BORN ON MANHATTAN’S East Side, Hines was the son of a police and fire department blacksmith. He captained a Tammany district that stretched along the Hudson into West Harlem. Refined manners put him in good stead with the business elite, while a gracious personality earned him the affection of the working class. He arranged for patronage jobs, fixed traffic tickets, made sure no one went hungry, and kicked off summers by hosting as many as twenty-five thousand people to hot dogs, soda, and ice cream in Central Park.
Hines was a rogue, too. He had mutually beneficial relationships with gangsters. They delivered money; he delivered services available only through the good offices of Tammany’s most powerful chief. He had only to make a phone call to secure protection or inflict punishment. Both were crucial to Wilkins’s cabaret ambitions, as well as to his determination never to take a fall again. When Prohibition dawned, they also helped propel his Exclusive Club to the top in the remaking of Harlem as New York’s illicit fun zone.
Rebellion against temperance brought nightclubbing there to exuberant life. Hip and chic whites arrived late at night in limousines to let loose in a dark town pulsing with daring rhythms. Finely dressed and carrying fat wallets, they crowded into hot spots that catered to partiers from a hostile culture and that were off limits to regular folks. Few Harlem residents ever stepped through the doors of the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, Small’s Paradise, or Wilkins’s Exclusive Club and into a universe where blacks entertained laughing, dancing, drinking revelers who had little interest in the afflictions of the lives around them.
To enhance the aura that his club was “exclusive,” Wilkins limited admission to whites and light-skinned blacks, with the exception of darker-toned celebrities. A young woman whose name was Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louisa Virginia Smith was at the center of the action. Ada Smith had grown up in Chicago dreaming of show business, and she had made her way to New York in 1914 to see the legendary Baron Wilkins. She was not yet twenty-one and faked her way inside with two under-aged friends.
“Everything about his bar and back room was bigger and better than anything else in the neighborhood. He drew a crowd we called ‘sporty,’” she remembered, adding, “Evidently I’d caught his eye. He was such a big, fat man that it wasn’t easy for him to move around, but he managed to get over to our table. He said to Gertie and Anita, ‘Whose’s that cute kid?’”
They chatted and Wilkins pointed to Smith’s red hair. “You know what,” he said, “I think I’ll call you Bricktop.”55
For the rest of her long life in cabarets, Ada Smith would be known as Bricktop, most famously as barkeep and chanteuse to the Lost Generation writers who congregated in Paris of the 1920s. She was a favorite of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and, yes, Langston Hughes.
Before those expatriate years, Smith returned to the Exclusive Club in 1922. She found a place where liquor and music flowed freely in a land beyond the law. Much to Wilkins’s anger, two headquarters detectives had staged a raid in March of that year. They arrested “ten white and two girls of color” plus “ten white and one man of color,” accusing some of the women of “vulgar dancing.” As ordained, a magistrate promptly dismissed the charges.56 Still, Wilkins said, the police should have known better than to bust in. Next time, if there was a next time, the cops would learn the error of their ways.
The great man took Bricktop on as a singer. Patrons loved her and so did he. When Bricktop said that the club needed a better house band, Wilkins took her advice and imported a five-man combo from Washington, DC. They included a dashing and handsome young piano player; Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington stepped onto the launching pad for his career.
Al Jolson and John Barrymore were regulars, along with playwright Charles MacArthur, who wrote The Front Page with Ben Hecht, and Lucille LeSueur, a chorus girl soon to be known as Joan Crawford. And then there was the “nice quiet Irishman” who would say to Bricktop: “Bricky, come on let’s you and me . . .”
“Oh, no that ain’t the play,” she would answer, knowing better than to get tangled up with Jack “Legs” Diamond, the killer who served as muscle for Arnold Rothstein.
“Sometimes the place would be full of gangsters,” remembered Elmer Snowden, who led Ellington’s combo. When the gangsters came in, he said, Wilkins “would close all the doors.”
Everyone on both sides of the law spent wildly. Ellington recalled a scene that many recounted as a regular part of the fun: “People would come in who would ask for change for a C-note in half dollar pieces. At the end of a song, they would toss the two hundred four-bit pieces up in the air, so that they would fall on the dance floor and make a jingling fanfare for the prosperity of our tomorrow. The singers—four of them including Bricktop—would gather up the money and another hundred-dollar bill would be changed and this action would go jingling deep into the night.”
Wilkins’s world, one commentator wrote, was a place where “one easily forgets that all Harlem is not like it. Harlem, the Harlem of the poor, overcrowded, underfed, with children crippled with rickets and scurvy.”57
ENRIGHT’S ORDER to raid Wilkins’s gambling joint set up a clash between two of Harlem’s most prominent residents: Battle, who was both admired for breaking the police color line and tarred as an enforcer of the dominating structure; and Wilkins, who was both romanticized for outplaying the white powers on behalf of the race and as plugged into Harlem as one could be. He gave generously to charitable causes and to the needy, belonged to the same fraternal organizations as Battle, and was celebrated with Connor as owner of the Bacharach Giants, a popular Negro League baseball franchise. Even Frederick Randolph Moore, guardian of Harlem’s rectitude, was a Wilkins fan. Selling alcohol to wealthy whites, promoting African American musical stars, and spreading the wealth close to home were no sins in the Age.
Battle looked for a way out of raiding Wilkins’s joint. There was none. He could only hope that Enright would spurn demands for retaliation, but Battle had no basis for trust. In fact, he had fresh reason for wariness. The newspapers had just told the tale of Albert Pitt, a cop who had conducted a raid that had been fully approved by the commanding officer for Brooklyn and Queens, and still was made to pay. The department transferred Pitt from a post close to his home in the Queens oceanfront community of Rockaway Beach to the Harlem stationhouse, at least two hours away by elevated train and subway. Pitt wrote to Enright, hoping that the commissioner would correct the injustice, got no response, and resigned rather than suffer the misery of a long daily commute to and from work. For good measure, the department falsely accused Pitt of refusing to work in a black community because he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.58
By then Battle knew that many of Enright’s closest aides—his “understrappers”—had corrupt ties with powerful people.59 Still, he sent an undercover investigator into Wilkins’s game. The officer returned with more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant. Armed with court authorization, swarming cops arrested Wilkins’s lieutenants and more than fifty gamblers. One by one, a magistrate called the defendants before the bench and pronounced the charges baseless. They all walked free from a courtroom controlled by Jimmy Hines.
Long after his association with Hughes was over, Battle would ruefully tell an interviewer: “I didn’t know what I was doing, I guess, because I thought it was honest and honorable to do your work correctly.”60
Under more pointed questioning by Hughes, he explained: “The underworld whispered that both Wilkins and Connor were friends of Inspector Lahey. They predicted that in any case, since the game was protected by a ‘Tammany fix’ nothing would happen to it. They were right. The game continued to run.”
And, then, on October, 14, 1923, the order came down: The department was booting Battle from the Special Service Division to a stationhouse in Canarsie, far out across Brooklyn, where the sewer pipes emptied into the bay. The building was known for that reason as “The Shithouse.”
Ba
ttle took sick leave and requested an audience with Enright. When the commissioner refused a meeting, Battle turned to Charles Anderson, who had rallied behind Battle’s fight to join the force and was still a Republican power broker. Anderson spoke with Enright and then reported back to Battle that “Enright advised me to go slow, lay low in Canarsie, and in due time I would be appointed sergeant and brought back to Manhattan.”
His eyes on the prize of promotion, Battle swallowed the bitter medicine of exile to “the hind-end of New York” where “goats, chickens and turkeys ran unmolested down streets and lanes.” He endured the hours-long ride to and from Harlem and the last stop on the subway line while waiting his turn on the promotion list. His new colleagues shared none of his hope about the future. They believed it was only a matter of time before he suffered a painful awakening.
A sergeant, “a very fine man, and officer,” decided to burst the bubble, Battle remembered.
“He said to me, ‘Battle, come here. What does it read over that station house?’
“I said, ‘80th Precinct stationhouse.’
“He said, ‘No. Those words are not emblematic. What it should read is, “All Those Who Enter Here Leave Hope Behind,” meaning that you’re here for good.’”61
MANY SAID THAT Enright had played Battle for a fool. In Harlem and the Guardians Society, they said that Battle had been too willing to credit Enright with good faith. He had been a dupe, they said. Enright had given him a plum assignment and had let a handful of African Americans form their own organization, and from these small favors Battle had concluded that this commissioner would give black cops a fair shot.
Still more hurtful to Battle, neighbors and police colleagues drew a Shakespearean parallel to his relationship with Enright. They cast Battle as Othello and Enright as the deceitful villain who manipulated the tragically trusting, dark-skinned nobleman in order to achieve his own hidden ends. “Harlemites said that in sending me there Commissioner Enright had become my Iago,” Battle recalled.
AS FALL MOVED toward winter in 1923, Battle looked toward the top of the slow-moving list for promotion to sergeant. He joined with Wesley, who was still studying for the fire lieutenant’s exam, in believing that the civil service system offered the most certain route to advancement. Wesley was eager to match his brainpower against that of his fellows—plus he wanted to best them physically, black man against white men in the ring.
The fire department sponsored annual boxing championships. Hundreds of firefighters competed. The victors in each weight class went on to fight the men who had prevailed in police department championships. Both forces rooted for the combatants who bore the honors of the rival legions.
Wesley signed up in the heavyweight division. He had put to good use his private firehouse gym and was well coached. Battle’s encouragement and Sam Langford’s tutorials at the Colored Men’s Branch of the YMCA sent Wesley to the bouts in top form. He disposed of opponents one after the other, until a single contender remained standing: Wesley.
This heavyweight crown, this thing that whites took so seriously as a badge of racial pride, now belonged to a black man. No one could deny Wesley the recognition in the way that his superiors had refused to acknowledge his life-saving valor on the job. More, by virtue of the victory, he would now represent the entire fire department in a duel with the police department’s best.
On December 12, 1923, three thousand firefighters, cops, and dignitaries crowded into an arena to witness the spectacle. Battle was likely the only police officer pulling for Wesley as he climbed into the ring against the finest’s legendary bruiser, Big Frank Adams. The bell rang. Wesley traded punches with Adams. Firefighters rose to their feet. Departmental pride trumping racial attitude, they urged on their man with roaring support. Here, he was their man because the blows he struck were their blows and the punishment he took was on their behalf. If Wesley won, they won. He stood proudly in until Adams was declared the victor. They cheered him then, too, for putting up a hell of a fight.62
On his next tour of duty, Wesley returned to a transformed firehouse. Men who had refused to speak with him outside the line of duty offered congratulations and included him in the give-and-take of comrades.
“Immediately everything changed,” Wesley would remember, adding as only he and Battle might, “Why people seem to idolize brute force in preference to culture and intellect is beyond me.”
EARLY IN THE evening on the 223rd day of Battle’s banishment, May 24, 1924, Baron Wilkins passed the time outside the Exclusive Club with an associate nicknamed Yum Yum. Seventh Avenue was in full stroll. In the basement of a building down the block, five men played dice. One of them, William “Yellow Charleston” Miller, was a drug addict and thief. He went broke. The game’s big winner spurned a loan request. Yellow Charleston drew a pistol, shot the man in the stomach, and fled.
What happened next was painted in bright and varying colors by the newspapers and in a retelling by the WPA Writers’ Project. All agreed that Yellow Charleston ran toward Wilkins for help.
“Above all, he had been the best friend the little fellows in the underworld had ever known,” the WPA author wrote. “He had helped them when they were in trouble, fed them, clothed them, had given them shelter, money to feed their families, and money even to beat the rap.”
Wilkins saw no reason for fear as Yellow Charleston raced forward, gun in hand.
“Yellow’s been hitting the dope again,” Wilkins told Yum Yum.
Yellow Charleston stopped in front of Wilkins.
“Give me some money,” he pleaded. “I’ve just killed a bird and I got to make a getaway.”
“But I haven’t any, son,” Wilkins responded calmly.
Yellow Charleston clutched Wilkins by the lapels, crying in the dialect of the WPA account, “You got t’ gie me some money. I jes’ kilt a man. I got t’ git away.”
“Don’t pull on my coat so hard,” Wilkins answered. “I tell you I haven’t any money. I simply don’t have it now.”
After one more refusal, Yellow Charleston pumped four shots into Wilkins and left him bleeding beside the Exclusive Club’s doorway.63
The news spread rapidly. Battle’s neighbors flooded into the streets. The stationhouse reserves cleared the way for an ambulance to bring Wilkins to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The next morning’s newspapers reported that posses had fanned out to hunt for Yellow Charleston. Shortly, he surrendered and would go to his death in the electric chair.
Wilkins had not been a church-going man. Family members arranged for a funeral service in his home. Testimonials poured forth.
“Local charities in Harlem were benefactors of Wilkins’ charity. Just recently he contributed 300 bathing suits to a local organization for the use of poor and needy children of Harlem,” the Age reported, while the Chicago Defender wrote, “His money went to Race enterprises and helping his friends and the poor. . . . Baron Wilkins was a man who lived in the age fighting for the uplift of his Race.”
In certainly his last good deed, Wilkins extended unsolicited help to Sam Langford. Nearly blind and approaching destitution, the boxer had arrived in New York to seek treatment by a prominent eye specialist. Just hours before Yellow Charleston opened fire, Wilkins had mailed Langford a twenty-five-dollar check to pay medical bills and had ordered his tailor to fit Langford for a suit. Two days after Wilkins’s murder, Dr. James Smith began cataract treatments that would restore Langford’s sight.64
An estimated seventy thousand people lined the sidewalks around the club on the morning Wilkins was to be buried. As happened in the outpouring for Luther Boddy, the crowd stood in admiration of a man who had violated Battle’s unyielding sense of right and wrong. This time the affront was personal, and this time Harlem’s most prominent men joined in paying testament to Wilkins.
Frederick Randolph Moore of the Age; Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright of Strivers Row and Harlem Hospital; Ferdinand Q. Morton, the first African American appointed to New Yor
k’s Municipal Civil Service Commission; and Charles Anderson gathered around Wilkins’s casket as honorary pallbearers. Members of Battle’s Monarch Lodge performed a ritual Elks farewell. The noted Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, led prayers. Then the honorary pallbearers walked solemnly behind casket of a man who had unabashedly supported Jack Johnson, championed black professional baseball, and promoted so many African American entertainers.
That Wilkins had also cast New York’s first black police officer into the wilderness was of no moment to a group whose allegiance Battle deserved. They carried Wilkins’s body one last time in front of the Exclusive Club. With understandable bitterness, Battle described the cabaret in a way that no one else did. He saw it in memory as having gone “downhill to become a sinister hang-out for gangsters and dope peddlers.”
Under watch by the masses, the slow procession to a waiting hearse included a pallbearer whose bond with Wilkins grew not from the shared experience of America’s racial crimes. He was a white man with ice-blue eyes, Wilkins’s partner in political crime: Jimmy Hines.65
THAT FALL, IN September 1924, with the requisite five years on the job, Wesley sat for the two-day fire lieutenant’s exam. Most of the 3,010 test takers were more experienced than he was and so would get an advantage in the scoring. He chanced it nonetheless, confident of his studies in the hose tower and eager to force salutes from white men who would refuse to acknowledge even a near-superhuman feat of heroism.
One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Page 21
