One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (16 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
The chief and his family again rented space in an overwhelmingly white community, and Wesley again took a desk among white children in a public school. Fewer than a dozen African American families lived in the neighborhood. Monthly, they gathered in a clubhouse to discuss how to help their children advance in life. They drummed in that young blacks had only three paths to success: as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or in other professions; as entrepreneurs with independent capital; or in civil service positions. The chief made sure that, just a few years from manhood, Wesley heard the message in the hope that he would act accordingly. But, headstrong and fixated on bodybuilding, Wesley had his own ideas.
WOODROW WILSON WAS
inaugurated the twenty-eighth president of the United States on March 4, 1913, with black Americans looking forward to his administration. He was an unlikely vessel for hope. Wilson’s heritage was in Virginia. As president of Princeton University, he had discouraged black applicants. As a historian, he had depicted the Ku Klux Klan as an understandable post–Civil War attempt at white self-defense.
W. E. B. Du Bois and Reverend Alexander Walters had met with the candidate during the campaign. After Walters explained that shifting fifty thousand black votes away from the Republicans—the party of Lincoln—to Democrat Wilson could be decisive, Wilson gave Walters a written vow that he had an “earnest wish to see justice done in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling.” Du Bois then gave Wilson a wholehearted endorsement, helping him to secure unprecedented backing among black voters.
Disappointment came swiftly. While the Equity Congress pressed to open New York’s civil service to blacks, Wilson permitted the start of Jim Crow segregation in the federal workforce. Still worse, he spurned pleas to condemn lynching. With Southern Democrats flying the banner of states’ rights, Wilson dismissed the killing tide as a matter to be dealt with locally, not federally.
Meanwhile, in Harlem, white residents continued to struggle desperately to bar blacks through restrictive covenants. As the
Age
described the documents: “The property owners bind themselves not to allow any part of their premises to be occupied in whole or in part by any Negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon of either sex either as a tenant, guest, boarder, or occupant in any other capacity, way or manner. Tenants of each house or flat may not employ more than ‘one male and one female Negro or two Negresses, mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons to perform the duties ordinarily performed by a household servant.’”
20
The Equity Congress voted to explore whether such a covenant was legal under the law of the day. No one was sure, and frustration was all the more intense because the group had made little progress on its founding goals. It had hoped to open the police department to African Americans—and so far, the black ranks had grown to only two members. Similarly, it had hoped to open the fire department, but no volunteers had stepped forward for the mission. Everyone recognized that firefighters would be even more hostile than cops, because firefighters shared living and eating quarters for days on end. About the only bright spot for the Equity Congress was passage of legislation authorizing a black National Guard regiment.
After two years of lobbying, the group held what the
Age
described as “a big jollification meeting.”
21
Charles Fillmore, the once lonely colonel of the provisional regiment, had by now enlisted one thousand men into his unofficial brigade. Many were eager to join a fully sanctioned National Guard unit. They never got the chance. The regiment’s champions learned that there was a far distance between authorizing a unit and activating a unit. The governor withheld the activation order in accord with prevailing belief that blacks neither merited the honor of military service nor could be trusted to bear arms.
22
* * *
AS
1913
CLOSED
, Battle shepherded a third young African American onto the force. The department assigned Jasper Rhodes to the West Forty-Seventh Street stationhouse in the heart of the wild Tenderloin. “As the first Negro there, he was given a rough road to go for a while,” Battle recalled. “Jasper would fight at the drop of a hat, so he soon gained a certain respect after his initial hazing was over.”
Battle, Holmes, and Rhodes concentrated both on exceeding all the demands of the job and on asserting simple social equality. Battle became the anchor on the department’s tug-of-war team and, with Rhodes, he attended the police summer camp in Brooklyn. Twice, Battle won “the fat man’s race,” a hundred-yard dash for men over 225 pounds and, he remembered, “Jasper always won the white cops’ money at dice.”
Clearly, Battle had the most desirable posting. Not only was he respected by Harlem’s growing African American population, his fellow officers increasingly appreciated the value of his dark skin.
“I recall one Negro girl refusing to be arrested by Patrolman Anton Strausner, crying, ‘I don’t want no white police to arrest me. Send for Battle to arrest me.’ She appealed to a passerby, ‘Don’t let this white man arrest me,’” Battle remembered.
About that time I arrived and Strausner turned her over to me. It was a good thing for a hostile crowd had gathered.
So bitter was Harlem’s resentment at having no officers of their own color in the area that, before my transfer there, there had been instances of Negroes taking a prisoner away from a white policeman. When I was sent to Harlem, I inherited not only the ordinary problems that the guardians of the law have everywhere, but the added problems of a racial situation made acute by the American color line. But to Harlemites, even one Negro patrolman seemed better than none.
BRIGHT AS HE WAS
, the Chief’s son, Wesley, left school at the age of sixteen after finishing the eighth grade. Hours spent sculpting his every muscle group had proven more attractive than homework and had delayed the young man’s progress. Years later Wesley would joke: “I was so large that the custodian of the school went to my principal in my last term and said that if I was not graduated he was going to quit his job. He said he was sick and tired of raising my desk and chair so that my legs would fit under the desk. So the principal must have felt that his custodian was more necessary than I to the school. That is how I was graduated.”
Still, Wesley remembered his teachers as “true friends” who had “endeavored to guide me correctly,” most of all warning “that a criminal record would bar me from a civil service position and to a Negro that is a calamity.” Wesley would place one teacher in particular among the people “who played a most important part in my life and fortified me for the battle that was to come.” This Mr. Freund “patiently counseled me at a very critical and emotional period of my life,” he would recall.
Finished with education and starting what was to become a life’s relationship with sixteen-year-old Margaret Ford, Wesley needed a job. Since he was too young to hope for appointment to a government post, New York offered only two options: he could seek the menial employment of a
boy
or he could sign up for dangerous labor with an employer none too concerned about race or age. Choosing the latter, Wesley knocked boldly on the door of a construction company that was digging a subway tunnel under the East River from the foot of Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Flynn and O’Rourke relied on the sweat of newly arrived European immigrants and African Americans. Mary White Ovington wrote: “New York demands strong, unskilled laborers. To some she pays a large wage, and Negroes have gone in numbers into the excavations under the rivers, though a lingering death may prove the end of their two and a half or perhaps six or seven dollar a day job.”
23
Wesley’s physique was ideal for working with heavy loads and heavy machinery. A foreman put him on a gang in a dark, dank shaft that smelled of grease, stone dust, and the residue of explosives. Near the Manhattan shore, the tunnel bored through bedrock. Dynamiters set off charges drilled into a stone face. Then, sand hogs, as tunnel workers are still known today, hauled away the chunked rock. Tradition, superstition, or wise practice forbade whistling or singing for fear that musical vibrations could dislodge stone overhead. To minimize the peril, scalers—Wesley among them—poked the newly exposed tunnel top with twenty-foot-long steel rods to break free unstable portions. It took speed to dodge the collapsing rock—more speed than some men proved to have. In that era, roughly forty workers died every year in all forms of accidents while building or tunneling for the subways.
24
Closer to the Brooklyn shore, the tunnel dome consisted of the riverbed’s sandy bottom. Here, construction engineers filled the shaft with compressed air to hold the silt in place and keep river water from draining through. Too little pressure and the sand would collapse; too much pressure and the air would rupture the sand upward, in both cases flooding the tunnel.
25
When such a blowout had occurred in an earlier tunnel, a sandhog named Richard Creegan attempted to plug the fissure with a straw bale that was on hand for such an emergency. The air pressure sucked Creegan up into the hole, shot him through the riverbed and the river, and jettisoned him into the air. Amazingly, Creegan survived. Not so three men who were sucked into a blowout in Wesley’s tunnel.
26
Two weeks after Wesley started work, a New York State Labor Department doctor visited the site. A foreman ordered Wesley to the surface with the warning that the doctor likely wanted to verify that he was of age to work in the tunnel. On the way up, Wesley prepared to lie.
“How old are you?” the doctor demanded.
“Eighteen,” Wesley answered, guessing that to be the legal limit.
“Don’t you know that you cannot work in the tunnel unless you are twenty-one years of age?” the doctor asked. “Now I am going to repeat the question. How old are you.”
“Twenty-one,” Wesley responded, and back down into the hole he went.
Soon enough, the grueling work in miserable conditions convinced him to study for a civil service exam. Meanwhile, Chief Williams pressed his independent-minded son to leave the high risk of injury or death he faced every day. Finally, after Wesley turned seventeen, the Chief pulled strings to secure a redcap’s job at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s magnificent new terminal across town from Grand Central. There, Wesley found toting luggage “equivalent to a four year college course in humanities.” Off hours, he and Margaret fell into young love.
THE WORLD CHANGED
on June 28, 1914.
For reasons obscure to Americans, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife. In short order, Europe cascaded into World War I. None of it seemed the business of the United States, and no group felt more remote from the fighting than African Americans. Only in hindsight, is it clear that the war shaped their destiny and American race relations.
The hostilities curbed the European immigration that had provided inexpensive labor to America’s expanding industries. Needing bodies at the right price, northern manufacturers trolled the South with the promise of jobs that paid more than plantation labor. The pull proved irresistible and the Great Migration from the South that would eventually number more than six million American blacks gained steam.
New York’s black leaders used the war to renew the push for a military regiment. General Nelson Miles, who had served in the Civil, Indian, and Spanish-American wars, offered discouraging counsel to a meeting of the Equity Congress. Calling the conflict “as little called for as any that has ever occurred on the face of the globe,” he said African Americans would be foolhardy to participate in a fight that “bid fair to be the most destructive war ever waged.”
Miles advised blacks to consider giving up on America entirely, saying “perhaps the intelligence acquired in the past few years by your race may be utilized as a great civilizing force for the great black belt of Africa with its 100,000,000 of inhabitants.”
27
The outcome was even more frustrating when a delegation of black leaders won a White House audience with Wilson in hope of holding the president to his campaign pledges. In a heated dialogue, William Monroe Trotter, editor of the
Boston Guardian
, told Wilson: “Two years ago, you were thought to be a second Abraham Lincoln. Mr. President, we are here to renew our protest against the segregation of colored employees in the department of our national government.”
Wilson tellingly said: “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.”
28
Here was the president of the United States saying that black citizens should gratefully accept the lesser stations to which they had been consigned rather than risk the undeterred retributions of white society. Here was the personification of the American promise, a man who had postured as a champion of “cordial” justice, sending a message to Battle that his courage in seeking equal opportunity had been misplaced.
Then, as 1915 dawned, a sensational movie devoted the power of the flickering image to glorifying white-on-black vigilantism. Directed by D. W. Griffith,
The Birth of a Nation
employed compelling new techniques of cinematography to—purportedly—portray Southern history from the Civil War through Reconstruction. Its very essence, Battle knew, was a grotesque lie.
Where Thomas had been forced to buy his freedom, where Thomas and Anne had instilled faith and the work ethic in their children, where Battle had left his parents in a South ruled by Jim Crow, where Anne still suffered the indignities of a lesser citizenship,
The Birth of a Nation
presented the region as dominated by drunken and vengeful blacks, a species whose men lusted for the sexual conquest of white women. The heroes who rode to the rescue were the white-hooded horsemen of the Ku Klux Klan.
