to the attention of the press on election morning, November 1913. Before dawn that day a herd of short-horn Oregon steers escaped from the New York Stock Company’s yards on the North River. Eight of them tore through 59th Street, scattering in different directions as far as Fifth Avenue.
They terrorized the town on both sides of Central Park. A policeman on 59th Street tried to flag some of the steers down. Failing, he and several other cops commandeered two taxies and with drawn revolvers tried to overtake them individually, shooting as they came in range.
What sounded like a gangster’s ballet along Fifth Avenue aroused the guests in both the Gotham and the St. Regis Hotels. A waiter at the St. Regis rushed out and was shot in the ankle. A night watchman removing a red lantern from the pavement in 55th Street was hit between the eyes and killed. One steer tried to enter Whitelaw Reid’s house, and was shot a few doors away in front of the home of Cardinal Farley.
Meanwhile, along Central Park West, one of the wildest of the animals trampled Patrolman Kiernan, overturned a delivery wagon, and caused panic among early-rising women and children on the streets. Officer Holmes, reporting for eight a.m. duty in the sector, immediately went in fleet-footed pursuit of the beast. He lit in the park.
As the steer turned its head to look at him, Holmes grabbed the animal’s nostrils with his right hand, shutting off its wind. Then with a ju-jitsu twist of one of the horns, he threw the beast to the ground and he held him until his feet were tied. This was the only animal returned to the stockyards intact.
The apartment that had brought Battle’s old friend Chief Williams from Grand Central to Harlem had grown small. He and Lucy had added a fourth child, and after pumping iron, their oldest son, Wesley, had become a broad-backed, barrel-chested, thick-armed fifteen-year-old. The family needed more room. The chief told Battle that he was moving to the rural expanses of the Bronx, to Williamsbridge, where there was enough wildlife and wooded territory to allow for hunting. Although remote, the area was convenient for the Chief because the New York Central had a rail line to Grand Central. The Battles bid the Williamses farewell.
The chief and his family again rented space in an overwhelmingly white community, and Wesley again took a desk among white children in a public school. Fewer than a dozen African American families lived in the neighborhood. Monthly, they gathered in a clubhouse to discuss how to help their children advance in life. They drummed in that young blacks had only three paths to success: as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or in other professions; as entrepreneurs with independent capital; or in civil service positions. The chief made sure that, just a few years from manhood, Wesley heard the message in the hope
that he would act accordingly. But, headstrong and fixated on bodybuilding, Wesley had his own ideas.
WOODROW WILSON WAS inaugurated the twenty-eighth president of the United States on March 4, 1913, with black Americans looking forward to his administration. He was an unlikely vessel for hope. Wilson’s heritage was in Virginia. As president of Princeton University, he had discouraged black applicants. As a historian, he had depicted the Ku Klux Klan as an understandable post–Civil War attempt at white self-defense.
W. E. B. Du Bois and Reverend Alexander Walters had met with the candidate during the campaign. After Walters explained that shifting fifty thousand black votes away from the Republicans—the party of Lincoln—to Democrat Wilson could be decisive, Wilson gave Walters a written vow that he had an “earnest wish to see justice done in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling.” Du Bois then gave Wilson a wholehearted endorsement, helping him to secure unprecedented backing among black voters.
Disappointment came swiftly. While the Equity Congress pressed to open New York’s civil service to blacks, Wilson permitted the start of Jim Crow segregation in the federal workforce. Still worse, he spurned pleas to condemn lynching. With Southern Democrats flying the banner of states’ rights, Wilson dismissed the killing tide as a matter to be dealt with locally, not federally.
Meanwhile, in Harlem, white residents continued to struggle desperately to bar blacks through restrictive covenants. As the Age described the documents: “The property owners bind themselves not to allow any part of their premises to be occupied in whole or in part by any Negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon of either sex either as a tenant, guest, boarder, or occupant in any other capacity, way or manner. Tenants of each house or flat may not employ more than ‘one male and one female Negro or two Negresses, mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons to perform the duties ordinarily performed by a household servant.’”20
The Equity Congress voted to explore whether such a covenant was legal under the law of the day. No one was sure, and frustration was all the more intense because the group had made little progress on its founding goals. It had hoped to open the police department to African Americans—and so far, the black ranks had grown to only two members. Similarly, it had hoped to open the fire department, but no volunteers had stepped forward for the mission. Everyone recognized that firefighters would be even more hostile than cops, because firefighters shared living and eating quarters for days on end. About the only bright spot for the Equity Congress was passage of legislation authorizing a black National Guard regiment.
After two years of lobbying, the group held what the Age described as “a big jollification meeting.”21 Charles Fillmore, the once lonely colonel of the provisional regiment, had by now enlisted one thousand men into his unofficial brigade. Many were eager to join a fully sanctioned National Guard unit. They never got the chance. The regiment’s champions learned that there was a far distance between authorizing a unit and activating a unit. The governor withheld the activation order in accord with prevailing belief that blacks neither merited the honor of military service nor could be trusted to bear arms.22
* * *
AS 1913 CLOSED, Battle shepherded a third young African American onto the force. The department assigned Jasper Rhodes to the West Forty-Seventh Street stationhouse in the heart of the wild Tenderloin. “As the first Negro there, he was given a rough road to go for a while,” Battle recalled. “Jasper would fight at the drop of a hat, so he soon gained a certain respect after his initial hazing was over.”
Battle, Holmes, and Rhodes concentrated both on exceeding all the demands of the job and on asserting simple social equality. Battle became the anchor on the department’s tug-of-war team and, with Rhodes, he attended the police summer camp in Brooklyn. Twice, Battle won “the fat man’s race,” a hundred-yard dash for men over 225 pounds and, he remembered, “Jasper always won the white cops’ money at dice.”
Clearly, Battle had the most desirable posting. Not only was he respected by Harlem’s growing African American population, his fellow officers increasingly appreciated the value of his dark skin.
“I recall one Negro girl refusing to be arrested by Patrolman Anton Strausner, crying, ‘I don’t want no white police to arrest me. Send for Battle to arrest me.’ She appealed to a passerby, ‘Don’t let this white man arrest me,’” Battle remembered.
About that time I arrived and Strausner turned her over to me. It was a good thing for a hostile crowd had gathered.
So bitter was Harlem’s resentment at having no officers of their own color in the area that, before my transfer there, there had been instances of Negroes taking a prisoner away from a white policeman. When I was sent to Harlem, I inherited not only the ordinary problems that the guardians of the law have everywhere, but the added problems of a racial situation made acute by the American color line. But to Harlemites, even one Negro patrolman seemed better than none.
BRIGHT AS HE WAS, the Chief’s son, Wesley, left school at the age of sixteen after finishing the eighth grade. Hours spent sculpting his every muscle group had proven more attractive than homework and had delayed the young man’s progress. Years later Wesley would joke: “I was so large that the custodian of the school went to my principal in my last term and said that if I was not graduated he was going to quit his job. He said he was sick and tired of raising my desk and chair so that my legs would fit under the desk. So the principal must have felt that his custodian was more necessary than I to the school. That is how I was graduated.”
Still, Wesley remembered his teachers as “true friends” who had “endeavored to guide me correctly,” most of all warning “that a criminal record would bar me from a civil service position and to a Negro that is a calamity.” Wesley would place one teacher in particular among the people “who played a most important part in my life and fortified me for the battle that was to come.” This Mr. Freund “patiently counseled me at a very critical and emotional period of my life,” he would recall.
Finished with education and starting what was to become a life’s relationship with sixteen-year-old Margaret Ford, Wesley needed a job. Since he was too young to hope for appointment to a government post, New York offered only two options: he could seek the menial employment of a boy or he could sign up for dangerous labor with an employer none too concerned about race or age. Choosing the latter, Wesley knocked boldly on the door of a construction company that was digging a subway tunnel under the East River from the foot of Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Flynn and O’Rourke relied on the sweat of newly arrived European immigrants and African Americans. Mary White Ovington wrote: “New York demands strong, unskilled laborers. To some she pays a large wage, and Negroes have gone in numbers into the excavations under the rivers, though a lingering death may prove the end of their two and a half or perhaps six or seven dollar a day job.”23
Wesley’s physique was ideal for working with heavy loads and heavy machinery. A foreman put him on a gang in a dark, dank shaft that smelled of grease, stone dust, and the residue of explosives. Near the Manhattan shore, the tunnel bored through bedrock. Dynamiters set off charges drilled into a stone face. Then, sand hogs, as tunnel workers are still known today, hauled away the chunked rock. Tradition, superstition, or wise practice forbade whistling or singing for fear that musical vibrations could dislodge stone overhead. To minimize the peril, scalers—Wesley among them—poked the newly exposed tunnel top with twenty-foot-long steel rods to break free unstable portions. It took speed to dodge the collapsing rock—more speed than some men proved to have. In that era, roughly forty workers died every year in all forms of accidents while building or tunneling for the subways.24
Closer to the Brooklyn shore, the tunnel dome consisted of the riverbed’s sandy bottom. Here, construction engineers filled the shaft with compressed air to hold the silt in place and keep river water from draining through. Too little pressure and the sand would collapse; too m
uch pressure and the air would rupture the sand upward, in both cases flooding the tunnel.25 When such a blowout had occurred in an earlier tunnel, a sandhog named Richard Creegan attempted to plug the fissure with a straw bale that was on hand for such an emergency. The air pressure sucked Creegan up into the hole, shot him through the riverbed and the river, and jettisoned him into the air. Amazingly, Creegan survived. Not so three men who were sucked into a blowout in Wesley’s tunnel.26
Two weeks after Wesley started work, a New York State Labor Department doctor visited the site. A foreman ordered Wesley to the surface with the warning that the doctor likely wanted to verify that he was of age to work in the tunnel. On the way up, Wesley prepared to lie.
“How old are you?” the doctor demanded.
“Eighteen,” Wesley answered, guessing that to be the legal limit.
“Don’t you know that you cannot work in the tunnel unless you are twenty-one years of age?” the doctor asked. “Now I am going to repeat the question. How old are you.”
“Twenty-one,” Wesley responded, and back down into the hole he went.
Soon enough, the grueling work in miserable conditions convinced him to study for a civil service exam. Meanwhile, Chief Williams pressed his independent-minded son to leave the high risk of injury or death he faced every day. Finally, after Wesley turned seventeen, the Chief pulled strings to secure a redcap’s job at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s magnificent new terminal across town from Grand Central. There, Wesley found toting luggage “equivalent to a four year college course in humanities.” Off hours, he and Margaret fell into young love.
THE WORLD CHANGED on June 28, 1914.
For reasons obscure to Americans, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife. In short order, Europe cascaded into World War I. None of it seemed the business of the United States, and no group felt more remote from the fighting than African Americans. Only in hindsight, is it clear that the war shaped their destiny and American race relations.
One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Page 12
