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

by Browne, Arthur

  La Guardia responded petulantly. He told the First Lady he was beset “by agitators and selfish people or by thoughtless and well-meaning people.” He minimized the degree of police brutality and defended the department’s efforts to recruit blacks. He followed up the next day, telling Mrs. Roosevelt that Harlem residents had complained that black officers were “too rough,” and explaining that the department had 155 African American members, including 6 sergeants, a police surgeon, and a parole commissioner—the retired Battle.

  “Commissioner Valentine would take one hundred right now if he could get them,” La Guardia wrote, blaming the war for difficulty in recruiting African Americans. Left unsaid were two numbers: First, the department had been adding black officers at the rate of only five a year in the three decades since Battle’s appointment. Second, the force should have employed one thousand African Americans if the proportion of blacks in the department equaled the proportion of blacks in the city’s population.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Battle and Florence faced the inevitable. On August 25, 1943, Carroll took leave from the fire department to enlist in the US Army, committed to go where he was called in service of a country at war, the country of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Battle could not help but remember the little boy who had come home on the handlebars of police officers’ bicycles. Florence remembered the thirteen-year-old who had made the honor roll in class 8B-1 of junior high. Everyone knew someone who had gone to duty in the Pacific or Europe. Everyone seemed also to know someone who had fallen in the line of duty. Charline, Eddy, big brother Jesse, and Carroll’s wife, Edith, could only hope for the best. The war had already exacted a toll on Jesse. Too old for active duty, he had taken a job in a defense plant and had lost a thumb pulling a man out of a machine in an industrial accident. Battle embraced Carroll and placed his son’s fate in the Lord’s hands, just as Thomas had done for the son who had left home at the age of sixteen, never again to see his father alive or dead.

  AS WITH MOST aspects of life in New York, corruption held sway behind bars. State institutions like Sing Sing confined the most serious offenders. City penitentiaries held inmates convicted of crimes that carried shorter sentences. The primary one housed sixteen hundred men behind quarried stone on Welfare Island in the East River. The jail was ruled by gangsters Joseph Rao and Edward Cleary. The crime bosses lived comfortably in hospital dormitories, Rao favoring silk shirts and expensive cigars, Cleary tending to a pet dog named Screw Hater. They made their livings importing narcotics via carrier pigeons. Shortly after La Guardia became mayor, his correction commissioner staged a naval assault to reclaim the jail. In the ensuing investigation, two former prisoners swore that well-connected inmates had advised purchasing paroles through Battle’s nemesis-turned-benefactor, Jimmy Hines.51 The parole commission chairman insisted that political influence played no role in any of the board’s actions. When La Guardia named Battle a decade later, the same man was still chairman. Whether or not he had ever been corrupt, cash could enter the picture as inmates sought to buy release from behind bars. Battle told Hughes of spurning the occasional dirty deal: “Once in a while I was offered money to use my influence in releasing prisoners, sometimes innocently and sometimes with knowingly unlawful intention of bribery. One Italian mother who scarcely spoke English, desperately anxious for the release of her son, threw herself on her knees in front of my desk, weeping and begging me to take a roll of bills she pulled from her purse if only I could hasten the freedom of her boy. I gently refused, and explained to her as clearly and simply as I could how our laws and regulations work.”

  In a more sinister case, the family of a man convicted of “the indecent handling of young girls” used political channels to offer Battle cash for a favorable ruling on a quick release from prison. “When I refused this offer, some of the politicians of his district told me in no uncertain terms that they would see to it that I got nowhere should I ever attempt to run for political office,” Battle told Hughes, adding that he ignored the threat and kept the man behind bars.

  Battle also gave Hughes a nutshell description of how he identified prisoners meriting release. “My function on the parole board, as I saw it, was to assist in the rehabilitation of those who have, in varying degrees, outraged society,” he said. “This could not be done justly, I felt, without duly considering those very essential factors which establish the odds for or against an offender’s rehabilitation, and to find the factors one had to look well into his past life.”

  When La Guardia appointed Gehrig and then Battle, Executive Director David Dressler of the state division of parole doubted the mayor had chosen wisely. He later came to believe that Battle “made up the real backbone of the Municipal Parole Commission.”52

  THE ARMY SENT Carroll for basic training at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana. Notorious to black Americans, the base was both segregated and in the heart of Jim Crow South. The indignities of even a New York City firehouse paled in comparison with the hostile caste structure of the nearby town of Alexandria. In 1942, the black press reported that three thousand African American troops had rioted there. While the circumstances and toll were unconfirmed, the Amsterdam News front page informed the Battles: “Six Soldiers Reported Killed in Dixie Rioting.”

  Frightening and outrageous news arrived steadily. When Private James Smart died in the Camp Claiborne hospital, the commander shipped his flag-draped casket home to Union Springs, Alabama. He provided Smart’s mother with a first-class railroad ticket, allowing her to accompany her son’s body. The trip required changing trains at Monroe, Louisiana. There, a conductor separated mother and son, limiting her to a Jim Crow coach and giving her a receipt for a refund of the difference between the cost of first-class and Jim Crow travel. Despite legal representation by future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, three black Camp Claiborne soldiers were sentenced to hang for the alleged rape of a white woman. When nine sick Camp Claiborne soldiers were transported to a distant hospital, they made an overnight stop in Texas, near a base that was beginning to house German prisoners of war. One of the nine described what happened in a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier:

  The only place that would serve us was the lunch room at the station. But we couldn’t eat where the white people were eating. To do that would contaminate the very air of the place, so we had to go to the kitchen.

  About 11:30 the same morning, about two dozen German prisoners of war came to the lunchroom with two guards. They entered the large room, sat at the table. Their meals were served them. They smoked and had a swell time.

  There they sat; eating, talking laughing, smoking. They were ENEMIES of our country, people sworn to destroy all the so-called democratic governments of the world. And there we were. Men sworn to fight, to give our lives for this country, but WE were not good enough to sit in the lunchroom.53

  Battle did what he could: with twenty-five other Harlem residents, he sent a telegram of protest to President Roosevelt:

  We learn that white soldiers brought back from overseas for recreation and relief from battle are to be given approximately two weeks each at government expense at luxurious hotels and resorts at Lake Placid, Santa Barbara, Hot Springs, Miami Beach, Ashville, and perhaps other pleasure places. But Negro soldiers are to be required to go to the Theresa Hotel in New York’s Harlem and Pershing Hotel on Chicago’s South Side. Such a plan is a reprehensible act which is an insult to Negroes buried in foreign soil, having died in the belief that they were fighting for democracy.

  SIX MONTHS INTO his training, Carroll came home on his only leave—home to his wife, Edith; home to Jesse; home to Charline, Eddy, and their two children; home to Battle and Florence. College-educated, athletically gifted, trained as a firefighter, Carroll had done well among his black comrades. He had already made corporal. The family bid Carroll farewell with a party in the great old townhouse. He returned to Camp Claiborne as a stepping-off point for Europe.54

  LIFE WAS CHANGING for Wesley as wel
l. After twenty-two years of often heroic service, he requested a transfer from the Hell’s Acres of Lower Manhattan to a battalion headquarters closer to his home in the Bronx. He cited in his application to Commissioner Patrick Walsh: “Serious nervous illness of my wife and the fact that all of the children have married and there is no one at home with her at the present time.”

  “It is a 44 mile round trip from my residence to work,” Wesley noted. “Also this is my first and only request for a transfer in close on to 23 years of service.” When Walsh gave no break to the new leader of the Vulcans, Wesley turned for help, ever so politely, to an old friend of his father’s from the glory days of Grand Central Station—former New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith.

  “Should you be kind enough to bring this to the attention of our very humane and just Commissioner Patrick Walsh, I am sure that he will do it if it is possible,” Wesley wrote.

  Six months later Wesley renewed his request. Finally, Walsh approved a transfer to an area that had far fewer serious fires and placed Wesley close to his wife of twenty-seven years.55 The duties were easier, but the department’s racial degradations became ever more severe.

  IN 1944, WHITE firefighters up through the hierarchy united to stop the department’s black ranks, small as they were, from growing. A captain newly assigned to Harlem established Jim Crow beds for his few African American firefighters. Propelled by the insult to the heart of black America, Wesley and the Vulcans planned the then-radical act of picketing. When word reached City Hall, La Guardia ordered the captain transferred. The Vulcans stood down only to see a different captain install Jim Crow beds in a Lower Manhattan firehouse. This time the Vulcans appealed for La Guardia’s help in a tellingly unsigned letter. The writer begged the mayor’s pardon by stating: “Anonymity is usually associated with a cowardly attack, but it should be obvious that were I to sign my name to this letter, life would be made so intolerable for me that it would be impossible to continue in the Department.” A month later, the unnamed writer reported to La Guardia that the captain had ordered a lieutenant in charge of yet another company “to adopt similar ‘Jim Crow’ tactics.”56

  To Wesley’s disappointment, the mayor appeared to take no action. With segregation proliferating, he pushed the Vulcans into a public stand. Years later he would recall that, as a senior battalion chief, he was largely impervious to retaliation, while others faced severe jeopardy. “It took courage for the young colored fireman who was just starting his career. With a family to think of, he had everything to lose should he have been dismissed from the department,” Wesley would say.

  As a first step, he led a six-man committee to notify Commissioner Walsh that the Vulcans had voted unanimously to seek a meeting with the mayor “regarding certain flagrantly undemocratic practices of racial discrimination in some firehouses.” The committee reported that the department would assign no more than three African Americans to a single company in order to maintain segregated beds. Company leaders often posted the names of black firefighters on specific bunks. The committee also reported that the Vulcans had compiled a list of every firehouse with Jim Crow beds, offering three examples as evidence.57

  When Walsh agreed to meet with the Vulcans, Wesley, accompanied by an NAACP lawyer, opened the discussions. Walsh signaled both cooperation and exasperation, telling Wesley, “I do not know why God made colored people but I guess he knew what he was doing.” Meanwhile, white firefighters pressured La Guardia to close his door to the group. Wesley responded by asking a prominent black judge to intercede with the mayor. He wrote: “The fact that (white opponents) so far have been successful in preventing our group from seeing the Mayor has caused the opposition to take greater courage and become more brazen than ever. In fact to such an extent that instead of the condition (Jim Crow beds) remaining static or improving for the better, it has become worse and is right now spreading to other companies in the department.”58

  The firefighters union president, a man named Kane, promised Walsh that union members would pass a resolution permitting any firefighter to select with whom he would rotate a bed when shifts changed. What Kane didn’t know was that his delegates included an African American who had passed for white and who had kept the Vulcans informed about union strategy.

  The spy revealed that Kane planned to extend the meeting long into the night so that everyone but his loyalists would drift away. Then he would introduce and pass the resolution. Wesley rallied the Vulcans to stay for as long as the meeting lasted and, more important, he enlisted the help of his battalion aide-de-camp, who happened to be Jewish. The aide spread a rumor that the union planned to apply Jim Crow rules to Jews. Jewish firefighters turned out in force. Together, the blacks and Jews not only defeated the union resolution but passed one of their own, which Wesley described as “an emancipation proclamation for we Negroes in the fire department.”

  The impact was minimal. When La Guardia continued to demur and Walsh failed to order full integration and equal treatment, Wesley enlisted Councilman Benjamin J. Davis—a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School and the only African American member of the municipal legislature—to convene a hearing into the Vulcans’ complaints. On December 14, 1944, Wesley led a delegation into a City Hall showdown. With fire department brass seated along one wall and the Vulcans facing them across the chamber, Wesley testified that the department’s sixty-seven black firefighters were assigned to twenty-six firehouses. Twenty of the companies had imposed segregated sleeping arrangements, he said. He told of beds screened off and of beds beside the toilets. He told of communal tables that were closed to African Americans and of companies that prohibited African Americans from sharing spare helmets and equipment when necessary. Davis urged the council’s City Affairs Committee to launch an investigation to substantiate Wesley’s testimony. His white fellow councilmen refused. Instead, they voted to give the fire department time to make reforms, thereby avoiding a politically explosive confrontation and perpetuating a racial structure that many accepted as the natural order.59

  Still, Wesley counted the very fact of a public hearing as a victory. Soon enough, he faced bitter reality. Ten months later, he outlined worsening abuses for the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had now been elected to Congress. He told Powell: “The Negro firemen of the New York Fire Department are in hopes that some courageous person will help us.”60 In truth, Jim Crow beds and commissaries were only the most visible representation of the department’s hostility. More insidiously, commanding officers barred African Americans from driving rigs and serving as hook-and-ladder tillermen. Central administrators excluded blacks from working as building inspectors, turning away even a graduate of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The medical office marked the files of black firefighters with a “C” and provided segregated services. All too predictably, the brass excluded African Americans from parades.

  Progress came in painfully slow increments, in large measure because La Guardia, who spoke from the heart about racial equality, accepted the prejudices of his fellow white citizens as a fact of political life. His biographer Kessner wrote: “Many of the plain New Yorkers whose cause he championed were biased against blacks. They were not prejudiced in the same way as some of the southern bigots who participated in lynch mobs and straight-out violence, but rather in a way that was more insidious. They would deny blacks a job, refuse to live near them, view them as inferior human beings, and deny their children equal opportunities. As mayor, La Guardia worked with such people, understood them, did not think that they were necessarily evil, and sometimes compromised with them.”61

  La Guardia’s mayoral successors similarly accommodated the racial animus that prevailed in the firehouses—so much so that more than half a century later, blacks would compose no more than 3 percent of the fire force.

  In April 1944, the newspapers carried brief accounts of the death of Casper Holstein at the age of sixty-four. He had been released from prison, had lived in near poverty
, and had suffered a stroke. For two years, a man named Alverstone Smothergill had cared for Holstein in Smothergill’s apartment. The papers described Smothergill as having once been a beneficiary of Holstein’s generosity. A few other grateful beneficiaries paid for a funeral and for a gravesite, which kept Holstein’s body from burial in a pauper’s grave. Battle was one of the few people who attended the service for a man who had given so much to so many, who had helped propel the fleeting cultural Renaissance, and who had been so easily forgotten so quickly.62

  THE WAR TOOK Carroll to the beach at Normandy on D-Day and then on the long hard march across France and into Germany in a segregated unit attached to Patton’s Third Army. Battle and Florence could only pray they would never get a knock on the door. After being delayed by her duties as a mother, Charline finally graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a master’s degree in psychology. She enrolled Yvonne and Tony in private schools in Lower Manhattan that offered superior educations, first the Little Red Schoolhouse for kindergarten, then City and Country, whose faculty included music teacher Pete Seeger. Battle began to work with Eddy and Charline to expand the cottage at Greenwood Forest Farm. Carroll came home from the war as a top sergeant of an outfit that had fought in the decisive Battle of the Bulge. He was invited to take a staff job in the fire commissioner’s office, but he preferred the excitement of responding to fires in a hook-and-ladder crew.

  AT MIDNIGHT ON December 31, 1945, La Guardia’s third and final term came to a close. A far different man followed Battle’s great mayoral patron into office. William O’Dwyer had arrived in New York as an Irish immigrant boy with twenty-four dollars in his pocket. He had worked as a grocer’s clerk, coal shoveler, plasterer’s helper, bartender, and police officer during the heyday of Tammany rule. Then he had gone on to become a lawyer and Brooklyn district attorney before realizing his mayoral ambitions, despite a history clouded by apparent favors to organized crime figures.