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

by Browne, Arthur

A month after the exam, Wesley and the Chief came upon a burning building in Harlem. Flames roared from the structure. The local fire company leaned a portable ladder against the facing and maneuvered their rig’s hand-cranked aerial ladder toward nineteen-year-old William Thompson, who was silhouetted against flame and smoke at a window. Wesley sped to the top of the portable ladder but was still a considerable distance below Thompson.

  As the crew brought the aerial ladder closer, Thompson jumped from the sill. His hands grasped the aerial ladder, only to be torn free by the momentum of his body. Instantly, Wesley leaped from the portable ladder, grabbed a rung of the aerial ladder with one hand, and caught the plunging Thompson with his other, holding fast to both with his muscular grip and rippled arms and shoulders. Then he carried Thompson to the street before climbing back up to help rescue five more people. A reporter witnessed the feat and chronicled what he had seen in a story headlined “NY’s Only Colored Fireman Saves Six From Burning Building.”66

  Still, the department withheld a citation.

  WITH PASSAGE OF the seasons, the police department’s churn of retirements created openings for promotions, until finally Enright had given sergeants’ stripes to 342 officers—or found them not to his liking. Battle was next for consideration at the 343rd spot on the list.

  On June 5, 1925, a promotions order reached Canarsie. A sergeant, and only the sergeant, was to report to headquarters for elevation to lieutenant. The meaning was certain. Passed over again, Battle would stay a cop for good.

  Crushed and furious, he watched the lucky sergeant depart in full-dress uniform. Adding to the insult, this sergeant drank heavily. Battle would later hear that Enright recoiled on meeting the man. The story went that he told a subordinate: “You take this badge and put it on that bum. He’s too drunk for me to do it.”67

  Battle would also discover that Enright had promoted three white cops ranked lower on the list. Now the picture was clear to a man who had been deceived by his own blindness as much as by his Iago: never would Enright give a black man command of whites. Battle would write with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Passed over by Enright, I cursed the day he was born, cursed all related to him, and wished the wrath of God upon him.”68

  At home, Battle could only tell Jesse, Charline, and Carroll that he would soldier on in the hard world they were coming to know. Then the Municipal Civil Service Commission published the results of the fire lieutenant’s exam. Of the 3,010 men who had competed, Wesley had ranked 189. The fire commissioner would get to his name within eighteen months—and deny Wesley if he chose to. Wiser than before, Battle urged Wesley to enlist allies immediately. Wesley wrote to Frederick Randolph Moore, spelling out his rescues, boxing victories, and test score.

  “Now will they promote me when my turn arrives?” he asked. “I believe in preparedness, so I am notifying the Negro Press now as I expect a fight about it later on.”69

  Quickly, the Amsterdam News ran a story headlined “Only Negro Fire-Fighter Passes Civil Service Exam for Lieutenant, Wesley Williams Who Has Made Many Thrilling Rescues, Makes General Average of 89.12—Over 1,200 Fail to Pass.”70

  Black New York’s anger at the injustice done to Battle provoked Enright to respond. A psychologist for the police department, E. E. Hart, presented the commissioner’s views in an article published by the Amsterdam News. An extraordinary example of dishonest condescension, the piece hailed Enright as a dedicated benefactor of African Americans. Hart wrote that a black traffic cop stationed at the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street was a symbol “of the things that have enabled the Negroes of New York to so progress that word of their prosperity has spread to the dark-skinned peoples of the world around.” Hart added that Enright deserved the applause of a grateful race for having allowed forty-five African Americans to join the force. “Thus he was the first city official to give them their place in the sun,” Hart wrote.

  As for Battle, Hart said that Enright had passed over several men, both black and white, “for good police reasons.”71 With these lies, Battle’s hopes were dashed. But, suddenly, miraculously, Enright was gone two weeks later.

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1925, after a then-record eight years as commissioner, Enright announced that he would head the newly formed International Police Association. Actually, he quit because the political wheel had turned. New York was about to install a new mayor for the Jazz Age: James “Jimmy” Walker.

  Born into a Tammany Hall family, Walker grew into a handsome, stylish, witty, fun-loving man. Early on, he wrote songs, including “Will You Love Me in December (as You Do in May)?” In the state legislature, he presciently pronounced that Prohibition was a “measure born in hypocrisy and there it will die.” He championed legalizing professional boxing and lifting a ban on Sunday baseball games. When the legislature took up a “Clean Books Bill,” he declared, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book.”

  After a hard-fought campaign, Walker deposed Red Hylan, who had fallen out of favor with the bosses. The American Mercury soon profiled him as a mayor who came not from the streets but “from the dance floors.”

  “His hair is black, thick and unruly,” the magazine reported. “His eyes are dark and restless. He has the slim build of a cabaret dancer, of a gigolo of the Montmartre. He dresses in the ultra-advanced fashion redolent of the Tenderloin. He is a native New Yorker, smokes cigarettes continuously, has a vast contempt for the Volstead act, and reads nothing but the sporting pages. He looks, in brief, to be slightly wicked and is therefore charming.”72

  New Yorkers happily went along for the ride as the married Walker slept through mornings, stayed out late, and made the nightclub rounds with his showgirl mistress.

  SPIRITS WERE HIGH in Harlem as well, at least among the elite.

  Young black writers like Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston came into vogue. Publishers saw the promise of their work, as the American educated class hungered for all that was “new” in style and thought. No one fostered the phenomenon—this Harlem Renaissance—more than Charles Spurgeon Johnson. The son of a Baptist minister, Johnson secured a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and took over as research director of the National Urban League. In that position, he founded a journal called Opportunity and joined the Crisis in publishing the emerging writers.

  In April 1924, Johnson organized a dinner at a downtown club to introduce the up-and-comers to white publishers, editors, and critics. The affair was a spectacular success. The editor of Survey Graphic magazine titled his March 1925 issue, Harlem—the Mecca of the New Negro. Guest-edited by Alain Locke, who had been the first African American Rhodes scholar, the magazine largely featured the writings of black authors, including Hughes. Brimming with optimism, Hughes’s poem began: “We have tomorrow / Bright before us / Like a flame.”73

  Later that year, Spurgeon Johnson staged a literary competition “to encourage the reading of literature both by Negro authors and about Negro life, not merely because they are Negro authors but because what they write is literature and because the literature is interesting.”74 The competition offered monetary awards. A broad panel of judges included Fannie Hurst and Eugene O’Neill. More than three hundred people attended an elegant dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Hughes took first prize for “The Weary Blues,” a masterpiece that captured the rhythms of a musical form infused with the American black experience. It opens and closes:

  Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

  Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

  I heard a Negro play . . .

  And far into the night he crooned that tune.

  The stars went out and so did the moon.

  The singer stopped playing and went to bed

  While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

  He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

  It was a heady time for the young writers. They were wanted at downtown A-list parties, and they were welcomed at fabulous soirées thrown by wealthy hair-care heiress A
’Lelia Walker, later described by Hughes as “the joy-goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Amid the carousing and the high that came with being in fashionable demand, the writers took to calling themselves the “niggerati.” Ever affable yet ever inscrutable because he was never known to have opened a deeply personal, let alone sexual, relationship with anyone, Hughes remained the movement’s leading light. He spelled out its lofty ambitions in an essay in the Nation that declared: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”75

  Soon, at the age of twenty-five, Hughes published a volume of poetry that biographer Rampersad described as “his most brilliant book of poems, and one of the more astonishing books of verse ever published in the United States—comparable in the black world to [Walt Whitman’s] Leaves of Grass in the white.”76

  Evoking the lives and ways of poor African Americans, the book scandalized much of the black establishment with such starkly revealing poems as “Red Silk Stockings,” which spoke of a black woman dressed to allure white men. Unfortunately titled “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” a reference to poor people selling their clothing to pawnbrokers, most of whom happened to be Jewish, the collection was Hughes’s declaration of freedom for his generation of African American artists. That it didn’t sell well seemed of little consequence in a time when black expression was the essence of hip. A wealthy, elderly white woman, Charlotte Mason, known endearingly to Hughes as “Godmother,” became his patron, funding him with $150 a month, asking only for an accounting and, far more important, a say over his writing projects.

  Swept up as well, many in the black intelligentsia predicted that the cultural outpouring would lead whites, at long last, to see blacks for all their humanity. “I am coming to believe that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator and contributor to American civilization,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.77

  WALKER’S TAMMANY HALL background gave Battle little reason to hope for a reprieve, nor did Walker’s unlikely appointment of George V. McLaughlin as commissioner. Then serving as New York State Superintendent of Banking, McLaughlin had no experience in policing and seemed ideally suited to act as Tammany’s puppet. Regardless, the new commissioner summoned Battle.

  “Officer, have a seat,” McLaughlin said. “I want to ask you do you know why you were not promoted to sergeant when your turn came?”

  “I do not,” Battle answered.

  “The only complaints I find against you in the files are anonymous letters. I have torn them up and thrown them into the wastebasket. Unsigned letters have no status with me. When I make my next appointments, Battle, I shall make you a sergeant. And when I appoint you, you will be a sergeant—not a Negro sergeant.”

  Battle’s promotion came though on May 21, 1926. After almost fifteen distinguished years of service, including, by his count, two years, seven months, one week, and two hours in Canarsie, Battle was a sergeant, Shield No. 612, and for the first time the New York Police Department had authorized a black man to give orders to white men.

  The Monarch Lodge of the Elks threw Battle a testimonial dinner. The Harold C. Clark Melody Orchestra played. The lodge’s exalted ruler toasted Battle as “a symbol of benevolence, activity, truth, tenacity, love and elasticity.” Dressed in a peach-and-orange crepe dress, Florence declined to speak, saying only that “one Battle a night was enough.”78

  Battle stood before his admirers as a forty-three-year-old man, almost twenty-one years a husband, the father of three children, one on the verge of manhood himself. He remembered that, in his days as a redcap, friends had warned him not to try for the police department, but he had tried, and today he had a higher rank than most of the white men on the force. He had been ostracized in the stationhouse and gawked at on the streets. They had not. He had been barred from a parade and threatened with death. They had not. He had been jailed with a murderer and saved a white officer’s life. They had not. And he was a sergeant, and they were not.

  In his pocket, Battle had a telegram, sent by Anne from Beaufort, where she was living happily with Mary Elizabeth. Anne reminded the son who had been born so large “that his good fortune was due to God and to prayer.” And a quarter-century later, long after Enright had faded into obscurity, shortly before he would die at the age of eighty-two in a fall down a flight of stairs on Long Island, Battle would write of his tormentor, “I asked the Lord to forgive him.”79

  CHAPTER FOUR

  COMMAND

  TONY JUMPS INTO Battle’s black, turtle-shaped Lincoln and across the front seat from his grandfather. Battle is taking the boy to see Sugar Ray Robinson, the world’s greatest boxer, at his training camp in Greenwood Lake.

  Battle first met the fighter when Robinson was a junior high school student. The Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church had brought the two together. The neighborhood around Cullen’s house of worship teemed with children who “were wild, bad, even vicious,” Cullen would remember. The roughest had a headquarters “in a cellar deep underground” and called their club “The Crescent.” Cullen persuaded the Crescent president, recalled only by the name Bunk, to take advantage of a gymnasium in the church basement. Thus was born the Salem Crescent Athletic Club.1

  Then one day, Cullen found Robinson playing craps behind the church. The pastor took the boy to a cellar window through which he saw a boxing ring, punching bags, and a basketball court. Eventually, Robinson went in.

  “About 20 guys were working out,” he recalled. “Sparring in the old ring. Skipping ropes. Punching the bags. Doing calisthenics. And sweating, the perspiration dripping like leaky faucets off their bodies. Over the years, the sweat had permeated everything in the gym.”

  Robinson most remembered the smell. “The thick stale odor hung in the air and it hung in my nostrils,” he told a biographer. “Later on, it would represent a strange perfume to me.”2

  Cullen recruited black police officers to keep the boys on the straight and narrow. Battle was at the top of the list. Boxer that he was, he got on famously with the fast-fisted boy and then the man.

  “Robinson has been and still is a sort of protégé of mine,” he told Hughes. “I have been close to him through the years as he rose to the championship, having been at one time champion of two classes at once.”

  TONY IS ACCUSTOMED to his grandfather’s standing among prominent people. He meets Paul Robeson on a Sunday when he performs before the Mother AME Zion congregation for forty minutes. America’s Communist blacklist has driven Robeson from the public sphere, but his brother, the Reverend Benjamin Robeson, is pastor, and nothing can stifle the tenor’s powerful voice on this stage. On other Sundays, Battle takes Tony to the Polo Grounds. Grandfather and grandson sit in a box behind the dugout. There, Battle introduces Tony to Don Newcombe, the pitcher who followed Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers and had won the 1949 National League Rookie of the Year Award.

  But, clambering from the big Lincoln, Tony has never witnessed a welcome as extravagant as the one Sugar Ray Robinson extends to Battle.

  “The entire program is choreographed to ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ with Sugar Ray dancing, skipping rope and sparring, all with the music going,” Tony remembers.

  Hughes, too, counts Sugar Ray as a friend. He’s a regular at Sugar Ray’s nightclub in Harlem. He makes his own trip to the boxer’s camp in that summer of 1952, having returned to Greenwood Forest Farms for a few more weeks. Almost three years have passed since Battle began working with Hughes, and now finally, Hughes is showing Battle drafts of the manuscript in progress. Battle reads the stories that he
has told to Hughes and that Hughes has put down on paper, and he goes over them with Hughes to get the stories right. Hughes promises that he has only one more chapter to write. Finally, Battle is happy.

  OLIVE KEENE KNEW all about the sergeant who lived on Strivers Row, and she walked up the townhouse steps hoping to get help from the one cop who might provide it. Battle opened the door to find “an attractive brown skin woman” who had a story to tell about two powerful white men.

  Joseph Roth and his son Herbert were pawnbrokers. They lent money at high interest rates to people pressed for cash. To guarantee repayment, they took property as security, “everything from pocket knives to diamonds.” Although exploitive, the pawn business was legal. Another aspect of the Roths’ trade was criminal. They worked as fences, buying stolen goods low at two shops, and reselling high elsewhere. Their version of the racket was particularly pernicious. They encouraged “domestic servants working in the homes of the rich to steal for them,” and then blackmailed the servants into stealing more.

  Olive Keene was one of the thieves. Now, though, standing on Battle’s doorstep, she was furious that the Roths had paid her less for stolen goods than she had expected.

  “Arrest me, Officer Battle,” she said. “I want to give you a case against the Roths. First put me in jail—and protect me. I’m afraid.”

  Three months had passed since Battle’s promotion. He was assigned to the detective squad in the familiar quarters of the Harlem stationhouse. His first homicide case had been an immersion in bloodshed: a locked apartment; a butcher knife, razor, and scissors; a man’s dismembered body, head missing. The neighbors said they had heard the man arguing with his wife. Battle tracked her to Jersey City and made the arrest.

  And, here, was Olive Keene, demanding to testify against two men who were connected to Tammany Hall. Harlem political leaders warned Battle to back off. He pressed on. Perhaps he felt safe because, to Tammany’s horror, Commissioner McLaughlin was taking on the rackets without fear or favor. Or perhaps it was simply as Battle said: “I was a member of the Harlem community, not only as a policeman, but as a parent-citizen, and I felt it was my duty to help rid the community of the menace of men like the Roths.”