One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (20 page)

Now, word spread that an African American would be assigned to a firehouse. Woodson got the news when the black-oriented
Chicago Defender
published a story. He wrote to Wesley with advice that was remarkably similar to Battle’s: “Do your work and do it as near perfect as you can” and “do everything the commanding officers tell you to do, no matter what it might be, do it.” Woodson also counseled: “If they speak of our race before you, in your presence, as niggers, pay no attention—go and do something or take a newspaper and read.”

While Battle and Wesley accepted Woodson’s words as wise counsel, they also took for granted that Wesley would need more than forbearance: they expected that he would have to use his fists. Wesley had learned self-defense at the Colored Men’s Branch of the YMCA under the training regimen of wrestler and judo black belt C. A. Ramsey. He and Battle would also run through boxing workouts there. They were in excellent company because two of the greatest heavyweights of the day trained at the Y. Sam Langford had come up through the ranks known as the “Boston Tar Baby,” had lost to Jack Johnson early in his career, and had spent years seeking a rematch that was never to come. Jeremiah “Joe” Jeanette had fought Johnson seven times before Johnson claimed the world title and then was denied a further bout. Both fighters had held the colored world championship. They happily ran Wesley through sandbag and punching bag drills and sparred with him.

“Look, you better stay in shape, Sonny,” they warned, “’cause when you get downtown with them Irishmen—you are going to have to defend yourself.”

IN FRANCE, THE
regiment fought on through the bloody concluding thrusts of the war and was the first to reach the Rhine. Never having fought under the American flag, the men who had been ridiculed as “darkies playing soldiers” were now the renowned “Hellfighters of Harlem.” They had spent 191 days at the front, longer than any other company, had never surrendered a foot of ground, and had never lost a man to capture. Two hundred had given their lives in combat and eight hundred had been wounded.
⁶¹

A little more than a month after the armistice, on December 13, 1918, the French pinned the
Croix de Guerre
on the regimental colors of the 369th in recognition of the unit’s courage and sacrifices. The men then returned to the indignities that came with serving under American command. At the port of Brest, a military policeman clubbed a private for the affront of interrupting the MP’s conversation to ask for directions to a latrine. Orders barred MPs from saluting officers of the 369th, white or black, because, Major Little was told, the “niggers” were “feeling their oats.”

WESLEY’S APPOINTMENT TO
the New York City Fire Department came through on January 10, 1919. He was assigned to Engine Company 55 in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood renowned as Hell’s Hundred Acres. The buildings were of two kinds: tenements whose wooden construction was akin to kindling, and factory lofts filled with flammable materials and supported by cast-iron columns that were prone to melting and collapse in a fire. By New York Central and subway, the firehouse was two hours from Williamsbridge. The long commute seemed the department’s way of telling Wesley that he was not wanted. Firefighters tended to work close to home, and dozens of firehouses were closer to Williamsbridge.

Concerned that the brass had begun a campaign of harassment, Chief Williams took advantage of Thorley’s Tammany Hall connections to get word to the fire commissioner that Wesley was in the department to stay. The commissioner responded that the door was open, but once through, Wesley would be on his own. With that sure understanding and with last words of love and support from his parents, Margaret, and Battle, Wesley set off to face what came. He could see his destination from far down the street. Opened in 1899, the firehouse was among dozens that had been ornately designed in a burst of construction. Its three stories had a brick and limestone façade and a copper-tiled mansard roof. A tower rose an additional eight feet and was fitted with hooks that allowed for hanging hoses down through the firehouse to dry after use. A single arched doorway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn equipment dominated the front and was topped by a carved stone banner, “55 ENGINE 55.”

The company’s sixteen men anticipated Wesley’s arrival. Some were on the street. He greeted them. They said nothing. He walked into a long, rectangular, vaulted chamber and reported for duty to a captain named Doyle. The entire company had been alerted to watch. Doyle ostentatiously stormed into retirement. The men expressed their feelings with mute hard glares. Wesley asked about equipment and accommodations. Responding to the most limited extent possible, the men pointed him to a second-floor bunkroom. They had removed a bed from the standard arrangement and had set it aside by the toilet. This was where he would sleep during a workweek that entailed staying on duty for five straight days, with four hours of free time each day. Wesley took the bunk without complaint.

Deprived as Battle had been of man-to-man workplace instruction, Wesley absorbed rules and routines by observation, as a campaign of harassment unfolded. When he went upstairs to the second floor, the men went downstairs, and vice versa. After his first meal at the company’s communal table, a firefighter broke the plate and drinking glass that Wesley had used, setting a standard practice of throwing out any kitchen utensil that touched a black man’s lips. A lieutenant assigned Wesley to stationhouse cleanup, as was customary for a rookie. The work included emptying spittoons—and, for Wesley, extended to finding them filled with urine. Every firefighter filed for reassignment, most writing on transfer requests that they refused to work with “a nigger.” The commissioner barred transfers for a year.
⁶²

Depending how close a firefighter lived to the station, he could go home once, twice, or three times a day to eat and relax on his four hours of free time. Not Wesley. He could barely get to Williamsbridge and back in four hours. So he stayed confined to a building that was only twenty-four feet wide and one hundred feet from front to back. He felt that he had been sentenced to prison.

THE FIFTEENTH, NOW
redesignated as the 369th Regiment, sailed into New York Harbor in February 1919. Battle met changed men. In the beginning, they had been given to excessively saluting superiors; now they were confident figures who looked others in the eye. Many showed the toll of the war in uneven gaits and the wheeze of damaged lungs. Napoleon Marshall, age forty-three when he landed in France, was upright and mobile only with the help of “a special steel corsage to support my back.” Despite the severity of his injuries, the military classified Marshall as only 29 percent disabled, less than the 30 percent needed to qualify for benefits. Still, he was as ebullient as ever. He wrote:

Hayward had promised the regiment “the greatest parade . . . that New York has ever seen.” They would not be invited to the Victory Parade in July, but New York on February 17, 1919, scheduled a celebration in honor of the only American regiment to bear a state’s name. That Monday morning, as “godfather” to the regiment, Battle joined the line of march. Led by the music of James Reese Europe’s band, with Noble Sissle out front as drum major, the returned heroes stepped off in solid, square phalanxes, thirty-five feet on a side. Battle strode with Needham Roberts beside a car bearing a flower-draped Henry Johnson, for whom walking had become a struggle.
⁶⁴
One shinbone had been replaced by a steel tube; most of the bones in one foot had been lost, so that Johnson moved “in a manner that might be described as ‘slap-foot.’” His discharge papers would state that Johnson had been “severely” wounded, but they would also rate that he had zero percent disability, disqualifying him, too, for benefits.
⁶⁵

The formation stepped up Fifth Avenue from Twenty-Third Street, in front of a reviewing stand on which sat dignitaries including Governor Al Smith, former governor Whitman, William Randolph Hearst, and Secretary of State Francis Hugo. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, white and black, cheered along the seven-mile route that culminated in tumultuous Harlem. In the outpouring, it was possible to believe that heroic service had finally won full United States citizenship for blacks, as had been hoped for in the story of Battle’s ancestor in the American Revolution, as Frederick Douglass had envisioned in the Civil War, as African Americans had dreamed in the Spanish-American War, and as Battle and the Equity Congress had sought in fighting for a regiment whose accomplishments had far exceeded expectations.

THE GREAT MIGRATION
had accelerated through the war years, so that, by the armistice, an ascendant black majority dominated Harlem. At the same time, the proud bearing of the regimental marchers exemplified a sense that the United States had reached a racial milestone with the rise of the New Negro, a people prepared to demand the equal treatment that had always been owed. Du Bois trumpeted the spirit in “Returning Soldiers,” an essay in the
Crisis
that concluded:

The rallying optimism of the moment proved ephemeral. In 1918, the war’s last year, the country recorded seventy-eight black lynchings, including those of a husband and wife, Haynes and Mary Turner. A white mob in Georgia shot Haynes dead in random retaliation for the murder of a white man. After Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested her husband’s murder, a mob hung her by the ankles, doused her with gasoline, and set her ablaze. A man cut open her belly. Turner’s near-term baby fell to the ground, uttered a cry, and was stomped to death.

Bitterly, Battle noted that the story of the Turner murders appeared in the newspapers on the same day as the first reports that Johnson and Roberts had killed twenty-four Germans. He followed closely as one abomination after another plunged America into the country’s worst period of racial violence, culminating in the Red Summer of 1919.

On April 13 in Carswell Grove, Georgia, Joe Ruffin, a black farmer, attempted to bail out a friend who was handcuffed in the back of a police car. The ensuing events climaxed when a white mob set a church ablaze and threw two of Ruffin’s sons into the fire. On May 10 in Charleston, South Carolina, white sailors erupted into rioting when they concluded that a black bootlegger had cheated them out of money. A mob beat four blacks with clubs, iron pipe, and hammers, one fatally. On June 9 in Ellisville, Mississippi, a white woman reported that a black man named John Hatfield had raped her. After a posse shot Hatfield, as many as ten thousand people watched a lynching party hang Hatfield, cut off his fingers, and burn his body.

The bloody tide had profound impacts. Du Bois’s militant march toward democracy became for African Americans a girding in an immediate fight to survive. The more powerfully that blacks claimed equality, it seemed to Battle, the more virulently that whites fought back.

SOMEONE STOLE WESLEY’S BADGE
. Someone sliced his rubber coat into ribbons. He found his boots filled with excrement. Then came the alarm for Wesley’s first big fire. Whipping on his gear, he clambered aboard a rig. The cellar of a building on the Bowery had gone up in flames. Announcing that he wanted to see just how brave Wesley was, a lieutenant ordered Wesley to take the hose and lead a crew into the smoky darkness. Wesley grabbed the nozzle and led a line of men who were to pull the hose and watch his back. The lieutenant was at his shoulder. Suddenly, fireballs rolled overhead. Standing his ground, Wesley trained water on the ceiling until the flames had died. Only then did he discover that the lieutenant and crew had abandoned him.

The episode established that Wesley had the courage to do the job, while also warning that he could not have faith in his fellows. Worse, he heard “veiled threats that they would throw me off the roof at some fire or push me into a burning cellar if I did not resign.” Wesley spoke with the company’s new captain, John J. Brennan, a man who had committed to treat Wesley fairly, while leaving him to overcome man-to-man bigotry. With Brennan’s permission, Wesley faced the entire company with a threat of his own: “I announced at roll call what I had heard and if that was attempted I would try to grab the nearest man to me and we would both go down. So that kept everyone far away from me on the roofs.”

Wesley detected a slight change in attitude even as the company kept its distance. “White men respect courage,” he would say years later, echoing a thought often stated by Battle. A sign of the shift emerged when a lieutenant told Wesley that the men would speak with him if he agreed to sleep in the basement.

“I don’t care whether anyone speaks to me or not,” he responded.

A firefighter named John O’Toole became an arch-antagonist. The brother of a fire captain, O’Toole had transferred into the department after working as a cop. He would boast in front of Wesley about having beaten blacks while serving as a cop. O’Toole’s brother, the captain, visited the firehouse for the express purpose of making his feelings clear. With Wesley listening, he said that “the fire department was a white man’s job and not meant for niggers,” and he told Brennan: “What are you doing with that nigger? Why, I would work him so hard that he would quit in two weeks. Why, if he was in my company he would never last. I would keep him going night and day. He would have to quit.”