One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (37 page)

By the commission’s final hearing, he was the police department’s convenient shield and the crowd’s handy sellout. Hays came armed with a letter sent to La Guardia by a Harlem man. He reported that three plainclothes officers had entered his home without a warrant, searched his dresser drawers, bed, suitcases, and china closet and left without a word. A representative of the Citizens League for Fair Play told Hays that cops would simply “pull citizens into hallways and search them for policy numbers.”

“That’s true!” spectators yelled.

Hays asked anyone who had been searched that way to stand up. Twenty-five people got to their feet. Turning to Battle, Hays asked whether he permitted his men to make such searches.

“No,” Battle answered, touching off boos and catcalls.

At that, Hays challenged Battle and De Martino to explain the circumstances under which the law authorized police to enter a home without a warrant. They responded that officers could force entry if they had a reasonable ground to suspect a felony had been committed. Hays read aloud the Penal Code. It clearly limited cops to entering a home without a warrant only if they knew—not just suspected—a felony had taken place.

“You know very well that you would not do it if the person lived on Park Avenue or was someone who was well-known,” Hays said.

Then he lectured Battle: “I think that you, as a colored officer in the police department, should charge yourself to see that these things don’t happen, especially to your people.”

The spectators cheered Hays and jeered Battle.
¹¹

Hays further pressed Battle on the case of a man who had been jailed for two days based solely on an anonymous—and false—telephone tip that he was wanted for murder. Battle and De Martino defended the arrest, provoking a new uproar. The commission concluded in its final report that “their interpretation of the law . . . was not in accord with the statute” and that the “large audience was justified in shouting that the law was not being applied in connection with the arrests of Negroes.”

Ultimately, the commission reported: “The cases which have been cited here indicate to what extent the police of Harlem invade the rights of Negro citizens. This invasion of the rights of Negro citizens involves interference in the association of whites and Negroes, searching of home without a warrant, and the detention of innocent men in jail, and even the mutilation and killing of persons upon slight provocation.”
¹²

La Guardia withheld the document. Instead, he recruited Harlem Renaissance scholar Alain Locke to write an appraisal of the findings. Ruefully, Locke recalled the time when “Harlem was full of the thrill and ferment of sudden progress and prosperity.” He found “it hard to believe that the rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925 were more than bright illusions or a cruelly deceptive mirage.” Charitably accepting La Guardia’s expressions of good intent—plus preliminary steps toward upgrading Harlem Hospital, opening new schools, and building public housing—Locke endorsed the commission’s catalogue of discrimination in education, housing, relief, health care, and employment. He focused on Battle in discussing the police.

After citing the death of Lloyd Hobbs, Locke wrote that “a series of police shootings in Harlem, continuing down to two quite recent killings of children in the police pursuit of suspected criminals, has brought the community to the point of dangerous resentment toward the police.” The hostility ran so deep, Locke wrote, that “many in the Harlem community feel as much resentment toward Negro police as toward white police, and even toward the Negro police lieutenant, who sometime back was a popular hero and a proud community symbol.”
¹³

THE STING OF
Locke’s conclusion must have been profound. Fifteen years later, Battle would tell Hughes about the riot of 1935, while making scant mention of the hearings. No doubt Battle recognized Valentine’s cynicism in making him the brown-skinned face of the police department after he had served for only eighty-two days as a lieutenant. Certainly, Battle also felt the injustice perpetrated by Hays in placing the burden for correcting police abuses on his shoulders rather than on those of the no-show Valentine and of every member of the white power structure who had allowed Harlem to fester. And, quite surely, with emotions running justifiably high among African Americans, Battle never felt so hurtfully the antiblack guilt by association that came with wearing a police uniform.

ONCE AGAIN
, he could only make the most of the black man’s straits, and in this circumstance he took advantage of the value that the mayor and police commissioner suddenly found in having a ranking African American cop at their service. After the riot, Battle never returned to a standard assignment. He took on the functions of visible presence and wise leader as the dour 1930s headed blindly toward the genocides and wars of the 1940s.

The department turned naturally to Battle when the Reverend Major J. Divine—the wildly flamboyant Father Divine—asked the police commissioner to assign fifty officers on horseback to escort his annual Easter parade in 1935. Father Divine preached that he was “the written word” who had come “to comfort you, bless you, give you homes for your bodies, rest for your souls, relief from all sorrow.” He ran grocery stores, barbershops, and newsstands. Many of his adherents lived in “heavens,” where he served lavish meals. He was wildly popular.

Tactfully, Battle informed Father Divine that the department would not call out the cavalry on his behalf. Instead, he marched beside Father Divine’s $25,000 Rolls Royce, “while on one running board a beautiful white female angel waved, and on the opposite running board a beautiful brown female angel smiled.”

Similarly, City Hall called on Battle when racial tensions split the Democratic Party. Tammany Hall had never nominated an African American to serve as a district leader, partly because of prejudice, partly because black enrollment had never reached a critical mass in any district. But, with Harlem’s growth in a district that also included white communities, blacks had gained a shot at a place in the party hierarchy. African American restaurant owner Herbert Bruce stepped forward to challenge a longtime incumbent. Orders came down: Battle was to be on hand when party members convened to elect their leaders.

“The white folks saw that Bruce was about to win and they wanted to walk out and close the meeting,” he remembered. “I said to the captain of the precinct, ‘Captain, I’m only a lieutenant but I’m sent up here to help you. I want to avoid interracial disturbances, so if I was you, tell them they can’t close this meeting.”
¹⁴

The captain did as Battle recommended and Bruce broke Tammany Hall’s district leader color line.

Shrewder than he once had been and more comfortable in the gray areas, Battle bid farewell when Casper Holstein went to prison on a gambling conviction in 1936 and found useful common ground with Tammany’s Jimmy Hines, who would soon be on his way to prison as well.
¹⁵

“Many times when poor people were being dispossessed for lack of rent, many times when poor people didn’t have coal or fuel, I went to Jimmy Hines, and Jimmy Hines would call the city marshal and say: ‘Come and see me, don’t dispossess those people.’” Battle recalled. “He did so many things from the humanitarian standpoint for those people. All those things are overlooked. Of course, we know he had to get the money from somewhere, and where he got it from—well, he suffered for that afterwards.”
¹⁶

Battle also forged a deep bond with Inspector John De Martino. When the moment was right, Battle told De Martino a story from his rookie days on the force. He recalled that half a dozen men had pulled up at his post in a car with a police insignia. One of the men had said he was a commissioner, had asked Battle whether he would like to join the detective division, and had ordered him to appear at headquarters. Battle told De Martino that he had done as instructed, only to be turned away, humiliated.

Then he asked a question about which he had long wondered: Had De Martino been one of his tormentors?

De Martino laughed, “You know who it was?”

“I think it was you.” Battle smiled. “You were one of them.”
¹⁷

De Martino would say no more, and Battle let the matter rest—no hard feelings toward a man who had become a friend.

AT THE MIDPOINT
of the decade, Battle stood proudly with Florence at Carroll’s wedding to a fellow New York University student. Edith, whose maiden name was not to be found in either the census or news accounts, had finished four years of classes and had graduated. To Battle’s displeasure, Carroll had left school after three years and was setting out to build a future in Washington, DC. Trying to dissuade him was futile. So, resigned to the ways of young people who were sure they knew best, the Battles wished the best for their youngest son and his wife.
¹⁸
Battle and Florence were rapidly approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of his joining the force and their thirty-first year of marriage. An
Amsterdam News
reporter interviewed Florence “among her plants in the yard behind her home” on Strivers Row. “She is a modest, charming woman—the sort of woman who strides side by side with her mate over roads that are built for those unafraid of life,” the journalist reported. “And, you know, he is still studying,” Florence said of her husband. “He hopes to be a captain. Perhaps after he achieves that, we can have a home in the country where I can have an honest-to-goodness garden.”
¹⁹

Mother AME Zion Church was packed on the afternoon of the anniversary, June 28, 1936. More than eight hundred people rose to their feet when Battle came forward to speak. “Too often we Negroes have allowed ourselves to look upon ourselves as an inferior race,” Battle pronounced, adding: “I’ve lived with you, prayed with you, socialized and fraternized with you. I’ve done everything with you, including arrest you. Make your own opportunities. When you see them, take hold of them and never give up.”

When an interviewer asked about racial prejudice, Battle responded optimistically, “I couldn’t conceive of it being wholly eliminated. But it is gradually decreasing as Negroes are improving themselves educationally and financially. But we do not seek social equality. What we want is an equal opportunity to enjoy life and to make our own way.”
²⁰

* * *

GIVEN HIS PROMINENCE
in Harlem and his love of sports, boxing most of all, it was all but inevitable that Battle would cross paths with two of the greatest black athletes of the era: Joe Louis and Jesse Owens.

At twenty-one, they called Louis “The Brown Bomber.” In the spring of 1935, he donated the proceeds of sparring matches to enable Sam Langford to undergo surgery for a detached retina after a reporter had found the retired champ sitting in a food distribution center, “a fat old fellow in a tattered overcoat and decadent shoes, with a black cap pulled down over his curly gray wool.”
²¹
Louis staged the exhibitions at Harlem’s Pioneer Sporting Club. They were great fun to watch for Battle, who was a charter member, as well as for Eddy Cherot, who had played his semipro baseball for Pioneer teams.

On June 25 that year, Louis fought former world champion Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium. As with any heavyweight bout featuring a black contender, the public transformed man-to-man combat into a racial and political drama. Carnera was Italian and, taken as the personification of dictator Benito Mussolini, was particularly noxious to many African Americans because fascist Italy had invaded Ethiopia. Louis knocked out Carnera in the sixth round. In September, again at Yankee Stadium, Louis dispatched a second former champ, this time sending Max Baer to the canvas in four rounds. Ernest Hemingway described the fight as “the most disgusting public spectacle outside of a public hanging” he had ever seen.
²²

Nine months later, Louis climbed into the ring against Max Schmeling, a German and symbol of Adolf Hitler’s doctrines of Aryan superiority. In the second of his autobiographies,
I Wonder as I Wander
, Hughes described how towering a hero Louis was to African Americans, writing that “thousands of colored Americans on relief or W.P.A., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs.”
²³

It was taken for granted that, after defeating Schmeling, Louis would next fight for the world championship, because Louis was the better fighter. Unfortunately, Schmeling was the better prepared. He knocked out Louis in the twelfth, throwing black America into mourning, including Hughes who had watched the fight at the stadium. Afterward, he remembered in his autobiography, “I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting on the curbs with their heads in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

Joy soon returned. In August, in Hitler’s Germany, Jesse Owens took the 1936 Summer Olympics by storm. Born in Alabama, raised in Cleveland and not yet twenty-three, Owens was the star of a US track-and-field delegation that included outstanding black athletes. He led his fellows onto a pressure-packed world stage. These Games were more than games. The stadium in Berlin was seen as a proving ground for Hitler’s master race theories. It wasn’t to be. Over a span of seven days, with the future fuehrer looking on, Owens took gold in the one-hundred-meter dash, the two-hundred-meter sprint, the four-by-one hundred-meter relay, and the long jump.

His accomplishments brought the back of white America’s hand. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped his amateur status, along with his ability to compete, after Owens declined to participate in fund-raising exhibitions in European cities. Instead, he sailed home on the
Queen Mary
. His father, Henry; his mother, Emma; and his wife, Ruth, traveled from Cleveland to meet the ship in New York. There, four hotels denied them rooms.