One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (24 page)

Jervis Anderson, author of
This Was Harlem
, encapsulated the leap forward: “Four musical styles appear to have met in Harlem by 1920 and to have influenced the emergence of jazz in the community: ragtime, stride piano, blues and some of the early Dixieland sounds of New Orleans. But until about 1922 the dominant forces in Harlem music were the blues singers and stride pianists.”
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In the ferment, an upstart newspaper was giving the venerable
New York Age
a run for its readers. Where the
Age
was a sober broadsheet with a national vision, the
Amsterdam News
told the people of Harlem what the people of Harlem were doing in a tabloidlike voice. The paper bannered headlines like “Murdered Man a Bigamist” and chronicled ordinary events that had a touch of the extraordinary. Readers of a feature called “Items of Social Interest” learned, among endless other things, that Mrs. Harry Reeves, a member of the Citizen’s Christmas Cheer Committee, was hosting a six-course dinner, that friends had thrown a surprise birthday party for Mrs. Laura E. Williams, and that twelve-year-old Clarence Propet had won a piano competition.
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Optimism trumped the social ills brought north by ill-educated Southerners, rent gouging by white landlords, and the low wages and closed doors that were the lot of most African Americans. Journalist George Schuyler recalled the era as a time “when everything was booming and joyful and gay.”
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The buoyancy of 1920 made great things seem possible, and they certainly did seem so to James Weldon Johnson, who wrote in the
Age
that year: “Have you ever stopped to think what the future of Harlem will be? It will be a city within a city. It will be the greatest Negro city in the world within the greatest city in the world.”
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And Battle, age thirty-seven, wanted to be there for it.

AROUND THE SAME TIME
, nineteen-year-old Langston Hughes succumbed to Harlem’s allure as he stood on the brink of adulthood after a lonely coming-of-age. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, he grew up in predominantly white areas of Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio, knowing both antiblack bigotry and the friendship of whites. His parental bonds were, to put it mildly, frayed.

Early on, Hughes’s father, James Hughes, abandoned his wife, his only child, and the America that denied him opportunity, and moved across the border to establish a successful life in Mexico. He was a man who scorned the poor, especially the black poor, seeming to view them as “lazy, undeserving cowards,” in the judgment of Hughes’s biographer Rampersad. Langston himself would write: “My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.”
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Hughes’s mother, Carrie Langston, was a flighty woman who dreamed of a show business career and who often left her solitary son in the care of a loving neighborhood couple, or with his grandmother, a reserved woman who instilled in Hughes tales of ancestors challenging the white world’s domination. She spoke most stirringly of her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had ridden off from their home in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1859 to join white radical abolitionist John Brown’s assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. For more than a half-century, Hughes’s grandmother wore the bullet-shredded shawl that Lewis Leary had worn at his death, often using the cloth as a nighttime coverlet for her young grandson.
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Shortly after graduating from high school, Hughes read the stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant and credited them with making him “really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them—even after I was dead.”
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In the summer of 1920, at the age of eighteen, he wrote his first poetic landmark,
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
, a work that captured the sweep of black history in thirteen lines. Audaciously adopting the personage of his race, he opened:

Then he told of bathing in the Euphrates River, building a hut near the Congo, looking upon the Nile, and listening to the Mississippi when Abraham Lincoln traveled to New Orleans before concluding:

Planning to study at Columbia University, Hughes arrived in New York City by ship from Mexico, where in 1921 he had left a father he admitted to hating.

“There is no thrill in all the world like entering, for the first time, New York harbor,—coming in from the flat monotony of the sea to this rise of dreams and beauty,” he wrote four years later. “New York is truly the dream city,—city of the towers near God, city of hopes and visions, of spires seeking in the windy air loveliness and perfection.”
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Hughes headed north to the subway stop at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, the very stop where Battle had protected the white police officer from the angry mob. “I went up the stairs and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again,” he would remember.
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In that moment, Hughes had unknowingly reached fertile ground for an unprecedented African American literary movement. Already, Jamaica-born Claude McKay had written poems of powerful emotion, none having more impact than his 1919 Red Summer sonnet, “If We Must Die.” Already, Countee Cullen, an orphaned teenager who had been taken in by the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, was writing lyrical poems as editor of the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School. His “I Have a Rendezvous With Life” had topped a national competition.

After completing two semesters at Columbia and resolving never to return, Hughes was repeatedly rebuffed in a job search because he was black. Over and over, he heard words to the effect, “But I didn’t advertise for a colored boy.” He wound up as a farm laborer on Staten Island, and then he landed, like Chief Williams and so many other young African Americans, at Charles Thorley’s House of Flowers. There, he delivered orders costing more than a month’s salary to the likes of the actress Marion Davies on her yacht and to the Roosevelts at Oyster Bay. He lasted a month before clashing with Thorley over showing up late one day.

Daring to believe that he could become America’s first self-supporting black writer, Hughes signed on as a crewman on freighters that took him to Africa and Europe. The journeys opened his eyes to the continent of his ancestors and allowed him to vagabond through cities like Paris. On his travels, he wrote poetry that drew notice at home, while new voices of the black urban masses gathered in New York.

Destitute and hoping to work his way home from Genoa, he roamed the wharves at the age of twenty-two and wrote another of his masterpieces. The eighteen lines vibrantly opened with the poem’s title, “I, too, sing America,” and locked in his dream of being read even after death.

* * *

JUST THEN, AMERICA
was embarked on the mad misadventure of Prohibition and the 1920s were starting to roar. On January 17, 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect, the dry forces set out to prove they could drain even drenched New York through criminal punishments. New Yorkers were of a different mind. They drank as they always drank, only in larger quantities and in clandestine bars that came to be called speakeasies. “Be it known to the trusting and the unsuspecting, New York City is almost wide open today,” the
Times
reported in a May 1920 story headlined “Making a Joke of Prohibition in New York City.”
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Congress had expected that local police would help enforce America’s only attempt to use the Constitution to limit rather than to protect personal freedom, but Congress could not require locals like Enright to adopt federal law as a mandate of their own. Judging him to be insufficiently enthusiastic, the “drys” persuaded the rural politicians of New York’s legislature to write a state prohibition statute onto the books.

Enright centralized enforcement in the Special Service Division. Only the division chief would decide which speakeasies to target. Enright promised two benefits: local cops would have fewer opportunities for graft, and the department’s vice squad would apply special expertise to clamping down. Concealed in the strategy was a third goal: with the division firmly in hand, Enright could enforce Prohibition to the extent acceptable in a drinking city—and he could exempt those parties who had the right connections.

Cynicism was well grounded. Aggressive or not, the mission of stanching alcohol sales was doomed, its fate sealed all the tighter as New Yorkers got into a partying mood. There was fun to be had in the brighter time that followed the war, fun to be had as livelier entertainment—these new movies, this new jazz, these new dances—energized popular culture, fun to be had as young women broke the shackles of sexual propriety, fun to be had in a round of cheer, or two or four or six or more.

All you needed was a supply of alcohol and a serving place out of the immediate reach of federal agents or cops. Ranging from the seedy to the elegant, speakeasies grew so common that a
New York Sun
columnist would eventually write that “the history of the United States could be told in eleven words: Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.”
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Vast quantities of illicit liquor poured forth, none more plentiful than bootlegged goods financed by Arnold Rothstein. Described by his lawyer as “a man who dwells in doorways, a mouse standing in a doorway waiting for his cheese,” Rothstein smelled plenty. He locked in contracts with distillers in Scotland, transferred the cargo to Irving “Waxey Gordon” Wexler, who controlled smuggling along the New York–New Jersey coast, and passed the alcohol to Lucky Luciano, who built a distribution network for clandestine drinking spots. Together, Rothstein and Luciano grew fabulously wealthy from a criminal enterprise that was unique for seeming a godsend to millions.

Each man’s success was remarkable in its own right. Rothstein pulled his off despite being snared—and dodging jeopardy—in the gambling scheme that fixed the 1919 World Series. Luciano, meanwhile, organized a one-hundred-man army that would morph into a powerful Mafia crime family after Prohibition’s repeal. With Rothstein selecting his wardrobe and instructing him in dinner table etiquette, Luciano enjoyed outlaw celebrity while purchasing ever more influence with ever more money—including cash delivered directly to police headquarters.

Reminiscing with Hughes, Battle cast alcohol enforcement as one more straightforward police duty. If he felt that the entire police department had been sent on a destructive fool’s errand, he chose survival over principle amid the rising corruption. At home, he could talk to Florence, the Chief, and Wesley about cops who were selling protection to bootleggers, cops who were trafficking in seized contraband, cops who were letting cargoes drift ashore on the waterfront, but on the job Battle kept his mouth shut and followed orders. He took no action without express prior approval. Like every cop, he had seen how crossing someone big had very nearly destroyed a man who was as tightly wired at the top of the department as a man could be.

On January 19, 1919, Inspector Dominic Henry led a raid on a West Side apartment in which, he discovered, Rothstein was playing craps. As cops wielded a battering ram, someone inside opened fire with a revolver. The shots wounded two detectives. Nothing came of the bloodshed until newspapers questioned why the police and district attorney had failed to file charges. Finally, a grand jury indicted Rothstein, only to have a judge dismiss the case amid reports that the doorway mouse had bought his way out for $32,000. In the ensuing furor, Henry was charged with perjury, convicted and sentenced to two to five years in Sing Sing prison. He escaped that fate only through the intercession of an appeals court, his near miss hammering home to cops the danger of barging through the wrong door.
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INSPECTOR SAMUEL G. BELTON
commanded the Special Service Division. The son of Irish immigrants and a widower, Belton had joined the force in 1891, the era of rampant vice and rampant graft; had made good in the Tenderloin when Devery transacted business at the street-corner Pump; and had bonded with Enright as a trustee of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association. When a coveted lieutenancy opened, Enright’s influence gave Belton command of a fifty-officer squad that enforced public health laws. When Belton was about to be denied promotion to captain with the expiration of a civil service list, Enright secured special authority to boost his friend’s rank. And, finally, Enright identified Belton as the cop he trusted to navigate the shoals of politics and Prohibition.
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To the men of the division, Belton could be both a powerful patron and a protective shield. Wanting both, Battle could only strive to meet his demands. Often, those entailed infiltrating a speakeasy, gambling house, or brothel to observe criminal activity, an especially tough challenge for Battle. Many a white-run joint wanted nothing to do with a black man, and many a black operator knew who Battle was. He hit upon an audacious solution: Battle asked Belton for permission to work with a raw black recruit who would be unknown as a cop and who could be trained to go undercover where Battle couldn’t. The request went up the chain and came down with a positive response.

Battle found an excellent undercover man in twenty-one-year-old Harry F. Agard. Although he was the son of African Americans, Agard could be mistaken for Chinese because his skin tone was golden and his features had an Asian cast. Especially important: Agard had a memory that was almost photographic.

Under Battle’s direction, they embarked on well-chosen investigations, Agard working his way inside a gambling operation or speakeasy and Battle staging a raid when signaled. Belton dispatched them on several occasions to bust fan-tan games in Chinatown, exploiting Agard’s appearance and his initiative in learning rudimentary Chinese phrases. More often, Belton targeted drinking spots here, there, and everywhere in Manhattan.