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

by Browne, Arthur

  Unfailingly, Battle encouraged his fellow officers and Wesley to believe that they could secure fairer treatment. Now, the significance of Battle’s membership in Enright’s personal fief was profound. Headquarters duty was as distant from their posts as the peak of Everest is from a valley floor. More, they all knew that Battle was going to work for a hard man who played for advantage.

  When Battle got the call in 1920, Tammany had shifted to less obvious, more lucrative corruption. Charles Francis Murphy, a former saloon owner, was now boss. He designated trusted deputy Tom Foley to be the machine’s liaison to the underworld, and he relied on Arnold Rothstein, a genius of a gangster who participated in fixing the 1919 World Series, to serve as the primary contact between crime and politics.

  Murphy conducted business with legitimate interests in “The Scarlet Room of Mystery,” a private area of Delmonico’s Restaurant, so named by the press due to the color of its plush upholstery. As recalled in M. R. Werner’s history, Tammany Hall, it was “Murphy’s great and lasting contribution to the philosophy of Tammany Hall that he taught the organization that more money can be made by a legal contract than by petty blackmail.”

  Enright was of like mind. He came by money with polish. A Wall Street broker bought five thousand shares of stock in a petroleum company with his own funds, sold the stock five days later, and, for reasons never credibly explained, cut a check to Enright for the resulting $12,000 profit. The broker also purchased a Stutz automobile for Enright’s wife. Meanwhile, on an annual salary of $7,000, Enright found the resources to deposit $100,000 into bank accounts.16

  Battle sized up what he was getting into without illusions. As excited as he was, the Special Service Division loomed as treacherous territory. He would roam the city in plainclothes, enforcing the law where he was told to or where he would have to divine the right side of an invisible line between an arrest that brought commendations and an arrest for which there would be hell to pay.

  Battle’s commanding officers gave him a desk and put him to work. At home, he told Florence, Wesley, and the Chief that Enright seemed a surprisingly fair-minded man, and he gained confidence that he would be measured by his performance. “I was assigned to cases without discrimination,” he said years later.

  Battle discovered great fun in being a cop who went about armed both with a gun and with political power—at times with orders from a mayor given to using the police to torment enemies. In one episode, Hylan mobilized the Special Service Division after learning that the Republican Club in his Brooklyn neighborhood was going to hold a stag party. “I was a Democrat, too, so I had no ardent objections to carrying out his orders,” Battle told Hughes in recalling a raid that is quaint in its moralism, wild and wooly in the ease with which Battle fired his weapon, and wonderfully narrated by the poet:

  When I arrived at the Club, the midnight stag party was going full blast. Beer was flowing. Smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The band was blaring. In the terminology of jazz, “the joint was jumping!”

  About five hundred men were feasting their eyes on three young ladies advertised as Little Egypt, Baby Doll and Fatima. These artistes were moving to the music with sufficient vigor to almost cause the walls to shake. As the music grew hotter, egged on by the men who threw dollar bills on the stage, the young ladies began to shed their garments, piece by piece.

  Each time a female garment fell, the men would cry approval, whistle, catcall and shout lewd remarks. As the music swelled in volume, one young woman threw her brassiere into the crowd and caused a stampede. Nobody got the brassiere. It was torn to ribbons in the melee. Excitement mounted as the same young lady stepped out of her step-ins.

  By now, the other dancers were vying with her in divesting themselves of lingerie. Finally all three of the dancers were prancing around the stage in nothing but silk stockings. At that point, I took a pistol from my holster and fired a couple of shots through the window—my signal to the detectives outside. The shots, the broken glass, the pistol flash, and the screams that went up caused pandemonium. But every exit was covered.

  Those who jumped out of windows leaped directly into the arms of policemen. Those who ran—ran into a cordon of cops. Those who fainted were carried out headfirst. A few men did faint. The police department was not prepared for so large a catch. Since a single patrol wagon would not hold more than fifteen or twenty men, we had to telephone all the stations in Brooklyn for the loan of their wagons. On the way to the precincts, the Black Marias had to pass Mayor Hylan’s home.

  “Every time you go by the Mayor’s house with a load, clang your gongs,” I told the drivers of the patrol wagons. They did—all night long.

  BATTLE’S HEADY DAYS of freewheeling police work slipped into eclipse when Florence noticed that three-year-old Teddy had a cough. Parents of today would hear little cause for worry in a three-year-old’s rasping. Not so mothers and fathers in 1920. Teddy’s jeopardy became clear when he gasped for air with a highly pitched sound, the signature of whooping cough.

  The New York Health Department recorded 8,873 cases of whooping cough that year, while judging that large numbers escaped official count. The disease proved fatal for one of every fifteen afflicted children. A doctor took charge of Teddy on August 12, recommending the standard practices for helping a gasping child: mustard plasters on chest and back, forehead ice packs, and steam inhalations so primitive as to include traces of benzene or turpentine. After six days, Battle heard a child’s last breath for a second time.17 Gloom descended on the household. Florence was inconsolable. There was the room in which Teddy had died and there was the bed. Battle thought about taking her away, not for a vacation, but to live somewhere else.

  * * *

  HE HAD a place in mind: Harlem in its day of glorious promise.

  Propelled by the Great Migration, New York’s black population grew by two-thirds between 1910 and 1920, from 91,709 to 152,467 people, with more than half drawn to live in Harlem.18 In front of Battle’s eyes, critical mass produced a militantly proud, magnificently optimistic culture.

  On Sundays, there was religion. People poured from their homes unified in expressing faith, some in storefronts with little more than a preacher, a Bible, and chairs, many in grand houses of worship that had been sold off by whites. Church-going could be an all-day affair. After the readings, preaching, and singing, the churches became social centers. Playing multiple roles, they were both “a stabilizing force” and “an arena for the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.19

  Sunday afternoons were taken up by The Stroll, and so, too, evenings when the weather was right. The place was Seventh Avenue, a boulevard of shops, restaurants, apartment buildings, and nightclubs. Up one sidewalk and then back down the other, people socialized with old friends and new acquaintances. Someone who knew someone always had word about something that had happened back home, and everyone on this “Great Black Way” shared Harlem’s news and gossip.20

  Some days the talk was of Paul Robeson. Still years from acclaim as an actor and singer, Robeson at the age of twenty-two was already a Renaissance man. He had attended Rutgers University as the school’s third black student; had won fifteen varsity letters for football, basketball, baseball, and track; had twice been named a football All American; and had graduated as class valedictorian. He passed the time on Seventh Avenue while studying at Columbia University Law School and earning a living teaching Latin and playing professional football.21

  Often the talk was of doers who were Battle’s generational contemporaries.

  Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, age thirty-three, was building his ill-fated United Negro Improvement Association into the country’s largest black nationalist movement with the message, “We are striking homeward toward Africa to make her the big black Republic.”

  Fabulously wealthy A’Lelia Walker, age thirty-five, was running America’s dominant bu
siness selling hair-care products to blacks. She had taken over the company on the death of its founder, her mother, Madame C. J. Walker, and she was soon to be renowned as a lavish hostess of the Harlem Renaissance.

  Later to achieve a landmark in labor organizing with formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, later to pressure President Harry Truman into integrating the US military, later to conceive of the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, age thirty-one, was urging radical socialism as the path to empowerment. He and a partner had founded the Messenger, “The Only Magazine Of Scientific Radicalism In The World Published by Negroes.”

  This being the takeoff of the Roaring Twenties, the neighborhood pulsed also with new cultural energy. Women cast off presumed propriety to wear their hair and their skirts shorter, so that, by one telling, a skirt sometimes “almost rivaled the bathing suit.”22 Saloons proliferated. Nightclub owners who had been tops in the Tenderloin found success in the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, Baron Wilkins’s Exclusive Club, and more. They provided drink and the best of song and dance at a time when a convergence of talent and creativity was remaking American popular music.

  Jervis Anderson, author of This Was Harlem, encapsulated the leap forward: “Four musical styles appear to have met in Harlem by 1920 and to have influenced the emergence of jazz in the community: ragtime, stride piano, blues and some of the early Dixieland sounds of New Orleans. But until about 1922 the dominant forces in Harlem music were the blues singers and stride pianists.”23

  In the ferment, an upstart newspaper was giving the venerable New York Age a run for its readers. Where the Age was a sober broadsheet with a national vision, the Amsterdam News told the people of Harlem what the people of Harlem were doing in a tabloidlike voice. The paper bannered headlines like “Murdered Man a Bigamist” and chronicled ordinary events that had a touch of the extraordinary. Readers of a feature called “Items of Social Interest” learned, among endless other things, that Mrs. Harry Reeves, a member of the Citizen’s Christmas Cheer Committee, was hosting a six-course dinner, that friends had thrown a surprise birthday party for Mrs. Laura E. Williams, and that twelve-year-old Clarence Propet had won a piano competition.24

  Optimism trumped the social ills brought north by ill-educated Southerners, rent gouging by white landlords, and the low wages and closed doors that were the lot of most African Americans. Journalist George Schuyler recalled the era as a time “when everything was booming and joyful and gay.”25

  The buoyancy of 1920 made great things seem possible, and they certainly did seem so to James Weldon Johnson, who wrote in the Age that year: “Have you ever stopped to think what the future of Harlem will be? It will be a city within a city. It will be the greatest Negro city in the world within the greatest city in the world.”26

  And Battle, age thirty-seven, wanted to be there for it.

  AROUND THE SAME TIME, nineteen-year-old Langston Hughes succumbed to Harlem’s allure as he stood on the brink of adulthood after a lonely coming-of-age. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, he grew up in predominantly white areas of Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio, knowing both antiblack bigotry and the friendship of whites. His parental bonds were, to put it mildly, frayed.

  Early on, Hughes’s father, James Hughes, abandoned his wife, his only child, and the America that denied him opportunity, and moved across the border to establish a successful life in Mexico. He was a man who scorned the poor, especially the black poor, seeming to view them as “lazy, undeserving cowards,” in the judgment of Hughes’s biographer Rampersad. Langston himself would write: “My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.”27

  Hughes’s mother, Carrie Langston, was a flighty woman who dreamed of a show business career and who often left her solitary son in the care of a loving neighborhood couple, or with his grandmother, a reserved woman who instilled in Hughes tales of ancestors challenging the white world’s domination. She spoke most stirringly of her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had ridden off from their home in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1859 to join white radical abolitionist John Brown’s assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. For more than a half-century, Hughes’s grandmother wore the bullet-shredded shawl that Lewis Leary had worn at his death, often using the cloth as a nighttime coverlet for her young grandson.28

  Shortly after graduating from high school, Hughes read the stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant and credited them with making him “really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them—even after I was dead.”29

  In the summer of 1920, at the age of eighteen, he wrote his first poetic landmark, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, a work that captured the sweep of black history in thirteen lines. Audaciously adopting the personage of his race, he opened:

  I’ve known rivers:

  I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

  flow of human blood in human veins.

  Then he told of bathing in the Euphrates River, building a hut near the Congo, looking upon the Nile, and listening to the Mississippi when Abraham Lincoln traveled to New Orleans before concluding:

  I’ve known rivers:

  Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  Planning to study at Columbia University, Hughes arrived in New York City by ship from Mexico, where in 1921 he had left a father he admitted to hating.

  “There is no thrill in all the world like entering, for the first time, New York harbor,—coming in from the flat monotony of the sea to this rise of dreams and beauty,” he wrote four years later. “New York is truly the dream city,—city of the towers near God, city of hopes and visions, of spires seeking in the windy air loveliness and perfection.”30

  Hughes headed north to the subway stop at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, the very stop where Battle had protected the white police officer from the angry mob. “I went up the stairs and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again,” he would remember.31

  In that moment, Hughes had unknowingly reached fertile ground for an unprecedented African American literary movement. Already, Jamaica-born Claude McKay had written poems of powerful emotion, none having more impact than his 1919 Red Summer sonnet, “If We Must Die.” Already, Countee Cullen, an orphaned teenager who had been taken in by the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, was writing lyrical poems as editor of the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School. His “I Have a Rendezvous With Life” had topped a national competition.

  After completing two semesters at Columbia and resolving never to return, Hughes was repeatedly rebuffed in a job search because he was black. Over and over, he heard words to the effect, “But I didn’t advertise for a colored boy.” He wound up as a farm laborer on Staten Island, and then he landed, like Chief Williams and so many other young African Americans, at Charles Thorley’s House of Flowers. There, he delivered orders costing more than a month’s salary to the likes of the actress Marion Davies on her yacht and to the Roosevelts at Oyster Bay. He lasted a month before clashing with Thorley over showing up late one day.

  Daring to believe that he could become America’s first self-supporting black writer, Hughes signed on as a crewman on freighters that took him to Africa and Europe. The journeys opened his eyes to the continent of his ancestors and allowed him to vagabond through cities like Paris. On his travels, he wrote poetry that drew notice at home, while new voices of the black urban masses gathered in New York.

  Destitute and hoping to work his way home from Genoa, he roamed the wharves at the age of twenty-two and wrote another of his masterpieces. The eighteen lines vibrantly opened with the poem’s title, “I, too, sing America,” and locked in his dream of being read even after death.

  * * *

  JUST THEN, AMERICA was embarked
on the mad misadventure of Prohibition and the 1920s were starting to roar. On January 17, 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect, the dry forces set out to prove they could drain even drenched New York through criminal punishments. New Yorkers were of a different mind. They drank as they always drank, only in larger quantities and in clandestine bars that came to be called speakeasies. “Be it known to the trusting and the unsuspecting, New York City is almost wide open today,” the Times reported in a May 1920 story headlined “Making a Joke of Prohibition in New York City.”32

  Congress had expected that local police would help enforce America’s only attempt to use the Constitution to limit rather than to protect personal freedom, but Congress could not require locals like Enright to adopt federal law as a mandate of their own. Judging him to be insufficiently enthusiastic, the “drys” persuaded the rural politicians of New York’s legislature to write a state prohibition statute onto the books.

  Enright centralized enforcement in the Special Service Division. Only the division chief would decide which speakeasies to target. Enright promised two benefits: local cops would have fewer opportunities for graft, and the department’s vice squad would apply special expertise to clamping down. Concealed in the strategy was a third goal: with the division firmly in hand, Enright could enforce Prohibition to the extent acceptable in a drinking city—and he could exempt those parties who had the right connections.

  Cynicism was well grounded. Aggressive or not, the mission of stanching alcohol sales was doomed, its fate sealed all the tighter as New Yorkers got into a partying mood. There was fun to be had in the brighter time that followed the war, fun to be had as livelier entertainment—these new movies, this new jazz, these new dances—energized popular culture, fun to be had as young women broke the shackles of sexual propriety, fun to be had in a round of cheer, or two or four or six or more.