One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (28 page)

Wesley signed up in the heavyweight division. He had put to good use his private firehouse gym and was well coached. Battle’s encouragement and Sam Langford’s tutorials at the Colored Men’s Branch of the YMCA sent Wesley to the bouts in top form. He disposed of opponents one after the other, until a single contender remained standing: Wesley.

This heavyweight crown, this thing that whites took so seriously as a badge of racial pride, now belonged to a black man. No one could deny Wesley the recognition in the way that his superiors had refused to acknowledge his life-saving valor on the job. More, by virtue of the victory, he would now represent the entire fire department in a duel with the police department’s best.

On December 12, 1923, three thousand firefighters, cops, and dignitaries crowded into an arena to witness the spectacle. Battle was likely the only police officer pulling for Wesley as he climbed into the ring against the finest’s legendary bruiser, Big Frank Adams. The bell rang. Wesley traded punches with Adams. Firefighters rose to their feet. Departmental pride trumping racial attitude, they urged on their man with roaring support. Here, he was their man because the blows he struck were their blows and the punishment he took was on their behalf. If Wesley won, they won. He stood proudly in until Adams was declared the victor. They cheered him then, too, for putting up a hell of a fight.
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On his next tour of duty, Wesley returned to a transformed firehouse. Men who had refused to speak with him outside the line of duty offered congratulations and included him in the give-and-take of comrades.

“Immediately everything changed,” Wesley would remember, adding as only he and Battle might, “Why people seem to idolize brute force in preference to culture and intellect is beyond me.”

EARLY IN THE
evening on the 223rd day of Battle’s banishment, May 24, 1924, Baron Wilkins passed the time outside the Exclusive Club with an associate nicknamed Yum Yum. Seventh Avenue was in full stroll. In the basement of a building down the block, five men played dice. One of them, William “Yellow Charleston” Miller, was a drug addict and thief. He went broke. The game’s big winner spurned a loan request. Yellow Charleston drew a pistol, shot the man in the stomach, and fled.

What happened next was painted in bright and varying colors by the newspapers and in a retelling by the WPA Writers’ Project. All agreed that Yellow Charleston ran toward Wilkins for help.

“Above all, he had been the best friend the little fellows in the underworld had ever known,” the WPA author wrote. “He had helped them when they were in trouble, fed them, clothed them, had given them shelter, money to feed their families, and money even to beat the rap.”

Wilkins saw no reason for fear as Yellow Charleston raced forward, gun in hand.

“Yellow’s been hitting the dope again,” Wilkins told Yum Yum.

Yellow Charleston stopped in front of Wilkins.

“Give me some money,” he pleaded. “I’ve just killed a bird and I got to make a getaway.”

“But I haven’t any, son,” Wilkins responded calmly.

Yellow Charleston clutched Wilkins by the lapels, crying in the dialect of the WPA account, “You got t’ gie me some money. I jes’ kilt a man. I got t’ git away.”

“Don’t pull on my coat so hard,” Wilkins answered. “I tell you I haven’t any money. I simply don’t have it now.”

After one more refusal, Yellow Charleston pumped four shots into Wilkins and left him bleeding beside the Exclusive Club’s doorway.
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The news spread rapidly. Battle’s neighbors flooded into the streets. The stationhouse reserves cleared the way for an ambulance to bring Wilkins to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The next morning’s newspapers reported that posses had fanned out to hunt for Yellow Charleston. Shortly, he surrendered and would go to his death in the electric chair.

Wilkins had not been a church-going man. Family members arranged for a funeral service in his home. Testimonials poured forth.

“Local charities in Harlem were benefactors of Wilkins’ charity. Just recently he contributed 300 bathing suits to a local organization for the use of poor and needy children of Harlem,” the
Age
reported, while the
Chicago Defender
wrote, “His money went to Race enterprises and helping his friends and the poor. . . . Baron Wilkins was a man who lived in the age fighting for the uplift of his Race.”

In certainly his last good deed, Wilkins extended unsolicited help to Sam Langford. Nearly blind and approaching destitution, the boxer had arrived in New York to seek treatment by a prominent eye specialist. Just hours before Yellow Charleston opened fire, Wilkins had mailed Langford a twenty-five-dollar check to pay medical bills and had ordered his tailor to fit Langford for a suit. Two days after Wilkins’s murder, Dr. James Smith began cataract treatments that would restore Langford’s sight.
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An estimated seventy thousand people lined the sidewalks around the club on the morning Wilkins was to be buried. As happened in the outpouring for Luther Boddy, the crowd stood in admiration of a man who had violated Battle’s unyielding sense of right and wrong. This time the affront was personal, and this time Harlem’s most prominent men joined in paying testament to Wilkins.

Frederick Randolph Moore of the
Age
; Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright of Strivers Row and Harlem Hospital; Ferdinand Q. Morton, the first African American appointed to New York’s Municipal Civil Service Commission; and Charles Anderson gathered around Wilkins’s casket as honorary pallbearers. Members of Battle’s Monarch Lodge performed a ritual Elks farewell. The noted Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, led prayers. Then the honorary pallbearers walked solemnly behind casket of a man who had unabashedly supported Jack Johnson, championed black professional baseball, and promoted so many African American entertainers.

That Wilkins had also cast New York’s first black police officer into the wilderness was of no moment to a group whose allegiance Battle deserved. They carried Wilkins’s body one last time in front of the Exclusive Club. With understandable bitterness, Battle described the cabaret in a way that no one else did. He saw it in memory as having gone “downhill to become a sinister hang-out for gangsters and dope peddlers.”

Under watch by the masses, the slow procession to a waiting hearse included a pallbearer whose bond with Wilkins grew not from the shared experience of America’s racial crimes. He was a white man with ice-blue eyes, Wilkins’s partner in political crime: Jimmy Hines.
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THAT FALL, IN
September 1924, with the requisite five years on the job, Wesley sat for the two-day fire lieutenant’s exam. Most of the 3,010 test takers were more experienced than he was and so would get an advantage in the scoring. He chanced it nonetheless, confident of his studies in the hose tower and eager to force salutes from white men who would refuse to acknowledge even a near-superhuman feat of heroism.

A month after the exam, Wesley and the Chief came upon a burning building in Harlem. Flames roared from the structure. The local fire company leaned a portable ladder against the facing and maneuvered their rig’s hand-cranked aerial ladder toward nineteen-year-old William Thompson, who was silhouetted against flame and smoke at a window. Wesley sped to the top of the portable ladder but was still a considerable distance below Thompson.

As the crew brought the aerial ladder closer, Thompson jumped from the sill. His hands grasped the aerial ladder, only to be torn free by the momentum of his body. Instantly, Wesley leaped from the portable ladder, grabbed a rung of the aerial ladder with one hand, and caught the plunging Thompson with his other, holding fast to both with his muscular grip and rippled arms and shoulders. Then he carried Thompson to the street before climbing back up to help rescue five more people. A reporter witnessed the feat and chronicled what he had seen in a story headlined “NY’s Only Colored Fireman Saves Six From Burning Building.”
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Still, the department withheld a citation.

WITH PASSAGE OF
the seasons, the police department’s churn of retirements created openings for promotions, until finally Enright had given sergeants’ stripes to 342 officers—or found them not to his liking. Battle was next for consideration at the 343rd spot on the list.

On June 5, 1925, a promotions order reached Canarsie. A sergeant, and only the sergeant, was to report to headquarters for elevation to lieutenant. The meaning was certain. Passed over again, Battle would stay a cop for good.

Crushed and furious, he watched the lucky sergeant depart in full-dress uniform. Adding to the insult, this sergeant drank heavily. Battle would later hear that Enright recoiled on meeting the man. The story went that he told a subordinate: “You take this badge and put it on that bum. He’s too drunk for me to do it.”
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Battle would also discover that Enright had promoted three white cops ranked lower on the list. Now the picture was clear to a man who had been deceived by his own blindness as much as by his Iago: never would Enright give a black man command of whites. Battle would write with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Passed over by Enright, I cursed the day he was born, cursed all related to him, and wished the wrath of God upon him.”
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At home, Battle could only tell Jesse, Charline, and Carroll that he would soldier on in the hard world they were coming to know. Then the Municipal Civil Service Commission published the results of the fire lieutenant’s exam. Of the 3,010 men who had competed, Wesley had ranked 189. The fire commissioner would get to his name within eighteen months—and deny Wesley if he chose to. Wiser than before, Battle urged Wesley to enlist allies immediately. Wesley wrote to Frederick Randolph Moore, spelling out his rescues, boxing victories, and test score.

“Now will they promote me when my turn arrives?” he asked. “I believe in preparedness, so I am notifying the Negro Press now as I expect a fight about it later on.”
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Quickly, the
Amsterdam News
ran a story headlined “Only Negro Fire-Fighter Passes Civil Service Exam for Lieutenant, Wesley Williams Who Has Made Many Thrilling Rescues, Makes General Average of 89.12—Over 1,200 Fail to Pass.”
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Black New York’s anger at the injustice done to Battle provoked Enright to respond. A psychologist for the police department, E. E. Hart, presented the commissioner’s views in an article published by the
Amsterdam News
. An extraordinary example of dishonest condescension, the piece hailed Enright as a dedicated benefactor of African Americans. Hart wrote that a black traffic cop stationed at the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street was a symbol “of the things that have enabled the Negroes of New York to so progress that word of their prosperity has spread to the dark-skinned peoples of the world around.” Hart added that Enright deserved the applause of a grateful race for having allowed forty-five African Americans to join the force. “Thus he was the first city official to give them their place in the sun,” Hart wrote.

As for Battle, Hart said that Enright had passed over several men, both black and white, “for good police reasons.”
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With these lies, Battle’s hopes were dashed. But, suddenly, miraculously, Enright was gone two weeks later.

ON SEPTEMBER
24, 1925, after a then-record eight years as commissioner, Enright announced that he would head the newly formed International Police Association. Actually, he quit because the political wheel had turned. New York was about to install a new mayor for the Jazz Age: James “Jimmy” Walker.

Born into a Tammany Hall family, Walker grew into a handsome, stylish, witty, fun-loving man. Early on, he wrote songs, including “Will You Love Me in December (as You Do in May)?” In the state legislature, he presciently pronounced that Prohibition was a “measure born in hypocrisy and there it will die.” He championed legalizing professional boxing and lifting a ban on Sunday baseball games. When the legislature took up a “Clean Books Bill,” he declared, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book.”

After a hard-fought campaign, Walker deposed Red Hylan, who had fallen out of favor with the bosses. The
American Mercury
soon profiled him as a mayor who came not from the streets but “from the dance floors.”

“His hair is black, thick and unruly,” the magazine reported. “His eyes are dark and restless. He has the slim build of a cabaret dancer, of a gigolo of the Montmartre. He dresses in the ultra-advanced fashion redolent of the Tenderloin. He is a native New Yorker, smokes cigarettes continuously, has a vast contempt for the Volstead act, and reads nothing but the sporting pages. He looks, in brief, to be slightly wicked and is therefore charming.”
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New Yorkers happily went along for the ride as the married Walker slept through mornings, stayed out late, and made the nightclub rounds with his showgirl mistress.

SPIRITS WERE HIGH
in Harlem as well, at least among the elite.

Young black writers like Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston came into vogue. Publishers saw the promise of their work, as the American educated class hungered for all that was “new” in style and thought. No one fostered the phenomenon—this Harlem Renaissance—more than Charles Spurgeon Johnson. The son of a Baptist minister, Johnson secured a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and took over as research director of the National Urban League. In that position, he founded a journal called
Opportunity
and joined the
Crisis
in publishing the emerging writers.

In April 1924, Johnson organized a dinner at a downtown club to introduce the up-and-comers to white publishers, editors, and critics. The affair was a spectacular success. The editor of
Survey Graphic
magazine titled his March 1925 issue,
Harlem—the Mecca of the New Negro
. Guest-edited by Alain Locke, who had been the first African American Rhodes scholar, the magazine largely featured the writings of black authors, including Hughes. Brimming with optimism, Hughes’s poem began: “We have tomorrow / Bright before us / Like a flame.”
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