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

by Browne, Arthur

  Hopes had, of course, been dashed.

  Harlem was more crowded than ever. From 1930 to 1940, the city’s black population climbed by 131,000, pushing the total complement toward a half-million. Fully 40 percent were on relief or making due with temporary jobs.40 Most of the city’s workplaces remained closed. Worse, industries supplying the British in hope of repelling Hitler’s air assault had hired whites while shutting out blacks. “We have not had a Negro working in 25 years and do not plan to start now,” North American Aviation informed the Urban League.41

  The color line was as rigidly enforced in the military. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in 1940 that segregation “has been proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense.” Separately, he elaborated that “colored troops do very well under white officers but every time we try to lift them a little beyond where they can go, disaster and confusion follows.”42

  Hearing echoes of the Third Reich’s doctrine of Aryan superiority, black leaders grew more militant. The NAACP’s Walter White and A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, planned an unprecedented mass action: a march on Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt and La Guardia attempted to dissuade them at a meeting in New York’s city hall. But after White described the abuses suffered by blacks, the First Lady promised: “I will get in touch with my husband immediately because I think you are right.”

  In June 1941, White and Randolph went to the White House. Face-to-face with Roosevelt, they said the march was set. White remembered:

  The President turned to me and asked, “Walter, how many people will really march?”

  I told him no less than one hundred thousand. The President looked me full in the eye for a long time in an obvious effort to find out if I were bluffing or exaggerating. Eventually he appeared to believe that I meant what I said.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.43

  One week later, Roosevelt issued an executive order barring defense contractors from discrimination in hiring and training, but he left military segregation intact. Some two hundred thirty thousand strong, the peacetime armed forces included fewer than five thousand blacks, and a lone African American general. The navy limited blacks to serving as messmen. The Marines were all white. Even blood donations were segregated. The military reserved plasma refined from African American blood donors for black recipients, never for whites. It made no difference that an African American doctor, Charles Drew, had recently perfected the science necessary to create blood banks.

  Still, after the United States went to war against Japan and Germany, African Americans joined the rush to serve. Many were inspired by the first American hero of World War II, Dorie Miller, who was black. The twenty-two-year-old son of a Texas sharecropper, Miller labored as a messman on the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. As torpedoes tore at the ship, he carried its mortally wounded captain to safety and got behind an anti-aircraft gun. Then he helped rescue crewmembers before abandoning ship as the West Virginia sank. He would die on Thanksgiving Day 1943 in the sinking of the Liscome Bay, still a messman.

  Humiliation, abuse, and violence emanated from the towns that surrounded military bases. In early 1942, servicemen from Harlem became embroiled in clashes that killed six blacks at camps Claiborne and Livingston in Louisiana. Riots erupted at camps in California, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Using the pen name, “A Disgusted Negro Trooper,” a serviceman wrote to the Cleveland Call and Post: “The conditions for a Negro soldier down here is [sic] unbearable and the morale of the boys is very low! Now right at this moment the woods surrounding the camp are swarming with Louisiana hoagies armed with rifles and shot guns even the little kids have 22 cal. rifles and B & B guns filled with anxiety to shoot a Negro soldier.”44

  Battle supported the war effort with typical gusto. During World War I, he had won a commendation for selling war bonds. Now he led numerous fund-raising drives. With Commissioner Valentine’s approval, he also allied with the Urban League and Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research would one day be crucial to the US Supreme Court’s dismantling of separate but equal in Brown v. Board of Education. Together, they prepared two hundred African Americans to take the police exam to fill in for officers who went overseas. To do his own part for public safety, Battle assumed the rank of lieutenant colonel in an auxiliary force called the New York City Police Corps.

  La Guardia called regularly on his parole commissioner for special duties. In June 1942, Greece’s King George II visited New York City to drum up support for his conquered nation. The mayor asked Battle and Florence to join the city’s delegation at a Waldorf Astoria Hotel banquet. Still more stirring, that month, La Guardia assigned Battle to escort to city hall Mrs. Conery Miller, sharecropper mother of Pearl Harbor hero Dorie Miller, when she arrived in New York to be honored at a Harlem rally.

  The war built toward its bloody crescendo. Japanese forces drove seventy-two thousand troops on the Bataan death march. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle made the first bombing raids on Japan, and US troops landed on Guadalcanal. The Americans and British invaded North Africa, while the Germans retreated from a winter assault on Moscow. In 1943, the Royal Air Force and the US Eighth Air Force began round-the-clock bombing of Germany.

  To Florence and Battle, it seemed only a matter of time before Carroll, draft age at twenty-six, would be called to duty. They took respite in Eddy and Charline’s purchase of the cottage in Greenwood Forest Farm. Yvonne, now six, and Tony, now two, would have all the space in the world for play. Florence would have the summer garden she longed for. And, much as on Strivers Row, the Battles would join a community of notables. Yvonne’s young playmates included the daughter of legendary bandleader Cab Calloway.45

  In the spring of 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt planned to again visit Harlem, this time to raise money for Mary McLeod Bethune’s Bethune-Cookman College. Battle looked forward to once more speaking with the First Lady. Taking command, he organized the American Women’s Voluntary Services, City Patrol, and Boy Scouts into an honor guard, complete with a drum major corps. He had become a familiar face to Mrs. Roosevelt. She congratulated him on his new stature as parole commissioner and then made an indelible impression on his spirit.

  This was the day on which he saw the First Lady pour the glass of ice water.

  The temperature that May 2 topped out at almost seventy degrees. Four thousand people filled the Golden Gate Ballroom. Religious and civic leaders delivered tributes to Bethune. Roland Hayes, a tenor, performed. Mrs. Roosevelt’s address made clear her affection for Bethune, along with her belief in equal rights.46 The heavyset, sixty-eight-year-old civil rights leader then took the podium. When she appeared to be burdened by the heat, the First Lady brought the glass of water.

  “I said: ‘This is democracy in action; the wife of the President of the United States pouring a glass of ice water for a Negro woman who’s real black—she’s black as a black shoe—and handing it to her and she was drinking it,’” Battle would recall almost two decades later.

  “I think that Mrs. Roosevelt is the grandest woman living today,” he added. “She’s the most outstanding woman in the world.”

  AMERICA STARTED A replay of the Red Summer of 1919.

  On May 24, white-on-black rioting broke out after the segregated Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company in Mobile, Alabama, promoted twelve blacks among its thirty thousand employees to work as welders. In early June, confrontations between Mexican residents of Los Angeles and servicemen on leave produced more than four days of pitched street battles. In June, in Beaumont, Texas, an eighteen-year-old telephone operator accused a black man of rape. Police shot the man to death. They said he had resisted arrest. Ten days later, a second woman reported that a black man had raped her. Although the woman failed to identify a suspect, as many as four thousand people converged on city hall, dispersed in mobs and ran
sacked black-owned businesses and homes.

  Then came Detroit.

  Expanding defense plants drew tens of thousands of blacks to a city physically unprepared for the influx. Competition for housing grew fierce. The federal government chose two sites for residential construction, one for blacks, one for whites. Plans called for locating the Sojourner Truth Homes in an all-white neighborhood. Protesting whites burned a cross in a nearby field. Only the protection of more than twenty-five hundred police officers and National Guardsmen enabled six African American families to take residence. In June 1943, in keeping with FDR’s executive order, the Packard Motor Car Company promoted three blacks to work on an assembly line that produced bomber engines. Twenty-five thousand white workers walked off the job, one announcing over a loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a nigger.”

  On a warm Saturday evening three weeks later, a car accident on Belle Isle, a recreation area in the Detroit River, triggered a dispute. An African American man was said to have insulted a white sailor’s girlfriend. Groups of blacks and whites squared off, and the fighting crossed the river into the city. The violence intensified with a false rumor that a white mob had thrown a black mother and children into the river. A second false rumor enraged whites. They took as truth a claim that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman. Racial warfare gripped Detroit for three days. The mayor and governor dithered in bringing police and federal troops to bear. When finally they took action, the violence had killed thirty-four people, including twenty-five blacks, most of them slain by the police.

  NEW YORK WAS on edge. Frederick Randolph Moore published front-page photographs of blacks who had been beaten by whites. The Amsterdam News blared, “Hell Breaks Loose in Eight Cities,” referring to Detroit, Beaumont, and Los Angeles, plus confrontations in Chicago; El Paso, Texas; Inkster, Michigan; Chester, Pennsylvania; and Collins, Mississippi.47

  La Guardia urged New Yorkers to remain calm. “If any white man provokes or instigates assaults against a Negro group, I will protect the Negro group and prosecute the white man,” the mayor pledged.48

  La Guardia had special concerns because his normally good relationship with New York’s black community had become strained. The police had shuttered the Savoy Ballroom, a landmark Harlem nightspot. Many believed the cops had responded to complaints about interracial dancing. Far worse, La Guardia had selected the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to develop an apartment complex on Manhattan’s East Side that is today the bedrock community Stuyvesant Town. Metropolitan Life had a hundred thousand policyholders in Harlem, employed virtually no blacks, and had announced that the housing would be open only to whites.

  With anger running high, the NAACP’s Walter White traveled to Detroit to investigate the uprising. La Guardia sent Deputy Chief Inspector Edward Butler, who was white, and Battle’s old friend Lieutenant Emmanuel Kline, the seventh African American to have joined the force. They reported back that the Detroit police had, in effect, “encouraged the whites and had made the Negroes feel that they had no protection.”

  La Guardia then summoned leaders including White, Battle, and the Reverend Johnson to Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, to draw plans for avoiding a riot and for responding should violence break out. There was agreement that the police should show restraint. Police officers would patrol in pairs and be accompanied by superior officers. No one would fire tear gas except as a last measure. Bars would be closed. Pawnshops that sold guns would be guarded. Police would protect passengers in buses and cars. Battle and White “both warned of the mounting emotional tension over the highly publicized mistreatment of Negro soldiers, and that any manhandling of colored men in uniform might quickly be interpreted as racial if the officers involved were white.”

  A drumbeat of hostility toward black servicemen picked up. On July 17, the headline of the Age front page read “Negro Soldiers in Two States Seize Guns, Use Them in Protest Against Treatment; One Killed, 7 Injured.”

  Then, Battle’s prophecy to La Guardia came true. Drawing on his recollections, Hughes wrote:

  On August 1, 1943, a white policeman in Harlem shot a Negro soldier in the back. Within an hour, the second race riot in the history of Harlem was in progress. The shooting happened in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel, just down the street from the stage door of the Apollo Theater on West 126th Street in Harlem. That night a woman and a man got into an argument in the lobby. The desk clerk called a patrolman. The patrolman attempted to restrain the woman and pull her away from the man. A Negro soldier, seeing a white officer maltreating, as he thought, a colored woman, remonstrated with the officer, who resented his interference.

  Some say the soldier tried to pull the policeman away from the woman, others say not. Some say the soldier wrested the policeman’s nightstick from him, struck him, and then ran. At any rate, the policeman fired as the soldier turned away, and the bullet struck him in the shoulder. Just as in the 1935 riots where the crowd spread a rumor that a colored boy had been beaten to death, and it was not true, so in this case the rumor went over Harlem that a white officer had killed a colored soldier for no good reason—had shot him in the back.

  This was not correct either. The soldier did not die. In fact, he was only slightly wounded. But before anyone knew this, mobs had surged into the streets, remembering all the black soldiers who had been shot, beaten, intimidated, and Jim Crowed all during the war up to that time. The mobs remembered, too, the beatings Harlem itself had taken through the long years of the Depression. They recalled more recently the names given Harlem in the newspapers of New York—“Black belt,” “muggers,” “dangerous.” A great many folks evidently thought they might as well become dangerous. So they did.

  Crowds surrounded the Braddock Hotel and the Twenty-Eighth Precinct stationhouse. Some threatened to kill the officer who had shot the soldier. La Guardia arrived to confer with Valentine. They flooded Harlem with cops. Valentine issued orders that grew out of La Guardia’s Gracie Mansion meeting: officers were to protect property, but they were to use deadly force only in response to mortal danger. White arrived at the stationhouse. La Guardia said they would tour the area in a police car. Fearing terrible repercussions if the mayor were to be injured, White said he would sit beside the window with La Guardia in the middle seat. La Guardia refused the offer. “They know my face better than yours,” he told White, “so you sit in the middle seat.”

  As they drove, White saw that “wild eyed men and women, whose poverty was pathetically obvious in their shabbiness, roamed the streets, screaming imprecations.” A brick crashed through a storefront window. A fire broke out.

  “Heedless of his own safety, La Guardia jumped from the car and screamed at the crowd before the building,” White would recall. “I doubt that in the excitement the Mayor was recognized, but such was the fury with which he lashed out at the marauders that his moral indignation shamed and quieted the crowd, which rapidly dispersed.”49

  Another time with La Guardia, White witnessed a scene that broke his heart. He wrote in a memoir:

  I remember especially a toothless old woman in front of a grocery store who moved about the edge of a crowd which had just smashed a store window. In one hand she clutched two grimy pillow cases which apparently she had snatched from the bed in which she had been sleeping. With the other hand she held the arm of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, possibly a grandson. The minute an opening appeared in the crowd the old woman, with an agility surprising in one of her age and emaciated appearance, climbed through the broken glass into the store window to fill the pillow cases with canned goods and cereals which lay in scattered disorder. When the bags were filled she turned toward the street and looked toward the police car in which La Guardia and I were sitting. Exultation, vengeance, the supreme satisfaction of having secured food for a few days, lighted her face, and then I looked at the sleepy-eyed child by her side. I felt nausea that an abundant society like America’s could so degrade and starve a h
uman being, and I was equally sickened to contemplate the kind of man the boy would become under such conditions.50

  Shortly after 1 a.m., La Guardia made the first of five radio broadcasts appealing for calm. At 1:30, mayoral aides reached Battle at Greenwood Forest Farms. Racing along the highways, he reached Harlem shortly before 3 a.m. and discovered that “the shops along 125th Street were a shambles.”

  “Because of my handling of the 1935 riot, I was given carte blanche, to take whatever action I deemed wise,” he said, adding, “The police had orders not to shoot, so the mobs paid them little mind. They scattered at a raised nightstick or the approach of a mounted cop only to reform again further down the street.”

  Finally, Battle issued an unprecedented order directly to the mayor of New York City and to White. “Although the head of the strongest organization in the world for the protection of racial rights, the NAACP,” White “was himself so light in complexion that he looked like a white man,” Battle told Hughes. “I requested both him and La Guardia to go home. I asked: ‘Walter, you and the mayor are both too white to be riding around Harlem on a night like this. Neither of you are an asset to calming things down. The fewer white faces in evidence, the better, until order is restored.’ They left.”

  The mayhem abated at dawn. Detroit’s upheaval had extended for thirty hours and spread across the city; Harlem’s had lasted twelve hours and had been contained to the community. Thirty-four had died in Detroit; twenty-five at the hands of police. Six had lost their lives in Harlem; four of them shot by cops. Two officers had acted in clear self-defense. One cop had killed two fleeing looters in apparent violation of orders. La Guardia’s leadership won wide praise.

  Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to La Guardia. She had heard from many about the need for additional African American officers and she had gotten to know Battle as a nearly solitary example of black police leadership. She advised the mayor that, with deeper black ranks “there might not be such instances as the past regrettable one.”