One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (41 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
As they drove, White saw that “wild eyed men and women, whose poverty was pathetically obvious in their shabbiness, roamed the streets, screaming imprecations.” A brick crashed through a storefront window. A fire broke out.
“Heedless of his own safety, La Guardia jumped from the car and screamed at the crowd before the building,” White would recall. “I doubt that in the excitement the Mayor was recognized, but such was the fury with which he lashed out at the marauders that his moral indignation shamed and quieted the crowd, which rapidly dispersed.”
49
Another time with La Guardia, White witnessed a scene that broke his heart. He wrote in a memoir:
I remember especially a toothless old woman in front of a grocery store who moved about the edge of a crowd which had just smashed a store window. In one hand she clutched two grimy pillow cases which apparently she had snatched from the bed in which she had been sleeping. With the other hand she held the arm of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, possibly a grandson. The minute an opening appeared in the crowd the old woman, with an agility surprising in one of her age and emaciated appearance, climbed through the broken glass into the store window to fill the pillow cases with canned goods and cereals which lay in scattered disorder. When the bags were filled she turned toward the street and looked toward the police car in which La Guardia and I were sitting. Exultation, vengeance, the supreme satisfaction of having secured food for a few days, lighted her face, and then I looked at the sleepy-eyed child by her side. I felt nausea that an abundant society like America’s could so degrade and starve a human being, and I was equally sickened to contemplate the kind of man the boy would become under such conditions.
50
Shortly after 1 a.m., La Guardia made the first of five radio broadcasts appealing for calm. At 1:30, mayoral aides reached Battle at Greenwood Forest Farms. Racing along the highways, he reached Harlem shortly before 3 a.m. and discovered that “the shops along 125th Street were a shambles.”
“Because of my handling of the 1935 riot, I was given carte blanche, to take whatever action I deemed wise,” he said, adding, “The police had orders not to shoot, so the mobs paid them little mind. They scattered at a raised nightstick or the approach of a mounted cop only to reform again further down the street.”
Finally, Battle issued an unprecedented order directly to the mayor of New York City and to White. “Although the head of the strongest organization in the world for the protection of racial rights, the NAACP,” White “was himself so light in complexion that he looked like a white man,” Battle told Hughes. “I requested both him and La Guardia to go home. I asked: ‘Walter, you and the mayor are both too white to be riding around Harlem on a night like this. Neither of you are an asset to calming things down. The fewer white faces in evidence, the better, until order is restored.’ They left.”
The mayhem abated at dawn. Detroit’s upheaval had extended for thirty hours and spread across the city; Harlem’s had lasted twelve hours and had been contained to the community. Thirty-four had died in Detroit; twenty-five at the hands of police. Six had lost their lives in Harlem; four of them shot by cops. Two officers had acted in clear self-defense. One cop had killed two fleeing looters in apparent violation of orders. La Guardia’s leadership won wide praise.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to La Guardia. She had heard from many about the need for additional African American officers and she had gotten to know Battle as a nearly solitary example of black police leadership. She advised the mayor that, with deeper black ranks “there might not be such instances as the past regrettable one.”
La Guardia responded petulantly. He told the First Lady he was beset “by agitators and selfish people or by thoughtless and well-meaning people.” He minimized the degree of police brutality and defended the department’s efforts to recruit blacks. He followed up the next day, telling Mrs. Roosevelt that Harlem residents had complained that black officers were “too rough,” and explaining that the department had 155 African American members, including 6 sergeants, a police surgeon, and a parole commissioner—the retired Battle.
“Commissioner Valentine would take one hundred right now if he could get them,” La Guardia wrote, blaming the war for difficulty in recruiting African Americans. Left unsaid were two numbers: First, the department had been adding black officers at the rate of only five a year in the three decades since Battle’s appointment. Second, the force should have employed one thousand African Americans if the proportion of blacks in the department equaled the proportion of blacks in the city’s population.
A FEW WEEKS LATER
, Battle and Florence faced the inevitable. On August 25, 1943, Carroll took leave from the fire department to enlist in the US Army, committed to go where he was called in service of a country at war, the country of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Battle could not help but remember the little boy who had come home on the handlebars of police officers’ bicycles. Florence remembered the thirteen-year-old who had made the honor roll in class 8B-1 of junior high. Everyone knew someone who had gone to duty in the Pacific or Europe. Everyone seemed also to know someone who had fallen in the line of duty. Charline, Eddy, big brother Jesse, and Carroll’s wife, Edith, could only hope for the best. The war had already exacted a toll on Jesse. Too old for active duty, he had taken a job in a defense plant and had lost a thumb pulling a man out of a machine in an industrial accident. Battle embraced Carroll and placed his son’s fate in the Lord’s hands, just as Thomas had done for the son who had left home at the age of sixteen, never again to see his father alive or dead.
AS WITH MOST
aspects of life in New York, corruption held sway behind bars. State institutions like Sing Sing confined the most serious offenders. City penitentiaries held inmates convicted of crimes that carried shorter sentences. The primary one housed sixteen hundred men behind quarried stone on Welfare Island in the East River. The jail was ruled by gangsters Joseph Rao and Edward Cleary. The crime bosses lived comfortably in hospital dormitories, Rao favoring silk shirts and expensive cigars, Cleary tending to a pet dog named Screw Hater. They made their livings importing narcotics via carrier pigeons. Shortly after La Guardia became mayor, his correction commissioner staged a naval assault to reclaim the jail. In the ensuing investigation, two former prisoners swore that well-connected inmates had advised purchasing paroles through Battle’s nemesis-turned-benefactor, Jimmy Hines.
51
The parole commission chairman insisted that political influence played no role in any of the board’s actions. When La Guardia named Battle a decade later, the same man was still chairman. Whether or not he had ever been corrupt, cash could enter the picture as inmates sought to buy release from behind bars. Battle told Hughes of spurning the occasional dirty deal: “Once in a while I was offered money to use my influence in releasing prisoners, sometimes innocently and sometimes with knowingly unlawful intention of bribery. One Italian mother who scarcely spoke English, desperately anxious for the release of her son, threw herself on her knees in front of my desk, weeping and begging me to take a roll of bills she pulled from her purse if only I could hasten the freedom of her boy. I gently refused, and explained to her as clearly and simply as I could how our laws and regulations work.”
In a more sinister case, the family of a man convicted of “the indecent handling of young girls” used political channels to offer Battle cash for a favorable ruling on a quick release from prison. “When I refused this offer, some of the politicians of his district told me in no uncertain terms that they would see to it that I got nowhere should I ever attempt to run for political office,” Battle told Hughes, adding that he ignored the threat and kept the man behind bars.
Battle also gave Hughes a nutshell description of how he identified prisoners meriting release. “My function on the parole board, as I saw it, was to assist in the rehabilitation of those who have, in varying degrees, outraged society,” he said. “This could not be done justly, I felt, without duly considering those very essential factors which establish the odds for or against an offender’s rehabilitation, and to find the factors one had to look well into his past life.”
When La Guardia appointed Gehrig and then Battle, Executive Director David Dressler of the state division of parole doubted the mayor had chosen wisely. He later came to believe that Battle “made up the real backbone of the Municipal Parole Commission.”
52
THE ARMY SENT
Carroll for basic training at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana. Notorious to black Americans, the base was both segregated and in the heart of Jim Crow South. The indignities of even a New York City firehouse paled in comparison with the hostile caste structure of the nearby town of Alexandria. In 1942, the black press reported that three thousand African American troops had rioted there. While the circumstances and toll were unconfirmed, the
Amsterdam News
front page informed the Battles: “Six Soldiers Reported Killed in Dixie Rioting.”
Frightening and outrageous news arrived steadily. When Private James Smart died in the Camp Claiborne hospital, the commander shipped his flag-draped casket home to Union Springs, Alabama. He provided Smart’s mother with a first-class railroad ticket, allowing her to accompany her son’s body. The trip required changing trains at Monroe, Louisiana. There, a conductor separated mother and son, limiting her to a Jim Crow coach and giving her a receipt for a refund of the difference between the cost of first-class and Jim Crow travel. Despite legal representation by future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, three black Camp Claiborne soldiers were sentenced to hang for the alleged rape of a white woman. When nine sick Camp Claiborne soldiers were transported to a distant hospital, they made an overnight stop in Texas, near a base that was beginning to house German prisoners of war. One of the nine described what happened in a letter to the
Pittsburgh Courier
:
The only place that would serve us was the lunch room at the station. But we couldn’t eat where the white people were eating. To do that would contaminate the very air of the place, so we had to go to the kitchen.
About 11:30 the same morning, about two dozen German prisoners of war came to the lunchroom with two guards. They entered the large room, sat at the table. Their meals were served them. They smoked and had a swell time.
There they sat; eating, talking laughing, smoking. They were ENEMIES of our country, people sworn to destroy all the so-called democratic governments of the world. And there we were. Men sworn to fight, to give our lives for this country, but WE were not good enough to sit in the lunchroom.
53
Battle did what he could: with twenty-five other Harlem residents, he sent a telegram of protest to President Roosevelt:
We learn that white soldiers brought back from overseas for recreation and relief from battle are to be given approximately two weeks each at government expense at luxurious hotels and resorts at Lake Placid, Santa Barbara, Hot Springs, Miami Beach, Ashville, and perhaps other pleasure places. But Negro soldiers are to be required to go to the Theresa Hotel in New York’s Harlem and Pershing Hotel on Chicago’s South Side. Such a plan is a reprehensible act which is an insult to Negroes buried in foreign soil, having died in the belief that they were fighting for democracy.
SIX MONTHS INTO
his training, Carroll came home on his only leave—home to his wife, Edith; home to Jesse; home to Charline, Eddy, and their two children; home to Battle and Florence. College-educated, athletically gifted, trained as a firefighter, Carroll had done well among his black comrades. He had already made corporal. The family bid Carroll farewell with a party in the great old townhouse. He returned to Camp Claiborne as a stepping-off point for Europe.
54
LIFE WAS CHANGING
for Wesley as well. After twenty-two years of often heroic service, he requested a transfer from the Hell’s Acres of Lower Manhattan to a battalion headquarters closer to his home in the Bronx. He cited in his application to Commissioner Patrick Walsh: “Serious nervous illness of my wife and the fact that all of the children have married and there is no one at home with her at the present time.”
“It is a 44 mile round trip from my residence to work,” Wesley noted. “Also this is my first and only request for a transfer in close on to 23 years of service.” When Walsh gave no break to the new leader of the Vulcans, Wesley turned for help, ever so politely, to an old friend of his father’s from the glory days of Grand Central Station—former New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith.
“Should you be kind enough to bring this to the attention of our very humane and just Commissioner Patrick Walsh, I am sure that he will do it if it is possible,” Wesley wrote.
Six months later Wesley renewed his request. Finally, Walsh approved a transfer to an area that had far fewer serious fires and placed Wesley close to his wife of twenty-seven years.
55
The duties were easier, but the department’s racial degradations became ever more severe.
IN
1944,
WHITE
firefighters up through the hierarchy united to stop the department’s black ranks, small as they were, from growing. A captain newly assigned to Harlem established Jim Crow beds for his few African American firefighters. Propelled by the insult to the heart of black America, Wesley and the Vulcans planned the then-radical act of picketing. When word reached City Hall, La Guardia ordered the captain transferred. The Vulcans stood down only to see a different captain install Jim Crow beds in a Lower Manhattan firehouse. This time the Vulcans appealed for La Guardia’s help in a tellingly unsigned letter. The writer begged the mayor’s pardon by stating: “Anonymity is usually associated with a cowardly attack, but it should be obvious that were I to sign my name to this letter, life would be made so intolerable for me that it would be impossible to continue in the Department.” A month later, the unnamed writer reported to La Guardia that the captain had ordered a lieutenant in charge of yet another company “to adopt similar ‘Jim Crow’ tactics.”
56
