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

by Browne, Arthur

  “Men and women stand in line from 1:00 a.m. till 9:00 in near zero weather and fight their way past policemen in order to get a chance at $15.00 a week jobs,” the New York Urban League reported, citing a pay scale that was less than half the amount deemed adequate for a Manhattan family of four.

  Even so, the cumulative damage was slowly realized. For a time, the clubs poured illicit drinks and played swinging music, and church and The Stroll enlivened Sundays. Weldon Johnson, ever the optimist, wrote of Harlem in 1930 that “as a whole community it possesses a sense of humour and a love of gaiety.” Confident that the writers, artists, and performers of the Renaissance were “helping to form American civilization,” he predicted that “the Negro in New York ought to be able to work through discrimination and disadvantages.”28

  But hope was fleeting, and the party soon over. As if on cue, on August 17, 1931, a cerebral hemorrhage felled grand hostess A’Lelia Walker at the age of forty-six. More than eleven thousand people filed past the casket of the wealthy woman who had lived in high style and had invited Hughes into parties where, he would write in an autobiography, “Negro poets and Negro numbers bankers mingled with downtown poets and seat-on-the-stock-exchange racketeers.”

  Hughes took his place at the funeral, aware that he and black America had passed milestones. Having broken with his patroness, “Godmother” Charlotte Mason, in one of the most wrenching rifts of his life, he had seized full control over his destiny as a writer, one who would choose his own projects, one who would survive without patronage, one who longed for the approval of the African American masses yet who wrote verse that was challenging for anyone, one who saw the waning of white interest in things black.

  A nightclub quartet called the Four Bon Bons sang Noel Coward’s “I’ll See You Again,” and “they swung it slightly, as she might have liked it,” Hughes remembered. A friend read a poem, “To A’Lelia,” written by Hughes. And, seven years after its birth at the Opportunity magazine awards dinner, where Casper Holstein had endowed the literary prizes, the Renaissance came to a symbolic close.

  Hughes would later write in his autobiography: “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem, the period that had begun to reach its end when the crash came in 1929 and the white people had much less money to spend on themselves, and practically none to spend on Negroes, for the depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”29

  THE SALARIES OF skilled workers fell by half. As a result, Harlem’s median income in 1932 dropped 43 percent below its level three years earlier. For want of rent, landlords threw families into the street, touching off fights between police and newly energized activists, whose ranks included communists. “Police and riot squads come with bludgeons and tear-bombs, fights and imprisonments, and deaths,” wrote Nancy Cunard, a British heiress who devoted her life to fighting racism and fascism.30

  At the outset, government offered little help. Jimmy Walker, mayoral rascal of the good times, appointed a relief committee only after thirty-five thousand unemployed New Yorkers marched on city hall. Rather than tap public money, the panel solicited contributions from municipal workers in order to distribute food, clothing, and coal, and to stave off evictions. Harlem’s churches and fraternal and social organizations provided similar assistance. Even white gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden, the power behind the legendary, whites-only Cotton Club, offered aid. He bought goodwill on Christmas Eve 1934 by having the nightspot hand out bags overstuffed with a four-and-a-half-pound chicken, five pounds of potatoes, five pounds of apples, and additional provisions.31

  The demand for basic nutrition was overwhelming. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were only then starting to take hold. Looking back, researchers for the Federal Writers Project drew a dire portrait: “When the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began operations, it found a majority of Harlem’s population on the verge of starvation, as a result of the depression and of an intensified discrimination that made it all but impossible for Negroes to find employment.”32

  In 1935, New York City’s jobless rate was 15 percent; Harlem’s was 40 percent, an acidic level that combined with racism and governmental neglect to corrode the essentials. Public schools that had educated Jesse, Charline, and Carroll were now overcrowded firetraps. A visitor to one found an offensive odor, a dilapidated principal’s office, and ten burned-out classrooms. Hungry children sat listlessly in classes or failed to show up at all. When police work took Battle inside Harlem Hospital, he entered an institution radically different from the one Dr. Louis T. Wright had integrated fifteen years earlier. Patients moved between floors in an elevator shared by garbage. The kitchen ventilation system was long broken. A doctor and nurse performed a bloody operation in a public area in front of twenty-five children. When Battle stepped out of the townhouse and walked east along Strivers Row to the corner of Seventh Avenue, he looked across the street at a block of apartment houses crammed with far too many people. On this block a few hundred yards from Battle’s home, men, women, and children were massed at the city’s highest human density, 620 souls per acre, all struggling for survival.33

  BATTLE’S EIGHTEEN YEARS of indignities and successes had paid off in the job security guaranteed to senior members of the New York Police Department. After Jesse took a job with the US Post Office and moved out, never to become a lawyer, Battle took in two young redcaps as lodgers. Many in Harlem were renting space in their homes and apartments to stay afloat financially. Battle opened the townhouse to supplement a comfortable wage and to do a good turn, one old redcap to a new pair. His income placed Battle on an elevated social plane.

  Three months after the crash, in celebration of Battle’s forty-seventh birthday, Florence welcomed eighteen guests into the townhouse for a seven-course dinner followed by dancing. Less than a month later, Mrs. Maude H. Ferguson played hostess to the Las Estrellas Club in her family’s home, located across the Strivers Row rear courtyard. As reported by the Amsterdam News, Florence was a “Mesdames” of this bridge-playing society. Just weeks later, Battle and Florence entertained sixty-five guests at a bridge party, dinner, and dancing in celebration of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Charline served as tournament timekeeper.

  A family friend doted on her. Henrietta Cachemaille was the wife of a Cuban émigré who made a living as a cigar maker. Charline knew the couple’s son well. A rough contemporary in age, Enrique was a student at Lincoln University, the historically black school from which Langston Hughes had recently graduated. Henrietta, Etta to the Battles, shared their concern that Charline was struggling at Hunter. Charline had finished her first semester in January 1930, and was coming through her second term with disappointing grades: D in Composition, C in Greek and Roman Civilization, C in Elements of Economics. It was an unhappy time for Charline. In 1931, she withdrew from school for six months. Battle would write in longhand that she was “near breakdown” during her studies. To ease her burdens, Battle and Florence sent Charline on a grand cruise with Etta Cachemaille. On June 25, 1932, they boarded the SS Pennsylvania and set sail for Los Angeles via Havana and the Panama Canal. Etta had just lost Enrique to medical complications following a car accident and, grief-stricken, she was only too happy to have Charline’s company.34

  The steamer was equipped with the latest amenities, including en suite bathrooms in some first-class cabins and a swimming pool. Its course soon reached the heat of southern waters. Charline donned her bathing suit, only to be told poolside that the Pennsylvania’s five hundred passengers were welcome to swim as long as they were white. She dove in and “used the pool without question the rest of the trip.” In Los Angeles, Charline and Etta attended the 1932 Summer Olympics before returning cross-country by train with stops to visit Yosemite National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Salt Lake City. There, they stayed in a hotel whose dining room was closed to blacks. Having no other choice, they ate in their room.

  JIMMY WA
LKER AND his showgirl mistress Betty Compton were dining at a roadhouse popular with politicians, gangsters, and businessmen when someone fatally shot Arnold Rothstein in the Park Central Hotel. After midnight, Walker danced with Compton, who was in her stocking feet. A gangster whispered in the mayor’s ear. Walker headed for the door. Holding Compton’s fur, he told bandleader Vincent Lopez: “Rothstein has just been shot, Vince. And that means trouble from here on in.”

  Little did he know. Running for reelection in 1929, Walker faced the loud, pudgy Italian who had welcomed Oscar De Priest into Congress. Fiorello La Guardia ran as a Republican reformer. He relentlessly attacked Tammany Hall, charged that the police had shied from investigating Rothstein’s murder for fear of finding ties to Tammany politicians, and proved that Rothstein had lent $10,000 to a Tammany magistrate. Few listened. A week after the stock market crash, Walker swamped La Guardia. Soon, though, hard-pressed New Yorkers fell out of love with their high-living mayor and Rothstein’s ghost came back to haunt him.

  The magistrate targeted by La Guardia proved to have deposited $165,000 into bank accounts on an annual salary of $12,000. Weeks later, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater withdrew funds, got into a cab, and vanished forever. With the entire court system under suspicion, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a former judge renowned as a paragon of probity, Samuel Seabury, to investigate judicial corruption. Disclosures came quickly. A former waiter named Chile Acuna admitted that he had conspired with vice cops and magistrates to extort money from women by framing them on prostitution charges. The commission discovered that numerous judges had impossibly large bank balances. With evidence of widespread payoffs, Roosevelt expanded the commission’s authority to cover all municipal affairs. Now, New York learned that zoning variances were for sale and that many office holders had swollen accounts. In October 1931, the commission questioned $12,000-a-year Sheriff Thomas Farley about deposits totaling $396,000. The money came from a tin box in his house, he explained, famously adding, “It was a wonderful box.”

  ANARCHY REIGNED ON the streets as the corruption came to the fore. In May 1931, a cop killer named Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley had a two-hour gun battle with police from inside a West Side apartment. Warring between Dutch Schultz and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll killed a five-year-old boy and wounded four children in a shootout. In August 1931, payroll bandits fatally shot a police officer, then led cops on a twelve-mile chase, killing a second cop and a four-year-old girl and wounding twelve people. All told in 1931 and 1932, gunmen killed sixteen police officers and wounded sixty-one. They also hit forty-three bystanders, killing four, in the nineteen months leading up to July 1931.35

  Walker’s police commissioner—Edward Mulrooney now had the job—responded by introducing a momentous technological advance to the New York Police Department. Mulrooney equipped two hundred fifty police cars, harbor launches, two airplanes, and the departmental blimp, Resolute, with two-way radios. The vehicles hit the streets on February 23, 1932, the first dispatch stating: “Motor patrol 500 respond at once to Room 1, ninth floor at 20 Exchange Place. Two men attempting to pass a forged check.”36

  As chief of detectives, Mulrooney had been Battle’s superior officer. Now, he elevated Battle from detective sergeant to acting lieutenant with command of a twelve-man crew known as a Radio Gun Squad. The assignment moved Battle from solving crimes after the fact to heading a forerunner of today’s SWAT teams, on the front lines, where gunmen were killing or wounding cops at a rate faster than one every two weeks.

  Standard radio patrols called for pairs of officers to drive fifteen- to fifty-square-block zones.37 The Radio Gun Squads had larger territories and served as backup on the most serious calls. Typically, four plainclothes detectives and a chauffeur manned a “high powered automobile, with radio, tear gas bombs, sawed-off shotguns, gas masks, night batons and revolvers,” as Battle described the vehicle. Siren blaring, Battle rode with his men where and when he chose. They made “excellent arrests, also assisted many policemen in trouble,” and once took a man into custody after a 2 a.m. gun battle by gangsters associated with Dutch Schultz. The man turned out to be a cop who was working for Schultz. “Much pressure was brought to bear on me that morning to have this policeman released,” Battle remembered. He stood his ground, won the cop’s conviction—plus a five-hundred-dollar raise.

  NEW YORKERS WERE so fed up with crime and corruption that Walker canceled the police department’s annual parade. The springtime march of thousands, from which Battle had been barred, would never be revived. Two weeks later, on May 25, 1932, the corruption commission called Walker to the stand. “There are three things a man must do alone,” he smiled. “Be born, die and testify.”

  There was a brokerage account to be explained. A company with a city contract had set up the fund and had generated $26,500 in profits for Walker without a penny’s investment. The mayor had no credible explanation. There was a second brokerage account to be explained, this one opened by a businessman seeking a subway system contract and producing $247,000 for Walker, again without a penny’s investment. The mayor had no credible explanation. Nor could Walker charmingly chat his way past a Paris vacation financed by a man to whom he had granted a bus franchise, or the $451,000 his brother had amassed on a $6,500 salary. Walker faced removal from office by Roosevelt in the thick of his first winning presidential campaign.

  “Jim, you’re through,” former governor and White House contender Al Smith told him.

  On September 1, 1932, Walker resigned and sailed with Compton for an extended European stay. Two placeholders then occupied the mayor’s office. Who would be police commissioner, the second was asked. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet,” he answered.

  The power vacuum extended until November 7, 1933, when Fiorello La Guardia, “the Little Flower,” as his first name translated from Italian, won election and filled the void to bursting.

  THERE WAS NO telling what Battle would meet on leaving for duty. The anxieties of a street cop’s wife heightened for Florence as the roll of the murdered grew. Gunfights with holdup men killed Officer Peter De Carlo in Brooklyn, Officer George Gerhard on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Officer Joseph Burke in Harlem, on Seventh Avenue, two blocks south of Strivers Row. Although the shootings abated in 1933, they extended a long shadow over life.

  Danger was equally real for Wesley. Increasingly, misfits filled his company. The department transferred in men who “had bad records or were always in trouble, or men who had no friends political or otherwise,” he remembered. None too happy, Wesley’s conscripts faced among the city’s most challenging firefighting duties. Flammable materials filled the loft buildings that surrounded the station, creating traps prone to smoky blazes and collapse.

  Wesley and his men had stood their ground in the cellar of a five-story SoHo loft where fire had broken out between the floor of a restaurant and the basement ceiling. They retreated from the flames when ordered by a chief, regained their breath, and plunged back into the inferno.

  Twice, Wesley reached the brink of death. At one fire, he led Company 55 in rescuing four families from a burning tenement. Smoke inhalation killed one of his men and knocked Wesley unconscious. The crew placed an oxygen mask over his face as he lay supine on the sidewalk. Two hours elapsed before he revived. In 1933, the company answered an alarm in a loft building occupied by firms that worked with fabrics. Wesley led seven men to the fourth floor, only to have the blaze come up behind them. Blinded by smoke and choking on the fumes of burning cotton waste, the eight raced to the roof. Several were incapacitated. The sole hope was rescue from below. Wielding hoses and carrying inhalators, squads ascended fire escapes. They administered oxygen before Wesley and his men scaled to safety behind streams of water.38

  By then, the word was out that Wesley had aced the captain’s exam and was sure to get called for promotion, assuming that the fire commissioner was of a mind to grant blessings. Battle heard the news while vac
ationing over Labor Day. He wrote to his former protégé on September 6, 1933: “It is my earnest desire that you will receive your promotion in the near future. Don’t rest on your oars, continue until you have attained the very highest rank as I know that you deserve same. . . . With kindest regards to your dear family and also your good father.”39

  Off duty, Battle maintained the social life of a Harlem burgher. He introduced Etta Cachemaille and Fannie Robinson, Bill’s wife, to the police commissioner when they needed a permit for a fund-raising dance. He and Florence hosted several hundred guests for dinner and dancing at a club in celebration of their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, and they donated a silver cup, the “Battle Trophy,” to be awarded to the winners of a bridge tournament.

  At home, Carroll had worked his way through high school. He was a popular teenager and had inherited Battle’s athleticism. Battle insisted that Carroll would follow Jesse and Charline in earning a college degree, because that was what Sam Battle’s children did. Carroll enrolled in New York University, where he played basketball and joined the Rameses Club, a social organization that had hosted a dance for five hundred in Harlem, entertained by Nappy and his Orchestra. Meanwhile, on better psychological footing, Charline was finishing a bachelor’s degree in political science. All was in order, and then a young man came calling.40

  Thornton Cherot was graceful and charming. He moved through a color-ruled world with a light skin tone and European features. On surface inspection, Jim Crow would easily have overlooked the African American lineage handed down to the son of Baldomero Cherot and the former Fanny DuPont.

  Baldomero could be traced to Ecuador; he was of Quechua Indian and French extraction. Fanny was likely the descendant of a white grandfather and black grandmother. She appears to be white in a photograph taken later in life. Thornton Cherot was the fourth of Baldomero and Fanny’s children. The contributions to Thornton’s DNA explain his appearance, while his social place derives from racial strictures. The state of Virginia delineated those, first setting a standard that a person was white unless more than one-quarter black, then lowering the mark to one-sixteenth, and then, in 1924, decreeing that “the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”41