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

by Browne, Arthur

  Later on the afternoon of May 9, 1928, standing before a roughly carved tombstone, Battle paid homage to a hero who was reviled by many as a murderous terrorist. He would tell Hughes of the events, and Hughes would barely reference them in a list of Battle’s most cherished memories. Hughes’s offhanded treatment of the episode was particularly startling because of his family’s reverence for the raid at Harpers Ferry. Over and again, his grandmother had told the story of how Leary had ridden off from Oberlin, Ohio, to give his life fighting alongside Brown, instilling in Hughes the greatness of his lineage. Often, she had worn Leary’s shawl, shown Hughes its bullet holes, used the cloth to protect him from the cold as he had slept. Then she had handed the shawl down to him and he had kept it in storage for decades until finally donating the cloth to the Ohio Historical Society.16 Yet he limited the labor he exerted for Battle to mentioning the pilgrimage to Brown’s grave to but two sentences.

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER Battle returned from Lake Placid, he took on the most sensational case of his career, the kidnapping of Casper Holstein, one of the least remembered and most influential of the figures who guided Harlem’s evolution in the 1920s. A native of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, Holstein arrived in New York with his mother as an eighteen-year-old in 1894. He finished high school in Brooklyn and took a succession of jobs, including, by one account, reading to the blind matriarch of a well-to-do Brooklyn family. Working as a bellhop in a Manhattan hotel, he learned how to bet on horses from guests who owned thoroughbreds. Then he served in the US Navy, returned to bellhopping, and studied in Chicago to be an embalmer. By 1905, Holstein was in the gambling business. His name surfaced in a Times report about a black man who had reported a swindle in a joint called the Fair Play Club.

  “Well, Sir, I jes’ play a little monte and I had a roll ob $150 befo’ me on de table when de lights went out,” the story caricatured the man as saying. “Every nigger in de club then grabbed, and everybody got a piece of dat money.”

  The police charged Fair Play Club president Casper Holstein with running a gambling house. This was the first of the ten bookmaking arrests he would rack up by 1921. The busts came and went quietly. Holstein was a man of reserved demeanor. Showing none of the flamboyance typical of gamers, he maintained a low profile while building social and business ties both in Harlem, where he helped found the black Elk’s Monarch Lodge, and in Chicago, where the men of the black gambling fraternity counted him among their kind. They marked Holstein’s visits with banquets. The Chicago Defender heralded him as a “well-known good fellow and club man of New York City.”

  Top among Holstein’s Windy City comrades was yet another black man of outsized accomplishment. Oscar Stanton De Priest was an Alabama-born son of former slaves. He left home for Chicago at the age of seventeen, earned a living as a painter, and found his calling in the city’s Republican machine, the equivalent of Tammany Hall. A talent for organizing gave De Priest command of votes in a growing African American population. He channeled his troops toward the party’s candidates, all of whom where white until De Priest won election as a Chicago’s first black alderman in 1914.

  Known by then as the black district’s “King Oscar,” De Priest prospered through the collusion between politics and vice that dominated the era. In 1917, the state attorney charged him with masterminding a “conspiracy to allow gambling houses and houses of prostitution to operate and for bribery of police officers in connection with the protection of these houses.” The renowned Clarence Darrow helped De Priest beat the rap at trial.

  Whether visiting De Priest in Chicago, where he was hailed as a “well-known good fellow and club man,” or working in New York, Holstein held a prominent place in the milieu of wagering. In the telling of a biographical sketch written for the WPA Writers Project, Holstein had substantial capital by the start of the 1920s and spent it charitably. Here, he comes to the rescue of the blind white woman to whom he had read as a young man in need of work. After the family goes broke in 1921, Holstein supports her and her loved ones in high style for a dozen years, and then he sits in the family’s pew at her funeral.17

  Even more colorfully, writing in the North American Review, black critic Saunders Redding depicted Holstein as working in 1924 as a building porter who “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas.” Here, he sits “in his airless janitor’s closet, surrounded by brooms and mops” as well as by stacks of old newspapers that published the daily tabulations of the New York Clearing House, an institution that transferred money among member banks.

  “The thought that the figures differed each day played in his mind like a wasp in an empty room,” Redding wrote of Holstein, until “he let out an uproarious laugh and in general acted like a drunken man.”18

  In that fabled instant, Holstein recognized that he could build numbers gambling around the Clearing House figures. The game was a precursor to today’s quick-pick-style lotteries. Play was simple: A bettor would select a number from 000 to 999 and place a bet with a “banker.” The banker would hold a drawing and pay anyone who had chosen the number that came up. Although the odds of winning were one thousand-to-one, the banker paid off at six hundred-to-one, all but guaranteeing a substantial profit.

  For years, the game had had a relatively small following, in part because would-be players knew better than to trust that bankers would always conduct honest drawings. Holstein’s flash of inspiration brought trust to the game, because no one could fake the Federal Reserve credit balance or the total amount of money the banks had cleared. Suddenly, with every banker and bettor tied to a single independent number—composed of the second and third digits of the clearance total and the third digit of the Federal Reserve balance—people of all walks of life began wagering vast quantities of pennies, nickels, dimes, and dollars.

  “All Harlem is ablaze with ‘the numbers.’ People play it everywhere, in tenements, on street corners, in the backs of shops,” wrote Winthrop D. Lane, author of “Ambushed in the City. The Grim Side of Harlem.”19

  Spent in volume, the coins and bills accumulated into riches for the bankers, with Holstein at the forefront. “In a year he owned three of the finest apartment buildings in Harlem, a fleet of expensive cars, a home on Long Island and several thousand acres of farmland in Virginia,” Redding wrote.

  Battle remembered Holstein as “a quietly well-groomed man of average size, light brown skin in complexion and amiable of manner, who neither drank nor smoked.” Attended by housekeepers, he “entertained celebrities and national politicians and fraternal leaders” in a duplex apartment.20 More tellingly, Battle recalled Holstein as “a kind of community Robin Hood, giving back a great deal of his wealth to the neighborhood in benefactions of one sort or another—such as building modern apartment houses at moderate rentals, spick and span in their maintenance, with the brass always polished.” Holstein was also revered for paying the college tuitions of deserving young people. Battle knew so personally because, he wrote, “I had sent many to him.”21

  Holstein was, in fact, a leading black philanthropist. He helped build a home for orphaned children in Gary, Indiana; founded a dormitory for girls in a Baptist school in Liberia; and offered to finance a sanitarium at which black doctors could practice in Harlem. He supported Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement and distributed as many as five hundred food baskets to Harlem’s poor at Christmastime. He paid for an annual boat ride for Harlem children and donated money to historically black Fisk and Howard universities. By donating the prize money for the Opportunity magazine annual literary awards—won in 1925 by Hughes—the numbers king also played patron to the Harlem Renaissance.22

  HOLSTEIN SPENT THE evening of Thursday, September 20, 1928, at the Turf Club, one of several Harlem cabarets he owned. Shortly before midnight, a chauffeur drove him to an apartment building where he planned to visit a woman. From that point, witnesses and newspaper accounts provide inconsistent details about everything from Hols
tein’s abduction to his inexplicable release three days later. Battle’s account is the most authoritative: “As [Holstein’s] car drove off, a curtained black sedan pulled up to the curb. Four white men leaped out, forced Holstein into the sedan and sped away.”

  A few hours later, on his day off, Battle rose at 4 a.m. to go ocean fishing aboard a chartered boat off Long Island. He returned with “a box full of iced porgy and weakfish” to find cops at the townhouse with news of Holstein’s kidnapping and orders to take command of the investigation. Witnesses supplied only vague descriptions of the curtained sedan. There was no ransom demand. Early Saturday morning, more than thirty hours after the abduction, Battle theorized that the kidnappers might force Holstein to make a bank withdrawal. The manager of the Harlem branch of the Chelsea Exchange notified banks across the city to alert Battle if anyone tried to cash a check signed by Holstein. Shortly, underworld beer runner Michael Bernstein presented a $3,200 draft at a bank in the Bronx.

  Battle assigned two black detectives, Paul Moore and George Webber, to pose as members of Holstein’s numbers crew. They visited Bernstein with a cover story about getting tipped that Bernstein was part of the kidnapping.

  “Eventually Bernstein was convinced that my men were really racketeers like himself, that they were deeply concerned about the welfare of their backer, and would even be willing to payoff to have him released unharmed,” Battle said.

  After Bernstein set the price at $50,000, Battle took Bernstein into custody, “put the fear of God into” him, and arranged for Bernstein to be released on bond. Eight hours later, past one in the morning, after being held for three days, Holstein walked back into the Turf Club. Shortly, he stopped by the stationhouse to tell Battle a patently incredible story of being hit in the head, blindfolded, and then released by kidnappers who had returned his diamond ring, worth $2,000, and given him $3 for cab fare.

  With good-humored obstructionism, Holstein said that he had paid no ransom and insisted that he could not identify any suspects, including Bernstein. When a reporter asked, “Mr. Holstein, didn’t you recognize any of your captors?” the story related: “A smile overspread Holstein’s face. ‘Well, you know, how it is,’ he said. ‘I could’—a slow wink went with this—‘but I can’t.’”23

  Regardless, Battle sent Bernstein to Sing Sing on the strength of the check he had attempted to cash. Relating the story to Hughes, he spared Holstein even a hint of criticism for refusing to cooperate with the investigation, and he placed the kidnapping into context as a turning point in Harlem history. There had been a hidden force behind the crime. Holstein’s riches had gotten the attention of the brutal Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer. After using kidnapping, torture, and murder to seize control of bootlegging in the Bronx, Flegenheimer was moving in on Harlem’s rackets at the vanguard of a white takeover. Holstein’s comic postkidnap performance conveyed to an audience of one—Dutch Schultz—that he had no interest in a futile fight.

  In the aftermath, despite his revulsion for the numbers game, Battle grew close to the very well-connected kingpin. Two months after the abduction, they had much to talk about when Holstein’s friend, Oscar Stanton De Priest won election to the US Congress. No state, northern or southern, had sent an African American to Washington in the twentieth century. No northern state had done so in all of US history. Holstein told Battle about the tough man who had worked the levers of machine politics to make history. Battle shared with Holstein memories of the last African American who had served in Congress, George H. White, a lawyer who been principal of a school for blacks in New Bern during Battle’s boyhood.

  De Priest strode into the Capitol in 1929 and was immediately rebuffed. One after the other, House colleagues refused office space that adjoined the quarters provided to De Priest. Then a white man from New York, a colorful progressive from the Italian stronghold of East Harlem, spoke with moral clarity. Battle would long remember that Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia dispatched a telegram to the Speaker of the House, stating: “Have noticed in press agitation among some members against allotment office to our colleague, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. De Priest. I will be glad to have him next to my office. It is manifestly unfair to embarrass a new member and I believe it is our duty to assist new members rather than humiliate them.”24

  Soon, supported by De Priest and “Bojangles” Robinson, Holstein recruited Battle into a drive to install Holstein as national Grand Exalted Ruler of the black Elks. With Holstein spending liberally, Battle jumped into electioneering at a convention in Atlantic City. Longtime incumbent J. Finley Wilson campaigned just as vigorously to hold his post. At an emotional high point, a Wilson bodyguard attempted to block Battle from mounting the convention platform, and Robinson backed up Battle by drawing a golden pistol that he was famed for carrying.

  In the end, Holstein, Battle, Robinson, and De Priest went down to defeat. More important, Battle’s association with these three leading figures at the time points to his arrival at a happy station in life. Back in New Bern, on the day of his last whipping for smacking a white who had called him “nigger,” Thomas had worried that his bullyboy son would never learn to succeed among either his own race or the other. Now, no matter the difficulties, he was a New York Police Department detective sergeant, peer to Congressman De Priest, peer to gambler Holstein, peer to dancer Robinson, peer to all the Strivers—a Striver.

  A GROUP OF detectives threw a party to celebrate Battle’s forty-sixth birthday on January 16, 1929. The guest list mixed whites and blacks. The department now counted ninety African Americans in the ranks, mostly cops, five detectives, one sergeant, and one police surgeon, Dr. Louis T. Wright. Battle took pleasure in the dark-skinned faces who wished him well, and the moment was all the sweeter because an old friend, perhaps his closest white friend, had organized the event.

  Way back at the beginning, Jimmy Garvey had defied the conspiracy of silence. After the department transferred Battle to Harlem, they had stayed close, Battle coming to Garvey’s side when Garvey’s daughter Helen, not yet two years old, contracted polio in the 1916 epidemic, Garvey offering moral support to Battle after Enright banished Battle to Canarsie.

  Garvey was still an active cop. His wife would describe him as an officer who “never stopped looking for suspicious persons.”25 He had made detective in 1921 and had welcomed Sergeant Battle to the division five years later. He talked often about Helen, who wore a metal brace from left thigh to heel, and called home regularly to speak with her. She was a freshman in high school. Garvey wanted Helen to go college. Battle had the same hope for Charline, who was approaching graduation from Wadleigh High School.

  True to form, Charline had ideas of her own. She talked about applying to schools in Boston. Battle and Florence balked at sending her so far away at the age of sixteen. Battle turned for advice to James Weldon Johnson. He counseled that Charline should consider New York City’s Hunter College, a school that had been founded to offer free public higher education to women both black and white. Battle also introduced his daughter to a young woman who was as fine a role model for Charline as Battle could find. The granddaughter of a slave who had purchased freedom, Eunice Carter had earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College in Massachusetts, then and now an all-women’s college, then and now among the most demanding of America’s liberal arts schools. She was about to enter Fordham University Law School, perhaps kindling hope in Battle that his daughter might be the lawyer in the family. Carter would become Fordham Law’s first black woman graduate, first black woman Manhattan district attorney, and the legal strategist behind racket buster Thomas Dewey’s successful prosecution of Lucky Luciano in 1936. She certified Hunter as a fine choice, Charline won admission, and Battle savored sending the second of his children to college.26

  THEN, THE TIDES of life turned. Mary Elizabeth telephoned with word that Anne had been stricken. Battle remembered, as only he could:

  In the summer of 1929 I was called to B
eaufort to the home of my sister, Mary Elizabeth, where my mother had gone after the great fire. She had been overcome by a stroke. I found her helpless, unable to move, so I remained to lift and nurse and bathe her. Because of her modesty, even in her condition, she would attempt to push me away when she needed attention.

  The doctors had given her up. I knew that she resented a long and lingering illness. She never wished to feel that she was a burden upon anyone. I knelt beside her bed and prayed that for her sake this would not happen, that God in His mercy would not let her suffer indefinitely, and that I might remain with her until the end.

  On the eighth of August she died at the age of seventy-six—the best and loveliest mother in all the world to me. She lay in state at St. Peter’s Church in New Bern, and was buried beside my father in the Cedar Grove Cemetery. Over the graves of our parents, we have built a monument of granite, but to their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren, the example of their Christian lives will live longer and tower higher than any monument of stone we could give them.

  Then the tides of history turned too.

  On October 29, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged for a second day. Ten miles north and a world away, Harlem had scant reason to notice. Few of Battle’s neighbors had ridden the stock market’s tenfold rise during the 1920s, so sudden losses totaling $30 billion passed as the misfortune of people who lived in a distant world. There was, of course, more to it: Black Thursday marked the start of the Great Depression.

  Shrinking businesses pushed 10 percent of the American workforce into unemployment during 1930. New York City was hit even harder, as one in every six workers lost jobs, and Harlem was pummeled harder still—the toll was one in four workers.27