One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (38 page)

The press turned out in force at the
Queen Mary
’s berth. Reporters wanted to find out: Had Hitler snubbed Owens? Owens would say no, but later in life he would say yes. They also wanted to discover whether Owens would cash in on his celebrity. In fact, he had been swamped with money offers—$40,000 to appear in song-and-dance man Eddie Cantor’s act, $25,000 to play joke-telling warm-up for a California orchestra. As the
Queen Mary
approached the harbor, Bill Robinson had cabled Owens: “Don’t do anything until you see me!”
²⁴

About to set foot in an overwhelming city, Owens placed his trust in the New York icon. Robinson arranged for police to escort Owens to Robinson’s apartment in Harlem, where police stood guard. All day, notables paid their respects, no doubt including Battle, who might well have commanded the security detail. That evening, Owens headed home to Cleveland for a parade. Columbus staged one as well. Then he set up base in Harlem to pursue commercial opportunities. For a time, Carroll Battle remembered, his father welcomed Owens to stay on the top floor of the great old townhouse.

The minister of Owens’s church urged President Roosevelt to invite the American victor to visit the White House. FDR demurred. Running for reelection while seeking good relations with the South, the president offered not a word of public recognition. La Guardia stepped into the breach. On September 3, 1936, New York threw a ticker-tape parade for the entire US Olympic team.

Owens and his wife Ruth took pride of place in an open car at the head of the motorcade. The route stretched from the Battery at the foot of Manhattan up Broadway to Harlem and then across the Triborough Bridge to an athletics stadium on Randall’s Island. Almost four weeks had passed since Owens had won his fourth medal. By this time, the reception was more curious than passionate—except in Harlem, and there it was mixed. Many a spectator was offended that parade organizers had placed Jack Dempsey in the lead car with Owens. Worse, the organizers had seated the other black Olympians in cars toward the rear of the procession.

“Jesse Owens, Jim Crowed. Jesse Owens, Jim Crowed,” some in the crowd chanted.
²⁵

On Randall’s Island, the audience cheered Owens warmly.

“Jesse, on behalf of New York City, I hail you as an American boy,” La Guardia said.

Deeply moved, Owens gave the friendliest face in a hostile world—that of Bill Robinson—the first of the gold medals he had won.
²⁶

Now, Owens needed to earn a living. One by one, the money offers extended to the black phenom evaporated. He accepted a healthy sum to stump for Alf Landon, FDR’s doomed Republican challenger. Over the next months, Owens moved in and out of Harlem, accepting fees at promotional events and crossing paths with Battle.

He threw out the first ball in the second game of a Negro National League doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, a portion of whose proceeds benefited Sam Langford. The Pittsburgh Crawfords and the New York Black Yankees took the field, the Crawfords getting the win behind the pitching of the legendary Satchel Paige. “Samuel Battle was on hand in all his regalia directing the police activity,” the
Amsterdam News
reported.
²⁷

Weeks later, Owens served as a starter and Battle as chief marshal at a five-mile footrace that rounded through Harlem, and he addressed the congregation of Battle’s Mother AME Zion Church, telling his listeners about thrills they could only imagine, as well as about trials they knew only too well.

ON JULY
16, 1937, Charline gave birth to a girl as “pretty born” as she had been. Charline and Eddy named their daughter Yvonne and brought the baby home to the great old townhouse. Passing for white, Eddy still worked as a textile factory foreman, while Charline had enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in pursuit of a master’s degree in psychology. She left her studies to tend to Yvonne, along with Florence.

Charline and Eddy invited Bill Robinson and his wife, Fannie, to serve as Yvonne’s godparents. The Robinsons accepted and opened a bank account for the infant.
²⁸
Robinson was then at the peak of his popularity. He had played roles in five movies, most notably with child star Shirley Temple in hit films like
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
. Later that year, Battle and Florence drove to Los Angeles to visit Bill and Fannie at their new $65,000 home.

FIRST LADY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
was coming to Harlem. The date was November 7, 1937. The place was the Young Women’s Christian Association. Battle was to make sure that all went smoothly. He arrived early at the YWCA. Financed partly by John D. Rockefeller, the building featured a gymnasium, pool, residence for 260 women, and a packed auditorium. The Y had opened the room for a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women.

A stout, ebony-toned woman who carried a cane as an affectation greeted Battle. He saw in Mary McLeod Bethune a most formidable woman. The fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, she grew up picking cotton in South Carolina. When her elders recognized her intellectual gifts, they enrolled Bethune in Presbyterian-based education. She excelled, moved on to schools that trained missionaries, and, in 1904, opened a school in Daytona Beach, Florida, “with $1.50, faith in God and five little girls for students.”
²⁹

Stressing “Self-control, Self-respect, Self-reliance and Race Pride,” the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls grew to offer college and teacher preparation on a twenty-acre campus. Eventually, Bethune merged Daytona Educational with the Cookman Institute to lead a school that developed into today’s Bethune-Cookman University.

In 1934, Mrs. Roosevelt invited Bethune to join the staff of the National Youth Administration. She accepted and would eventually become its director of Negro affairs. The post and a growing bond with Mrs. Roosevelt installed Bethune in FDR’s so-called Black Cabinet. She spoke frankly to both Roosevelts and, from her first visit to the White House, became known for a singular sense of rightful place. As she walked up the lawn, the sight of a black woman headed toward the main entrance disturbed a gardener.

“Hey there, Auntie, where y’all think you’re going?” he called.

Bethune walked up to the man, studied his face, and asked: “I don’t recognize you. Which one of my sister’s children are you?”
³⁰

In 1935, Bethune united twenty-nine organizations with eight hundred thousand members under the umbrella of the National Council of Negro Women. She invited Mrs. Roosevelt to address the group’s New York chapter. That evening, the First Lady ran late. Dorothy Height was assigned to greet Mrs. Roosevelt at the front door. Newly hired as the Y’s assistant executive director, she instructed the receptionists to notify her as soon as Mrs. Roosevelt’s car pulled up.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Height came of age in a working-class, integrated, steel-mill town near Pittsburgh. At the age of eight, she learned that she was a “nigger” in the eyes of her best friend, the blond girl next door. At twelve, the Pittsburgh YWCA barred her from its pool. At fifteen, a Harrisburg hotel denied her a room when she visited the state capital to compete in—and win—the Pennsylvania high school speaking competition. At seventeen, she won a national speech contest, came away with a four-year college scholarship, secured admission to prestigious Barnard College, and was turned away because Barnard had filled its quota of two black students. Instead, Height earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at New York University.

Now, she was anxious to flawlessly escort the First Lady from the front door. Mrs. Roosevelt upset those plans. She drove to Harlem in her own car and entered the Y through a service door. Alerted by a janitor, Height intercepted the First Lady and showed her into the auditorium. There, Battle saw how deeply the women adored Mrs. Roosevelt.

The First Lady was a vocal civil rights advocate. In 1934, she hosted an unprecedented White House meeting at which America’s black leaders discussed issues of pressing importance, including high unemployment and the low amounts of money provided to schools attended by African American children. She had tea with the Hampton Institute choir and lunch on the patio with the NAACP’s Walter White. And nothing resonated more with black America than Mrs. Roosevelt’s activism against lynching.

The 1930s brought a resurgence in white-on-black mob killings. Congress took up legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to prosecute local officials who let a lynching pass without prosecution. Mrs. Roosevelt supported the bill; her husband declined to get behind it for fear of alienating powerful Southern members of the House and Senate. Two years later, the First Lady again pressed FDR after particularly savage lynchings gave the legislation new urgency. Again FDR refused to act. The antilynching bill died an ignominious death. Hitler scoffed that Jews were better off in his pre-Holocaust Germany than blacks were in the United States.

Palpable anger swept black America—exempting Mrs. Roosevelt. Fighting the good fight generated the genuine affection for the First Lady that Battle witnessed at the YWCA. When the evening was finished, the audience sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to her.

As Mrs. Roosevelt prepared to leave, Bethune turned to Height. “We need you at the National Council of Negro Women,” she said, making a fist to indicate that women should bond against injustice. “The freedom gates are half ajar. We must pry them full open.”

Battle spoke quietly to the First Lady. “Mrs. Roosevelt, where are you going from here, and what can I do?” he asked. “I want to know your itinerary.”

“Lieutenant, I’m going to Hyde Park,” she answered, referring to the family home north of New York City.

“This is night, and you’re going to Hyde Park alone?”

“Yes.”

“I will get you an escort to Hyde Park, to drive behind you while you drive,” Battle said.

“If you’ll let your escort just go as far as the parkway with me and get me on the parkway, I’ll be all right from there,” Mrs. Roosevelt directed.
³¹

Battle humored the First Lady. He ordered a contingent of officers to stay with her not just to the parkway but all the way to the city line, and there he arranged for Westchester police to follow her home unseen.

For Height, the evening’s event marked the start of a life of civil rights activism. Drawn into Bethune’s “dazzling orbit of people in power and people in poverty,” she would serve as president of the National Council of Negro Women from 1957 to 1997, would be the only woman on the dais when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech to the 1963 March on Washington, would be honored with both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, would be on the dais at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and would be lionized by Obama as “the godmother of the civil rights movement” on her death at the age of ninety-eight in 2010.
³²

For Battle, the night’s consequences were less sweeping and more personal. He had started a relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt that he would come to treasure.

WITH RANK AND
recognition came the opportunity to keep making a difference for the race.

In 1938, Battle joined a fight to integrate the Baltimore Police Department. For almost a decade, the local black-oriented newspaper, the
Afro-American
, had railed that governors, mayors, and police commissioners had maintained an all-white force.

Finally, Republican governor Harry Nice promised to integrate the department. When action was slow in coming, black Republican power broker Marse Calloway helped organize training that would prepare African Americans to take the civil service hiring test. Numerous blacks enrolled. As they were completing the course, Governor Nice wrote to La Guardia, asking that Battle be sent to address the class.

La Guardia granted permission for Battle to make the trip, advising Valentine, “He is going into unfriendly territory and I repeat must make a good showing, guarding against being a ‘Show-Off.’ We will help him with it.”
³³

Black leaders scheduled a rally at Baltimore’s Bethel AME Church. On the stage, Battle rose to offer his seat to Governor Nice, but “Marse Callaway said, ‘Don’t move, Lieutenant Battle. You are the guest speaker here. The governor is only incidental. Let him sit on your left.’ So that is where he sat.”

Battle recounted his history and described the service of fellow black officers. Local leaders spoke and the audience signed petitions to the governor, mayor of Baltimore, and police commissioner.

“The very next day, for the first time, several Negroes took the examinations for the police force. And it was not too long before two plainclothes men and a Negro policewoman were appointed,” Battle recalled.

His satisfaction at helping to push Baltimore toward equal opportunity gave way that summer to the thrill of Wesley’s elevation from captain of a single firehouse to battalion chief overseeing half a dozen companies, each led by a captain and lieutenants and staffed by a total of almost two hundred men. The milestone produced a delicious moral victory. As battalion chief, Wesley had charge of a fire company that was led by a captain named O’Toole. Way back at the start, this same O’Toole had tried to humiliate Wesley by asking why his commanding officer would have anything to do with “that nigger” and urging that Wesley be driven from the force.

When Wesley won promotion to lieutenant, O’Toole’s brother John had walked out, pulling strings to get a new assignment. Now, after serving under Wesley at a single fire, Captain O’Toole retired in order to escape taking further orders from a black man.

THE FIRE DEPARTMENT
was changing. In 1936, the New York State legislature had reduced the standard workweek from eighty-four hours to forty-eight and had given the department three years to hire large numbers of firefighters. Propelled by the Depression, African Americans had stepped forward to brave the hostility that ruled firehouses. The number of blacks on the force rose from four to twenty at the end of 1937 and to more than fifty in 1940. Some fire companies required African American members to sleep in Jim Crow beds. Silence prevailed except in the line of duty. Lieutenants assigned blacks to porterlike duties, such as cleaning toilets and tending firehouse furnaces.