One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (23 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
As Battle weathered the silent treatment and exile to the stationhouse flag loft, Enright moved on to building a Lieutenants Benevolent Association into a still more potent force. His annual dinners in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel drew the rich and powerful, including President William Howard Taft. Among those who sent regrets were Devery, Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain.
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Enright became a casualty of war when voters threw the bums out. A reform mayor and police commissioner took office in 1914. Committed to tilting at the windmill of a corruption cleanup, the new commissioner established the department’s first internal affairs unit. He called it the Confidential Squad and gave command to a warhorse of a captain known as “Honest Dan” Costigan.
With Sergeant Lewis Valentine at his side, Costigan identified commanders who were in Tammany Hall’s pocket by raiding gambling houses in their precincts. He also seized the records of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, infuriating Enright with an investigation that turned up no wrongdoing. The commissioner then denied Enright a promotion to captain, even though by exam score he was at the top of the list.
Enright would have his revenge. The machine prevailed anew on Election Day 1917, installing as mayor Mike “Red” Hylan, a hotheaded Brooklyn Democrat and former train motorman. Hylan stunned New York by appointing Enright commissioner, elevating him over 122 more-senior officers. With New York’s governor studying whether to remove Enright from office out of that fear he would open the door to police corruption, Devery endorsed the appointment, saying, “It takes a former cop to make the department go. Enright is the boy to do it.”
In short order, Enright disbanded the Confidential Squad, exiled Costigan and Valentine to grueling posts, and closed the department’s honor roll to Valentine’s partner Floyd Horton, who had been killed in the line of duty. When Devery died in 1918, Enright ordered flags lowered to half-staff, assigned the department’s one-hundred-piece band to play on the day of the funeral, and made sure that a handpicked honor guard escorted his role model’s casket from church to burial.
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Shrewdly, Enright established a closely held unit to handle sensitive investigations and to enforce the law—or not—as he saw fit. He called the squad the Special Service Division. High on its list of responsibilities were prostitution, gambling, and illegal alcohol sales, the vices where crime, money, and political power intersected. No police commissioner could ignore the statutes, but no police commissioner could enforce them with crusading zeal and expect to stay in office for long. Appointment to the unit was by Enright’s invitation. He needed good cops and good superior officers who were more than that. He needed good cops and good superior officers whom he could trust.
And now Captain Cornelius Willemse put in a word for the big Negro, Sam Battle, who’d gone undercover to catch a murderer in the Tombs. Enright ordered Battle to report. No one in the department had ever opened a door for him without a fight, let alone a door to the commissioner’s elite unit, but here Enright was saying that Battle had earned a coveted posting. He took the assignment as confirmation that a black man could endure to win his due. He was glad also to serve again as a beacon for others at a time when the post–World War I determination of the New Negro had produced a small surge in African American recruits.
Edward Jackson secured state legislation that enabled him to join the force after losing an eye on the battlefield. Wesley Redding, son of a high school teacher and a bank worker, emigrated from Atlanta to New York and worked as a Pennsylvania Station railroad cop before joining the department. Emmanuel Kline, son of a freed slave, arrived from South Carolina, studied English at Columbia University and French at the Berlitz School, and served overseas in the 376th Infantry Division. He came home to work as a redcap for Chief Williams at Grand Central and then followed Battle’s path onto the force.
In 1918, the New York Police Department opened its ranks to a handful of women. They were issued badges but did not wear standard uniforms or perform standard patrol. A unit headed by the department’s first female deputy commissioner focused on the “white slave traffic,” abortions, fortune telling, “wayward girls,” and “domestic relations cases.” In 1919, Cora Parchmont, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former high school teacher, became the first black policewoman. “We will try to keep unfortunate ones from going to prison instead of aiming to imprison them,” Parchmont told the Chicago
Defender
.
Unfailingly, Battle encouraged his fellow officers and Wesley to believe that they could secure fairer treatment. Now, the significance of Battle’s membership in Enright’s personal fief was profound. Headquarters duty was as distant from their posts as the peak of Everest is from a valley floor. More, they all knew that Battle was going to work for a hard man who played for advantage.
When Battle got the call in 1920, Tammany had shifted to less obvious, more lucrative corruption. Charles Francis Murphy, a former saloon owner, was now boss. He designated trusted deputy Tom Foley to be the machine’s liaison to the underworld, and he relied on Arnold Rothstein, a genius of a gangster who participated in fixing the 1919 World Series, to serve as the primary contact between crime and politics.
Murphy conducted business with legitimate interests in “The Scarlet Room of Mystery,” a private area of Delmonico’s Restaurant, so named by the press due to the color of its plush upholstery. As recalled in M. R. Werner’s history,
Tammany Hall
, it was “Murphy’s great and lasting contribution to the philosophy of Tammany Hall that he taught the organization that more money can be made by a legal contract than by petty blackmail.”
Enright was of like mind. He came by money with polish. A Wall Street broker bought five thousand shares of stock in a petroleum company with his own funds, sold the stock five days later, and, for reasons never credibly explained, cut a check to Enright for the resulting $12,000 profit. The broker also purchased a Stutz automobile for Enright’s wife. Meanwhile, on an annual salary of $7,000, Enright found the resources to deposit $100,000 into bank accounts.
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Battle sized up what he was getting into without illusions. As excited as he was, the Special Service Division loomed as treacherous territory. He would roam the city in plainclothes, enforcing the law where he was told to or where he would have to divine the right side of an invisible line between an arrest that brought commendations and an arrest for which there would be hell to pay.
Battle’s commanding officers gave him a desk and put him to work. At home, he told Florence, Wesley, and the Chief that Enright seemed a surprisingly fair-minded man, and he gained confidence that he would be measured by his performance. “I was assigned to cases without discrimination,” he said years later.
Battle discovered great fun in being a cop who went about armed both with a gun and with political power—at times with orders from a mayor given to using the police to torment enemies. In one episode, Hylan mobilized the Special Service Division after learning that the Republican Club in his Brooklyn neighborhood was going to hold a stag party. “I was a Democrat, too, so I had no ardent objections to carrying out his orders,” Battle told Hughes in recalling a raid that is quaint in its moralism, wild and wooly in the ease with which Battle fired his weapon, and wonderfully narrated by the poet:
When I arrived at the Club, the midnight stag party was going full blast. Beer was flowing. Smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The band was blaring. In the terminology of jazz, “the joint was jumping!”
About five hundred men were feasting their eyes on three young ladies advertised as Little Egypt, Baby Doll and Fatima. These
artistes
were moving to the music with sufficient vigor to almost cause the walls to shake. As the music grew hotter, egged on by the men who threw dollar bills on the stage, the young ladies began to shed their garments, piece by piece.
Each time a female garment fell, the men would cry approval, whistle, catcall and shout lewd remarks. As the music swelled in volume, one young woman threw her brassiere into the crowd and caused a stampede. Nobody got the brassiere. It was torn to ribbons in the melee. Excitement mounted as the same young lady stepped out of her step-ins.
By now, the other dancers were vying with her in divesting themselves of lingerie. Finally all three of the dancers were prancing around the stage in nothing but silk stockings. At that point, I took a pistol from my holster and fired a couple of shots through the window—my signal to the detectives outside. The shots, the broken glass, the pistol flash, and the screams that went up caused pandemonium. But every exit was covered.
Those who jumped out of windows leaped directly into the arms of policemen. Those who ran—ran into a cordon of cops. Those who fainted were carried out headfirst. A few men did faint. The police department was not prepared for so large a catch. Since a single patrol wagon would not hold more than fifteen or twenty men, we had to telephone all the stations in Brooklyn for the loan of their wagons. On the way to the precincts, the Black Marias had to pass Mayor Hylan’s home.
“Every time you go by the Mayor’s house with a load, clang your gongs,” I told the drivers of the patrol wagons. They did—all night long.
BATTLE’S HEADY DAYS
of freewheeling police work slipped into eclipse when Florence noticed that three-year-old Teddy had a cough. Parents of today would hear little cause for worry in a three-year-old’s rasping. Not so mothers and fathers in 1920. Teddy’s jeopardy became clear when he gasped for air with a highly pitched sound, the signature of whooping cough.
The New York Health Department recorded 8,873 cases of whooping cough that year, while judging that large numbers escaped official count. The disease proved fatal for one of every fifteen afflicted children. A doctor took charge of Teddy on August 12, recommending the standard practices for helping a gasping child: mustard plasters on chest and back, forehead ice packs, and steam inhalations so primitive as to include traces of benzene or turpentine. After six days, Battle heard a child’s last breath for a second time.
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Gloom descended on the household. Florence was inconsolable. There was the room in which Teddy had died and there was the bed. Battle thought about taking her away, not for a vacation, but to live somewhere else.
* * *
HE HAD
a place in mind: Harlem in its day of glorious promise.
Propelled by the Great Migration, New York’s black population grew by two-thirds between 1910 and 1920, from 91,709 to 152,467 people, with more than half drawn to live in Harlem.
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In front of Battle’s eyes, critical mass produced a militantly proud, magnificently optimistic culture.
On Sundays, there was religion. People poured from their homes unified in expressing faith, some in storefronts with little more than a preacher, a Bible, and chairs, many in grand houses of worship that had been sold off by whites. Church-going could be an all-day affair. After the readings, preaching, and singing, the churches became social centers. Playing multiple roles, they were both “a stabilizing force” and “an arena for the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.
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Sunday afternoons were taken up by The Stroll, and so, too, evenings when the weather was right. The place was Seventh Avenue, a boulevard of shops, restaurants, apartment buildings, and nightclubs. Up one sidewalk and then back down the other, people socialized with old friends and new acquaintances. Someone who knew someone always had word about something that had happened back home, and everyone on this “Great Black Way” shared Harlem’s news and gossip.
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Some days the talk was of Paul Robeson. Still years from acclaim as an actor and singer, Robeson at the age of twenty-two was already a Renaissance man. He had attended Rutgers University as the school’s third black student; had won fifteen varsity letters for football, basketball, baseball, and track; had twice been named a football All American; and had graduated as class valedictorian. He passed the time on Seventh Avenue while studying at Columbia University Law School and earning a living teaching Latin and playing professional football.
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Often the talk was of doers who were Battle’s generational contemporaries.
Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, age thirty-three, was building his ill-fated United Negro Improvement Association into the country’s largest black nationalist movement with the message, “We are striking homeward toward Africa to make her the big black Republic.”
Fabulously wealthy A’Lelia Walker, age thirty-five, was running America’s dominant business selling hair-care products to blacks. She had taken over the company on the death of its founder, her mother, Madame C. J. Walker, and she was soon to be renowned as a lavish hostess of the Harlem Renaissance.
Later to achieve a landmark in labor organizing with formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, later to pressure President Harry Truman into integrating the US military, later to conceive of the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, age thirty-one, was urging radical socialism as the path to empowerment. He and a partner had founded the
Messenger
, “The Only Magazine Of Scientific Radicalism In The World Published by Negroes.”
This being the takeoff of the Roaring Twenties, the neighborhood pulsed also with new cultural energy. Women cast off presumed propriety to wear their hair and their skirts shorter, so that, by one telling, a skirt sometimes “almost rivaled the bathing suit.”
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Saloons proliferated. Nightclub owners who had been tops in the Tenderloin found success in the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, Baron Wilkins’s Exclusive Club, and more. They provided drink and the best of song and dance at a time when a convergence of talent and creativity was remaking American popular music.
