One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (11 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
Red-topped cap on his head, Battle wove a hand truck down the platform. Tenderloin cabaret king Baron Wilkins, who had backed Johnson with money, led a welcoming committee. Well aware of both the man and his nightclub, Battle greeted Wilkins and stood by to serve.
Johnson disembarked into an uproarious swirl. Perhaps the only man there who was larger in height and weight than the champion, Battle pushed through the jostling crowd to collect Johnson’s bags and followed the entourage to the street. A dozen large open-topped touring automobiles waited at curbside. Johnson and Wilkins climbed into the lead car while a brass band played “Hail to the Chief.” They pulled away for a drive to Wilkins’s Little Savoy cabaret, where Johnson was accustomed to staying in a rose-and-gold-hued room. Battle watched them go, thinking about a black man who had upended the world.
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SIX MONTHS LATER
, in August 1909, while the NAACP was still gelling, Battle saw the drive for national activism merge with rising calls to integrate the New York Police Department. First, in the pulpit of the Bethel AME Church, the Reverend Reverdy Ransom urged the appointment of black police officers in a sermon that illustrates how constricted American racial attitudes were. He declared that African Americans belonged in the NYPD not as a matter of equal opportunity but to better crack down on the misconduct of blacks newly arriving in the city from the rural South. “We who are continuously denouncing the whites should show our honesty, broad-mindedness and sincere desire to see that the laws are not broken by being as equally willing to condemn and seek to bring to justice the disreputable members of the race,” Ransom said.
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Fortune’s
Age
played Ransom’s sermon on the front page—only now Timothy Thomas Fortune was gone from the great paper of his founding. He had succumbed to a problem with drink, and there was a new force in the ownership: Booker T. Washington had covertly invested in the
Age
with the aim of countering rising criticism of his leadership in other organs of the black press. Washington installed as editor Frederick Randolph Moore, the son of a slave mother and a white father who had started his career as a US Treasury Department messenger. Moore accompanied the
Age
’s report on Ransom’s sermon with an editorial whose thoughts were more apologetic than acidic: “The resentment of the loafing Negroes of 127th street Sunday afternoon against the policeman performing his duty was entirely uncalled for and vicious. The Negro has copied this method of resisting the law from the foreign colonies in New York and it is to be vigorously condemned by every respectable and race-loving Negro.”
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A week after Ransom’s call, congregants packed the pews of Battle’s Mother AME Zion Church, now moved from Greenwich Village to a house of worship at the corner of West Eighty-Ninth Street and Columbus Avenue, for an appearance by New York’s second-highest elected official. Standing in for a vacationing mayor, Board of Aldermen President Patrick McGowan announced that he supported opening the police force to African Americans. The
Age
reported: “The Acting Mayor declared that he long had been of the opinion that Negro police in certain sections would end the clashes between the police and the blacks and, therefore, favored having Negro police.”
Moore’s approving editorial was vested with wishful thinking: “The Negro has had a deep and deterring suspicion that politics play the important part in the selection of the policemen. Now to be assured by the city government that the Negro passing the examination will be treated with absolute fairness will doubtless encourage numbers of qualified Negroes to try for the force.”
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At this point, a new figure stepped to the fore with an appeal to
Age
readers. As a lieutenant of Tammany Hall Democratic boss Richard Croker, Edward E. “Chief” Lee was the city’s most powerful African American political operative. Before the turn of the century, Croker had realized that persuading blacks to vote for Democrats rather than for Republicans, still seen as members of the party of Lincoln, could be crucial to gaining an edge. He promised to “place at least one colored man in every department of the city government,” and he installed Lee as head of a patronage-dispensing Tammany club called United Colored Democracy.
On September 2, 1909, Moore’s front-page headline challenged: “Chief Edward E. Lee Tells
The Age
That Negroes Refuse to Qualify for Positions—September 11, Last Day for Filing Applications.”
The story went on: “Chief Lee contends that the absence of negroes from the police force of Greater New York is not due to color prejudice existing in the Police Department, but because in the past members of the race have been backward and unwilling to take the examination. Within the past four years but two Negro applicants have taken the examination and they failed to prove equal to the test.”
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AMID THIS SURGE
of advocacy, Battle decided to be the one. He set his mind on joining the New York Police Department, fortress of a closed white circle guarded by clubs and guns. Decades later, he portrayed his decision as one of routine economics: with a growing family, he saw no chance for advancement as a redcap and no hope of a pension. He also knew that he was smarter, better read, stronger, spoke clearer English, and knew far more about New York and America than many of the Irish cops he encountered on the street. If they could do the job, so could he.
The police department’s nightstick racism frightened Florence, but she gave her blessing to a job that, by rights, should have been anyone’s to claim. Battle then raised the possibility with a handful of friends. They predicted defeat and counseled against fighting a lost cause. Wary of failure, he retreated into privacy. He chose to be just another applicant and not to stand out as
the
black man who was daring to try for the police department. At all costs, he wanted to avoid having it known that he had washed out. Hundreds of men fell below the hiring mark every time the department replenished the ranks. That was expected. But he would become a black man who wasn’t good enough, confirming what so many whites said—that blacks just weren’t good enough.
The test was competitive. Ranking toward the top on the hiring list would be crucial. Among the exam topics were the Penal Law, the Code of Criminal Courts Act, the Dance Hall Law, the Civil Rights Law, the Education Law, the General Business Law, general city ordinances, arithmetic, and expertise in getting around the city. A good memory was a big plus.
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Would-be police officers typically took classes at the Delehanty Institute, a school that readied candidates for civil service tests. Battle found his way there, only to be barred from admission. Director Michael J. Delehanty would not allow a black man into a course for the police department, nor would his white students. Except for Florence, Battle was on his own.
He told Hughes, who wrote:
I bought a book, “How to Become a Patrolman,” purchased from “The Police Chronicle” for fifty cents. My new book indicated other volumes, lists and useful materials which I secured. I used every available moment of free time for study. I carried my books in my pocket while on duty at Grand Central and I spent most of my lunch hour concentrating on them. After I had swept up behind the horses at the cabstand and finished my other cleaning duties, I read while waiting trains. By the time I got home in the evenings it would often be after eight o’clock. As soon as supper was over, I would tackle my studies again. I sometimes fell asleep in my chair after a hard day’s work.
My greatest difficulty was in memorizing addresses, streets, place names and locations. For memory training, my wife used to read to me paragraphs from newspapers and, an hour or two later, I would see how much I could repeat to her word for word.
At the age of twenty-six, Battle strode into the test center on the appointed day in 1910. He was alone among 637 white faces. They could not turn him away because blacks were entitled by law to sit for civil service tests. At home afterward, Battle told Florence that he seemed to know the material. They would have to wait to find out whether he had known enough. When the city published the roster of results, Battle found his name at the 199th place—in the top one-third of the pack, easily high enough to be called for the mandatory physical.
He had work to do. Knowing better than to report as just another rookie, Battle turned for advice to the men who knew what it was like to be black in a police department. Wiley Grenada Overton, Philip W. Hadley, John W. Lee, and Moses P. Cobb told Battle that being a good cop would not be good enough. They told him that he would have to be better than the best white cop. And they told him that he would have to weather mistreatment with silent grace, because the department had too many ways to get a man.
While Battle waited to be called for his physical, The Reverend Reverdy Ransom made a fresh push to open the department. A new president of the Board of Aldermen, John Puroy Mitchell, had stepped in as acting chief executive while Mayor William Gaynor recuperated from an attempted assassination. Ransom won an audience with Mitchell.
“We presented a request to him first, to appoint some Negro policemen, not only on regular patrol duty, but also to the city parks,” Ransom recalled in a memoir. “Mayor Mitchell throughout the whole interview was both evasive and not committal, and finally disgusted, I said to him, ‘Mr. Mayor, it looks like you refuse to appoint Negroes to police duty, even in the parks of the city. Is it because you are afraid they might spit on the grass and kill it?’”
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NO SOONER HAD
Jack Johnson won the heavyweight crown than the cry had gone up: America needed to knock the black interloper off the throne. Former champion Jim Jeffries became the Great White Hope. The bout was set for San Francisco, July 4, 1910. In the run-up, Jeffries worked out with a fury that returned him to fighting trim after six years spent in retirement on a California alfalfa farm.
Cabaret king Baron Wilkins sent Johnson off to California with a promise to bet big on his friend. Johnson telegraphed on arriving: “Send me seventeen thousand out here as the odds are better. Betting very brisk. Am in tip-top shape and will win sure.” The
Age
proudly reported that Wilkins had quickly assembled “Negroes of betting proclivities” into “a pool with a view to making a killing on July 4.” They wired $20,000 “with instructions for Johnson to bet the entire amount on himself.” Twenty thousand dollars then is the equivalent today of roughly a half-million dollars.
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At almost the last minute, the governor of California barred the fight from his state. The promoters hurriedly found a new location in the wilder territory of Reno, Nevada. There, early in the afternoon on America’s birthday, with the temperature topping one hundred degrees, Johnson and Jeffries ran through their final warm-ups. In New York, thirty thousand people jammed Times Square to read bulletins posted on three sides of the
Times
building, and thousands more gathered to get the news in Herald Square. Wilkins’s best customers milled around a ticker-tape machine specially installed in the Little Savoy’s basement gambling hall.
Perry Bradford, the musician, remembered: “In came Lovie Joe, opened his mouth and said that he had that money to bet on Jeffries, Barron called that bet and told Lovie to go back to the syndicate and bring some real money, no more pennies. Lovie came back with twenty thousand dollars more. So Baron covered that bet and asked Lovie Joe if he got any more money.”
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At 2:46 p.m., the Fight of the Century began disappointingly. Johnson, at 208 pounds, and Jeffries, down to 227, spent the first round shoving and bumping more than punching. In the fourth, Jeffries opened a cut in Johnson’s mouth, and whites across the country cheered the telegrapher’s news: “First blood for Jeff.” Their exultation was short-lived. From the fifth round on, Johnson took increasing command. In the fifteenth, Johnson knocked Jeffries to his haunches with an upper cut and three lefts. Jeffries got to his feet before the count reached ten. Johnson put him down again with a left. Jeffries’s seconds reached through the ropes to help him stand. Johnson administered four blows and stood over Jeffries, cocked to put him down if he dared rise. Jeffries’s corner threw in the towel.
In shared psychic defeat, the taunts of racial passion cooled into silence, while, twenty-seven hundred miles away in Herald Square, “You could hear a pin drop midst the big crowd which had been screaming every time Jeffries hit Johnson,” Bradford remembered. Inside the Little Savoy, Wilkins climbed atop the bar and called out, “Everybody have some champagne on the house.” A sporting man named Dude Foster paraded around shaking two bottles of champagne, waving thousand-dollar bills that he’d won wagering on Johnson and proclaiming, “I am God’s gift to women. All you beat up gals, and what came with you, if you need any of that little thing called money, see the Dude.”
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Meanwhile, carrying a purse of $121,000, Johnson headed east by train. Along the way, he got reports that white-on-black rioting had erupted like “prickly heat all over the country,” in the
New York Tribune
’s memorable phrase. Racial violence that night in Houston, Washington, Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and numerous other cities and towns would leave as many as twenty-six people dead. In New York, white gangs attacked with such frequency in the blocks around the Little Savoy that wounded blacks arrived at the Tenderloin stationhouse at an average rate of one every fifteen minutes. Whites assaulted blacks on West Fifty-Third Street, where Battle had dined at the Marshall Hotel. On the West Side, a mob of two hundred chased a black man toward Central Park, relenting only when a white doctor held them off with a gun, not far from the home of Battle’s former employers, the Andreinis. A short walk from Battle’s Mother AME Zion Church, crowds cheered as a band of young toughs known as the Pearl Button Gang set upon blacks. A few blocks from McBride’s Saloon, where Battle had eaten lunch with fellow redcaps, someone called for a lynching, someone produced a rope, and “the negro was in a fair way to swing into eternity,” when police arrived. On San Juan Hill, near where Battle had set up house with Florence, a white mob set fire to a tenement occupied by blacks and tried to block the doors until firefighters reached the scene. Just down the street and around the corner from Battle’s Harlem apartment, whites dragged a black man from a trolley after crying, “Let’s lynch the first nigger we meet.”
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