One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (15 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
“Kill the nigger. He’s got a gun. Lynch him,” the mob yelled.
After running the man to ground, whites kicked their quarry in the head and face until two cops with guns drawn fought through the melee to save him.
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At work, the muscle of onetime bullyboy Battle proved indispensable. The law was ruggedly enforced. A bit of clubbing or a liberal pummeling saved the trouble of a court appearance and was surely more effective as a deterring punishment. As Battle explained: “I gradually but regrettably came to believe, along with the other officers, that there was as much law at the end of a nightstick as there was on the statute books.”
A man who knew how to handle himself was much valued in the NYPD, all the more so if he also had the courage of his physique. Battle was bigger, stronger, and more athletic than any man in the precinct, and he had honed his fighting skills in the recreational boxing ring. Yet he took what his fellow cops dished out with outward stoicism, never so much as raising his voice or responding with profanity.
And then one day Battle had had enough. As he approached the stationhouse on West Sixty-Eighth Street, white cops who were hanging about uttered the word “nigger” within his hearing one too many times. His patience now gone, Battle delivered a challenge: if they wanted to fight, he would take them on, one or all.
“Any of you men, any man here, or any series of you here, that has anything against me, leave your guns, your billies and your blackjacks upstairs,” Battle declared. “I’m going down to the cellar, and I won’t have anything but my fists. Come down one by one. If you’re not able to go back up, after a certain length of time send another one down. Anything that you have against me, take it out on my black behind.”
Battle descended the stairs in front of every available eye, ready for anyone who had the bravery to follow him. None did, and Battle took significant ground in establishing that his stationhouse mates would afford him a minimum of dignity.
Similarly, Battle combined size and strength with courage to command respect in the line of duty. Given the opportunity, he also evened the score of black and white cracked skulls. As transcribed and polished by Hughes, Battle recalled:
One night when I was sleeping in the flag loft, about two a.m., the call came to go post haste to the aid of the patrolmen of the San Juan Hill district. Since it took some time to hitch up the horse-drawn patrol wagons, (“Black Marias” as they were called) we started out from West 68th Street on foot on the double.
As we passed the firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue, one of the firemen yelled, “There go the reserves—Battle in the lead.” I outran the others. We beat the patrol wagons to the scene of the riots. This was my first emergency call, and I was anxious for action.
When we got to the scene of the fighting in the streets, fists were flying, derbies were being smashed, and missiles flying from roof-tops. One man had already been killed and a number injured. The area was in turmoil. Our superior officers immediately gave orders to use our nightsticks to clear the streets, so we swung into the fray.
I was, of course, the only Negro, among the police, therefore doubly open to attack from the angered whites in the mob. The Negro rioters were in the minority. Nevertheless, my fellow policemen managed to club down two or three Negroes for every white. Therefore, to even things up, I began to club down the whites.
When things had finally quieted, I was assigned to the corner of West 62nd and Amsterdam, with orders to allow no one to loiter on the sidewalks. Just before daybreak four young white hoodlums stopped at the corner and refused to move.
“Get along,” I said.
They didn’t budge. When I repeated my order to move on, one of them made a racially profane insulting remark to me. I placed them under arrest. They resisted, so physically I was forced to tackle all four. I subdued them before assistance arrived. When help from other officers did come, I refused it and held all four of my prisoners myself until the Black Maria took them away, which gave saloon commentators material for conversation for the rest of the week. This conflict established my ability to hold my own in the district and from then on I was respected.
One night I was assigned to do a special post in Hell’s Kitchen where people often seemed to enjoy fighting. But the saloonkeepers and businessmen did not enjoy having their establishments broken up. Just before midnight I was standing in front of a saloon at 52nd Street and 10th Avenue when one of the habitués came out and said to me, “Officer, this is a bad place to stand. You know ‘Paddy, the Priest’ was killed right on this spot.” “Paddy, the Priest” had been a well-known gangster. I replied, “That is just why I am standing here, sir, so if anything happens, I will be in the right place.”
Hardly five minutes passed before a free-for-all broke out in a bar just down the block toward 9th Avenue. I went in with my nightstick swinging. In a short time order was restored. Peace reigned and nobody lifted a hand against me, so I was not compelled to make any arrests. By this time I had become well known in the area. Sometimes I needed only to walk into a bar and the fighting would stop.
Eventually, two officers broke the wall of silence.
Jimmy Garvey had joined the force after Battle, so he had not participated in the conspiracy of silence. Still, it took spine for a lone Irish Catholic to stand apart from peers who were so closely knit by nationality and faith that it was accepted practice for a man to skip out while on duty to attend mass. Garvey spoke openly to Battle, man-to-man in a budding friendship, as he proved himself to be a young cop’s cop, eager for any duty.
Abraham Stewart was a sergeant who happened to be Jewish. He asked Battle’s permission to share the flag loft in order to better prepare for the lieutenant’s exam. “I know it’ll be quiet, where you are,” Stewart explained.
“You don’t have to ask me, you’re a sergeant, but I’m glad to have you, anyway,” Battle responded. “Each time that we afterwards found ourselves together we talked. He was a friendly fellow and sometimes we checked each other in our studies. Stewart made the top of the list in the lieutenants’ tests.”
With the exception of Garvey and Stewart, the wall of silence remained largely intact when Battle was detailed to election night duty in a precinct headquartered on Manhattan’s East Side. After trying to pass the night reading in a chair rather than enter a second-floor bunkroom, he climbed the stairs in the grip of exhaustion. The room was dark. No one could see who he was. He crawled into an empty bunk and heard the conversation turn “to that colored cop.”
Surprising Battle, one man said, “I understand he’s a pretty good guy.”
“Battle’s OK,” a cop from his precinct answered, further surprising Battle.
He lay without speaking while the officer noted that Battle had never complained and always did more than his share of the work. The officer also said that some of the precinct’s cops were starting to regret his silencing.
“I thought, these boys haven’t got such a bad heart after all; they’re just a little weak-kneed, that’s all,” Battle concluded with great generosity.
FLORENCE BROUGHT HAPPY NEWS
. Once more, she was pregnant. Almost four years after tiny Florence D’Angeles fell prey to
cholera
infantum
, Battle looked forward to welcoming a new life into the family. He was twenty-nine, Florence was as yet only twenty-three, Jesse was six.
The baby was due by Christmas. Florence’s oldest sister, Elizabeth, came from Virginia to help care for the infant. The holiday passed. Then, finally, while Battle was on duty and with Dr. Roberts at her side, Florence gave birth at home on January 17, 1913, to Charline Elizabeth Battle. Christened at Mother AME Zion Church, she was Battle’s pride from the start.
“My daughter, Charline Elizabeth, was such a pretty born child that I bought for her a special rubber-tired baby carriage with an elegant hood,” he wrote. “In this I used to push her all over Harlem, accepting for myself compliments paid the child’s beauty.”
AROUND THIS TIME
, a young man by the name of Robert Holmes stepped forward to follow Battle onto the police force. Square-shouldered, stocky, and athletic, Holmes lived with his parents, Henry and Ella, a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. Like Battle, he was a member of the black Elks.
Henry and Ella had brought their son north from South Carolina around the turn of the twentieth century.
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Settling in Harlem with hope, they had taken their places among the whites whose tolerance was growing thin. Now, Henry was forty-four years old and afflicted with deteriorating lungs. Ella, who was forty, was losing her eyesight while eking out a living as a laundress. Fearing for his parents’ futures, Holmes was drawn to the police department’s pay and benefits.
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After the Delehanty Institute denied his admission, he studied for the test by correspondence course. Battle happily helped Holmes master the rules, laws, and procedures he would face on the exam. In shared purpose, they became friends, each understanding that this was the way it had to be, one becoming two, two becoming four, accepting the indignities that had to be accepted until they were large enough in number to refuse to accept any more.
Holmes came through with flying colors. So, on August 25, 1913, Battle celebrated Holmes’s appointment as the department’s second black officer. He was proud to have opened the door and was buoyed in knowing that more young black men appeared to be coming behind him. They sought him out, and he gave all the guidance he could. Then, abruptly, Commissioner Waldo propelled Battle to a new milestone.
To root out the corruption that came with excessive familiarity between cops and the public, Waldo ordered every patrolman, sergeant, and lieutenant transferred from three Manhattan precincts, and he replaced them with freshly promoted superior officers and five hundred newly sworn cops. The West Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse was among those cleaned out. Waldo dispatched Battle to Harlem.
The shift marked the department’s first venture into assigning a black officer to patrol a community with a substantial black population. Waldo’s motivations are hidden to history, but there is one indication that African American leaders pressured City Hall to establish a black police presence in Harlem. In a memoir, the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen recounted lobbying the mayor and police commissioner to assign Battle to the community. Cullen was the founder of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and the adoptive father of Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance wunderkind poet like Hughes. The Reverend Cullen recalled that the Reverend Charles Martin, a prominent fellow black church leader, and John B. Nail, the respected black saloonkeeper, joined in the cause. Misspelling Battle’s name, Cullen stated: “We succeeded in having the first colored policeman, who was Policeman Samuel Battles, appointed to Harlem.”
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Battle bid farewell to Abraham Stewart, who had shared the flag loft, and to Jimmy Garvey, who had paid no heed to the conspiracy of silence. Garvey was newly married and was ever more known as a cop who went the extra mile.
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Battle wished his friend well and promised to stay in touch. His last duty on West Sixty-Eighth Street was to square Holmes away on a lonely inaugural assignment. “Holmes was given my squad and post,” Battle wrote. “I gave him my bed and mattress and he occupied the flag loft as I did.”
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The stationhouse covering Harlem was at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. To many longtime white residents he was an “invader,” but, with the influx of blacks growing by the day, Battle’s fellow officers discovered that he was useful.
“They needed me as much as I needed them and sometimes more because some of them were on posts where there were all Negroes,” he remembered. “Then, too, this story had gone out that, ‘He’s a decent fellow,’ and they began to treat me nicely and spoke to me and asked me to join their organizations and things of that kind.”
No more an on-duty pariah, Battle took obvious satisfaction both at being treated more like a peer and at watching Holmes surmount isolation in grand style. They shared pride and amazement at an episode in which officers fired their pistols in the cavalier way of the time. Battle remembered for Hughes:
Holmes first came to the attention of the press on election morning, November 1913. Before dawn that day a herd of short-horn Oregon steers escaped from the New York Stock Company’s yards on the North River. Eight of them tore through 59th Street, scattering in different directions as far as Fifth Avenue.
They terrorized the town on both sides of Central Park. A policeman on 59th Street tried to flag some of the steers down. Failing, he and several other cops commandeered two taxies and with drawn revolvers tried to overtake them individually, shooting as they came in range.
What sounded like a gangster’s ballet along Fifth Avenue aroused the guests in both the Gotham and the St. Regis Hotels. A waiter at the St. Regis rushed out and was shot in the ankle. A night watchman removing a red lantern from the pavement in 55th Street was hit between the eyes and killed. One steer tried to enter Whitelaw Reid’s house, and was shot a few doors away in front of the home of Cardinal Farley.
Meanwhile, along Central Park West, one of the wildest of the animals trampled Patrolman Kiernan, overturned a delivery wagon, and caused panic among early-rising women and children on the streets. Officer Holmes, reporting for eight a.m. duty in the sector, immediately went in fleet-footed pursuit of the beast. He lit in the park.
As the steer turned its head to look at him, Holmes grabbed the animal’s nostrils with his right hand, shutting off its wind. Then with a ju-jitsu twist of one of the horns, he threw the beast to the ground and he held him until his feet were tied. This was the only animal returned to the stockyards intact.
The apartment that had brought Battle’s old friend Chief Williams from Grand Central to Harlem had grown small. He and Lucy had added a fourth child, and after pumping iron, their oldest son, Wesley, had become a broad-backed, barrel-chested, thick-armed fifteen-year-old. The family needed more room. The chief told Battle that he was moving to the rural expanses of the Bronx, to Williamsbridge, where there was enough wildlife and wooded territory to allow for hunting. Although remote, the area was convenient for the Chief because the New York Central had a rail line to Grand Central. The Battles bid the Williamses farewell.
