One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (10 page)

Left unmentioned was the intense animosity that greeted blacks. In December 1905, the
New York Herald
had reported that buildings once “occupied entirely by white folks have been captured for occupancy by a Negro population.” The
Herald
’s use of the word “captured” reflected the prevailing tendency to describe arriving blacks as “invaders,” an “influx,” or a “horde.”

The rhetoric was accompanied by antiblack action. First, whites fled, often in panic. The
New York Times
described the scene in 1905 after the owners of two buildings accepted black tenants: “The street was so choked with vehicles Saturday that some of the drivers had to wait with their teams around the corners for an opportunity to get into it. A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are invading the choice locality is pouring into the streets. Another equally long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the household goods of the whites from their homes of years.”
⁷⁵

As white departures further depressed real estate values, landlords banded together. Many appended restrictive covenants to their deeds that barred sales or rentals to African Americans. When Battle left for work in the morning and returned at night, he walked by covenanted buildings. When he strolled the neighborhood with Florence and Jesse, he walked by covenanted buildings. He passed them on 129th and 130th streets. He passed them on 131st, 135th, and 136th streets, more than two hundred in all. A typical covenant barred occupancy by “any negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon of either sex . . . excepting only that any one family . . . may employ one negress or one female mulatto, or one female quadroon or one female octoroon as a household servant.”
⁷⁶

The antagonism surrounding the family was more personal and collectively held than any Battle had experienced. By moving uptown, he had crossed one of the invisible boundaries that circumscribed African American life in New York. He was allotted the space where men toted luggage, but he was barred from the territory where men were professionals. He was shunned in the neighborhood where he lived, but he moved enthusiastically in black society, in the Elks, in the Mother AME Zion congregation, among the bright lights of Negro Bohemia.

At home, Florence matured from sixteen to eighteen into a wife and mother beyond her years. Jesse thrived under her care and in his father’s big arms. Then, as Jesse approached two years old, Dr. Roberts confirmed that Florence was once again pregnant. Hoping the baby would be a girl, the Battles launched into preparations. Most pressingly, they searched for an apartment better suited to a family of four. At 27 West 136th Street they found a place that accepted blacks and moved in. It was there, on July 8, 1908, that Dr. Roberts delivered Florence D’Angeles Battle, her middle name hailing the baby as sent by the angels. At twenty-five, Battle was the proud father of two.

But joy was short-lived.

At little past three weeks of age, Florence contracted
cholera infantum
, then a terrifying illness likely caused by poor sanitation and now easily treatable by antibiotics. The condition afflicted children with severe diarrhea, violent vomiting, high fevers, and, eventually, dehydration. Often it was fatal. The only available—and ineffective—treatment was Mixture Cholera Infantum, a compound developed by a New York doctor in 1901 and sold today under the brand name Pepto-Bismol.

With Dr. Roberts at her side and Samuel and Florence struggling night and day to ease her agony, little Florence fought for life for more than a week. At the age of one month and one day, she died. Her death certificate set the time of death at 3:30 a.m. on August 9, 1908, and the place of death as “tenement.”
⁷⁷

After a small funeral, Battle and Florence made a mournful pilgrimage across the East River by ferry and then by wagon into the Queens countryside to an Episcopal Church cemetery. Death had never been so close for Battle, and the toll on Florence was severe. To spare her the pain of confinement where the baby had died, Battle insisted that the family should travel by train to a black Elks convention in Detroit. The redcaps turned out in force to send Battle, Florence, and Jesse off with good cheer, and the Elks families did their best to provide comfort. At the convention’s end, Battle took his wife and son for a late summer respite from New York’s heat at the seashore in Atlantic City.

THERE WAS BAD
news while Battle was in Detroit. Horrific white-on-black racial violence erupted in Springfield, Illinois. The police had arrested two black men for unrelated crimes, one on a charge of slitting a white man’s throat after, it was believed, attempting to assault a white girl, the other for allegedly raping a white woman, a claim that was later retracted. A crowd surrounded the jail. Furious that the sheriff had spirited the two men away, the mob trashed black-owned businesses, and killed a barber who tried to defend his shop and hung his body from a tree. Under the watch of as many as twelve thousand people, rioters set ablaze a black neighborhood and cut firefighting hoses.

The intensity of the violence was greater than anyone could remember. The eruption had occurred not in the South but in the North, and not just anywhere in the North, but in the city that had sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House and in which the Great Emancipator was entombed. After visiting Springfield, journalist William English Walling wrote a magazine article headlined “Race War in the North.” He concluded with words: “Yet who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid?” In New York, Mary White Ovington took the question as a challenge and began gathering allies to meet it.

AT ROUGHLY THIS
moment, three African American men gathered with history-changing purpose in Doyle’s Saloon on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 136th Street.

J. Frank Wheaton—a friend of Battle’s from the Elks—was born in 1866 to a father credited with having been the first black to vote in Maryland after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Wheaton graduated from Storer College in West Virginia and studied at Howard University before becoming the first African American to graduate from the University of Minnesota Law School.

A gifted orator, he won election in 1898 to the Minnesota legislature, another first for a black man. He represented a district whose population of forty thousand included only one hundred African Americans. He won passage of a civil rights law that expanded equal access to public places and transportation. In 1905, Wheaton moved to New York, served as an assistant district attorney, opened a law practice, and became “the most loved man in Elkdom.”

Bert Williams—a comrade from Battle’s nights at the Marshall Hotel—was born in 1876 on the island of Nassau in the Bahamas. His father brought Williams to New York at the age of two and then to Riverside, California, where Williams graduated from the public high school. He let pass an ambition to become a civil engineer to go into show business. He began by playing the banjo in minstrel shows, moved into vaudeville, and teamed with fellow performer George Walker.

The duo, Williams and Walker, introduced New York to a two-stepping dance called the cakewalk. Their rendition, performed with two women, became a craze. In 1902, they made black theatrical history by opening a musical comedy in a Times Square theater. They took the hit to London and were invited to Buckingham Palace to entertain the Prince of Wales on his birthday.

J. C. Thomas was born in Houston on Christmas Day, 1863, and worked as a steamship cabin boy, eventually moving to New York at nineteen. While serving as a steward in private clubs, Thomas took a course in embalming and then opened a funeral parlor for African Americans in the Tenderloin, becoming the dominant funeral director in the region. He also invested in real estate, scoring a windfall when the Pennsylvania Railroad bought up the neighborhood for construction of a majestic Penn Station. His six-foot frame and Van Dyke beard reminded many of a Virginia planter.

Wheaton, Williams, and Thomas each put a hundred dollars on the bar at Doyle’s Saloon as a contribution to forming the Equity Congress, an organization dedicated to seeking social equality in practical terms. The proprietor, Doyle, a neighborhood Irishman whose first name is lost to time, also kicked in a hundred dollars, earning a place as the Equity Congress’ fourth founding member. Whether Doyle did so out of principle or simply to buy goodwill among a growing black customer base will never be known.

Wheaton, Williams, and Thomas set two goals. The first was to force open to blacks those areas of the civil service that had been closed: the New York City police and fire departments. The second was to persuade New York’s legislature and governor to establish a black National Guard regiment that would give the state’s African Americans entry into the US military.
⁷⁸

IN THE FIRST
week of 1909, Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, and social worker Henry Moskowitz began planning to issue a “call” on the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. They recruited white progressives, including Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the
New York Evening Post
and grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and then they enlisted blacks, including W. E. B. Du Bois, the intellectual spirit of the modern civil rights movement, and Battle’s pastor, the Reverend Alexander Walters. On February 12, the group issued a manifesto that concluded: “We call upon all believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.”

Now seen as the founding event of the NAACP, the call was a ray of light for African Americans. Fully twenty years earlier, Reverend Walters had joined Timothy Thomas Fortune to form the National Afro-American League and had renewed the failed dream of founding a national civil rights organization after the US Supreme Court endorsed the concept of separate but equal in
Plessy v. Ferguson
. But now the Lincoln’s birthday call of 1909 engendered fresh hope, because committed whites had for the first time joined the cause.

“I did not know personally Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary White Ovington or W. E. B. Du Bois but I rejoiced in their courageous action,” Battle told Hughes four decades later.

The call led to conferences in New York in 1909 and 1910, out of which the NAACP emerged. Battle closely followed developments. His readings, his associations with blacks of achievement, and his experiences in the superior and inferior worlds had schooled him in America’s racial crimes, from the slavery that had chained his parents to the ingrained prejudices that chartered less for his life and threatened to do the same for Jesse. A young man who was now drawn to action, he joined the nascent NAACP.

“I am a life member,” Battle said. “I have been a member since the organization was founded.”

AS THE NAACP
was germinating, on the morning of March 30, 1909, the
20th Century Limited
rolled into Grand Central carrying America’s most cheered and feared black man. Arthur John Johnson—Jack Johnson—was the newly crowned world heavyweight boxing champion, the first African American to win the title. Battle pulled rank for the privilege of carrying his bags.

Johnson was a figure of great fascination to the onetime bullyboy who now sparred in the gymnasium of St. Cyprian’s Church on San Juan Hill. The big man from Galveston, Texas—six feet tall, 190 pounds—punched with precision and evaded blows feinting backward. Much more, he had broken America’s most jealously guarded color line.

“I will never fight a Negro. I never have and never shall,” champion John L. Sullivan had pronounced in 1892, reinforcing a seemingly eternal understanding that blacks were welcome to fight blacks and could match up against whites in lesser bouts—but never for the heavyweight crown.

Those restrictions notwithstanding, boxing was the single professional sport in which African Americans had a shot at making a living. Some excelled, and white society grew wary. In 1895,
New York Sun
editor Charles A. Dana gathered the inchoate fear into words: “The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.”
⁷⁹

Johnson embodied Dana’s fevered imaginings. He won fight after fight until there was no one left to defeat—except the world champion, if ever the world champion would grant a match. Outside the ring, Johnson reveled in celebrity. Smiling through gold-capped teeth, he favored flashy clothing and drove fast cars. Most combustibly, he kept company with women, many of them white.

In time, Johnson would pay dearly for his “unforgivable blackness,” as Du Bois would famously write. Now, though, he had goaded titleholder Tommy Burns into a fight in Australia by branding Burns a coward.

“I’ll fight him even though he is a nigger,” Burns finally declared, and the
Sydney Truth
blared, “De Big Coon Am A-Comin.”

News stories made clear that white America vested combat between men of two skin colors with mythic significance. Something deep in its psyche dictated that the better race, rather than the better man, would win. Blacks, on the other hand, had rooted for a Johnson victory as proof that African Americans would succeed in any field if given the opportunity.

So, Battle had thrilled to read press accounts of the fight: Johnson knocking Burns to the canvas in the first and second rounds, Johnson drawing blood and closing Burns’s eye. Johnson taunting, “You punch like a woman, Tommy.” Johnson seeming to support Burns round after round so the pummeling could continue. The police entering the ring in the fourteenth to spare Burns further punishment. The referee declaring Johnson the victor. The crowd plunging into mournful silence.

Three months later, Johnson came to New York to entertain at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre with displays of athleticism and boxing prowess, doing five shows a day and earning $7,000 for a two-week run. When the
20th Century Limited
pulled in, cavernous Grand Central was jammed by thousands of people, most of them black.