One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (42 page)

To Wesley’s disappointment, the mayor appeared to take no action. With segregation proliferating, he pushed the Vulcans into a public stand. Years later he would recall that, as a senior battalion chief, he was largely impervious to retaliation, while others faced severe jeopardy. “It took courage for the young colored fireman who was just starting his career. With a family to think of, he had everything to lose should he have been dismissed from the department,” Wesley would say.

As a first step, he led a six-man committee to notify Commissioner Walsh that the Vulcans had voted unanimously to seek a meeting with the mayor “regarding certain flagrantly undemocratic practices of racial discrimination in some firehouses.” The committee reported that the department would assign no more than three African Americans to a single company in order to maintain segregated beds. Company leaders often posted the names of black firefighters on specific bunks. The committee also reported that the Vulcans had compiled a list of every firehouse with Jim Crow beds, offering three examples as evidence.
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When Walsh agreed to meet with the Vulcans, Wesley, accompanied by an NAACP lawyer, opened the discussions. Walsh signaled both cooperation and exasperation, telling Wesley, “I do not know why God made colored people but I guess he knew what he was doing.” Meanwhile, white firefighters pressured La Guardia to close his door to the group. Wesley responded by asking a prominent black judge to intercede with the mayor. He wrote: “The fact that (white opponents) so far have been successful in preventing our group from seeing the Mayor has caused the opposition to take greater courage and become more brazen than ever. In fact to such an extent that instead of the condition (Jim Crow beds) remaining static or improving for the better, it has become worse and is right now spreading to other companies in the department.”
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The firefighters union president, a man named Kane, promised Walsh that union members would pass a resolution permitting any firefighter to select with whom he would rotate a bed when shifts changed. What Kane didn’t know was that his delegates included an African American who had passed for white and who had kept the Vulcans informed about union strategy.

The spy revealed that Kane planned to extend the meeting long into the night so that everyone but his loyalists would drift away. Then he would introduce and pass the resolution. Wesley rallied the Vulcans to stay for as long as the meeting lasted and, more important, he enlisted the help of his battalion aide-de-camp, who happened to be Jewish. The aide spread a rumor that the union planned to apply Jim Crow rules to Jews. Jewish firefighters turned out in force. Together, the blacks and Jews not only defeated the union resolution but passed one of their own, which Wesley described as “an emancipation proclamation for we Negroes in the fire department.”

The impact was minimal. When La Guardia continued to demur and Walsh failed to order full integration and equal treatment, Wesley enlisted Councilman Benjamin J. Davis—a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School and the only African American member of the municipal legislature—to convene a hearing into the Vulcans’ complaints. On December 14, 1944, Wesley led a delegation into a City Hall showdown. With fire department brass seated along one wall and the Vulcans facing them across the chamber, Wesley testified that the department’s sixty-seven black firefighters were assigned to twenty-six firehouses. Twenty of the companies had imposed segregated sleeping arrangements, he said. He told of beds screened off and of beds beside the toilets. He told of communal tables that were closed to African Americans and of companies that prohibited African Americans from sharing spare helmets and equipment when necessary. Davis urged the council’s City Affairs Committee to launch an investigation to substantiate Wesley’s testimony. His white fellow councilmen refused. Instead, they voted to give the fire department time to make reforms, thereby avoiding a politically explosive confrontation and perpetuating a racial structure that many accepted as the natural order.
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Still, Wesley counted the very fact of a public hearing as a victory. Soon enough, he faced bitter reality. Ten months later, he outlined worsening abuses for the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had now been elected to Congress. He told Powell: “The Negro firemen of the New York Fire Department are in hopes that some courageous person will help us.”
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In truth, Jim Crow beds and commissaries were only the most visible representation of the department’s hostility. More insidiously, commanding officers barred African Americans from driving rigs and serving as hook-and-ladder tillermen. Central administrators excluded blacks from working as building inspectors, turning away even a graduate of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The medical office marked the files of black firefighters with a “C” and provided segregated services. All too predictably, the brass excluded African Americans from parades.

Progress came in painfully slow increments, in large measure because La Guardia, who spoke from the heart about racial equality, accepted the prejudices of his fellow white citizens as a fact of political life. His biographer Kessner wrote: “Many of the plain New Yorkers whose cause he championed were biased against blacks. They were not prejudiced in the same way as some of the southern bigots who participated in lynch mobs and straight-out violence, but rather in a way that was more insidious. They would deny blacks a job, refuse to live near them, view them as inferior human beings, and deny their children equal opportunities. As mayor, La Guardia worked with such people, understood them, did not think that they were necessarily evil, and sometimes compromised with them.”
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La Guardia’s mayoral successors similarly accommodated the racial animus that prevailed in the firehouses—so much so that more than half a century later, blacks would compose no more than 3 percent of the fire force.

In April 1944, the newspapers carried brief accounts of the death of Casper Holstein at the age of sixty-four. He had been released from prison, had lived in near poverty, and had suffered a stroke. For two years, a man named Alverstone Smothergill had cared for Holstein in Smothergill’s apartment. The papers described Smothergill as having once been a beneficiary of Holstein’s generosity. A few other grateful beneficiaries paid for a funeral and for a gravesite, which kept Holstein’s body from burial in a pauper’s grave. Battle was one of the few people who attended the service for a man who had given so much to so many, who had helped propel the fleeting cultural Renaissance, and who had been so easily forgotten so quickly.
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THE WAR TOOK
Carroll to the beach at Normandy on D-Day and then on the long hard march across France and into Germany in a segregated unit attached to Patton’s Third Army. Battle and Florence could only pray they would never get a knock on the door. After being delayed by her duties as a mother, Charline finally graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a master’s degree in psychology. She enrolled Yvonne and Tony in private schools in Lower Manhattan that offered superior educations, first the Little Red Schoolhouse for kindergarten, then City and Country, whose faculty included music teacher Pete Seeger. Battle began to work with Eddy and Charline to expand the cottage at Greenwood Forest Farm. Carroll came home from the war as a top sergeant of an outfit that had fought in the decisive Battle of the Bulge. He was invited to take a staff job in the fire commissioner’s office, but he preferred the excitement of responding to fires in a hook-and-ladder crew.

AT MIDNIGHT ON
December 31, 1945, La Guardia’s third and final term came to a close. A far different man followed Battle’s great mayoral patron into office. William O’Dwyer had arrived in New York as an Irish immigrant boy with twenty-four dollars in his pocket. He had worked as a grocer’s clerk, coal shoveler, plasterer’s helper, bartender, and police officer during the heyday of Tammany rule. Then he had gone on to become a lawyer and Brooklyn district attorney before realizing his mayoral ambitions, despite a history clouded by apparent favors to organized crime figures.

Still, Battle mixed high admiration for La Guardia with optimism about his successor. He viewed O’Dwyer as a friend from the past. While accounts of O’Dwyer’s police career focus on his pounding a beat in Brooklyn, Battle recalled that O’Dwyer “knew me very well, because I helped to break him in” as a patrolman in Harlem.
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When O’Dwyer named Battle to serve on a commission that would plan the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the consolidation of the cities of Brooklyn and New York into Greater New York, Battle proudly foresaw building a close relationship with yet another mayor.

WESLEY NEARED THE
end of his third decade on the fire force. One day in 1949, he sat outside his battalion headquarters in the Bronx. As he would later recall, a chauffeur-driven Cadillac pulled up. A distinguished looking white man stepped out.

“Do you remember me?” the man asked.

When Wesley answered no, the man introduced himself as Dick Dawson, sat beside Wesley on an empty chair, and “cried like a baby.” Dawson had been among the firefighters who had conspired to drive Wesley out of the department at the start of his career. He had been among those who had asked for transfers on the ground that they refused to work with a “nigger.” He had also been the first man to leave the company when the commissioner’s one-year ban on transfers had expired. Dawson told Wesley that he had eventually left the fire department and had grown wealthy as a real estate investor.

“He said he had everything to make him happy but one thing and that it was on his conscience as to how he had treated me those thirty years back. And would I forgive him? That was the only thing that marred his complete happiness. I said, ‘Forget about it. I certainly forgive you.’”

“He asked me if there was anything that I needed or that he could do for me and I told him, ‘No, thank you.’ The man left with tears in his eyes.”

AN AIDE TO
Mayor O’Dwyer, a black man, made an appointment to see Battle. He showed up with a Democratic elected official, who also was black. Battle knew both men well. He expected nothing untoward. Then his visitors said they were emissaries of a white Tammany Hall district leader who wanted a horseracing bookmaker released from a thirty-six-month sentence. They said Battle “would do all of them a favor. I would not lose anything by it.” Warily, Battle agreed to look into the case. After the emissaries left, he determined that the bookie was connected to a notorious gambling ring and ruled out taking “such a despicable case before the board for review.” Returning to apply pressure, the elected official was even more explicit.

“This white leader insisted that I do something for this man,” Battle wrote. “If I didn’t, I would be sorry someday. On the other hand, I would be rewarded.”

Well used to the security of mayoral favor, Battle rejected the demand out of hand: “I sent word by this politician to the white leader that this case stinks to high heaven.”

Case closed—or so he thought.

IN APRIL
1948, seventy-year-old Bill “Bojangles” Robinson danced in front of an audience that included Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Irving Berlin and then collapsed backstage at the Copacabana nightclub. Although he had suffered a heart attack, he refused to stop dancing. Nor did he stop gambling or consuming a gallon of vanilla ice cream daily. After another coronary, Robinson died on November 25, 1949. Battle and a group of the dancer’s friends gathered at the Delmonico Hotel, in a room rented by Ed Sullivan, the
New York Daily News
theater writer who had just launched a variety show on the new medium of television, a program that would become one of the most successful ever. Robinson’s friends planned a grand sendoff.

The funeral was to be held at Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, but Battle felt the house of worship would be too small to accommodate the masses who would want to pay respects. He arranged for Robinson’s body to lie in state in the cavernous 369th Regiment Armory. An estimated fifty thousand people filed by a flower-bedecked bier, Robinson in a blue suit and white shirt, the foot of his casket draped with the American flag.

Three thousand people filled the Abyssinian Church for the funeral. The honorary pallbearers included Bob Hope, Duke Ellington, Louis B. Mayer, Cole Porter, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson. At Battle’s suggestion, Mayor O’Dwyer excused Harlem’s children from school so they could line the route of the funeral procession. In the church vestibule, Battle chatted with O’Dwyer, the Reverend Powell, and Battle’s friend the Reverend John H. Johnson. The mayor offered a surprise.

“Sam, I am going to reappoint you to the parole commission when your term expires and you don’t have to have anyone come to see me about it,” O’Dwyer pledged, relieving Battle of a growing anxiety. His term as commissioner would be finished on January 4, 1950. Remembering all the support he had needed for advancement in the past, Battle was just beginning to strategize about the backing he should bring to bear on O’Dwyer. Now, in the presence of the ministers, Battle thanked O’Dwyer and sat through the funeral with a mix of grief and happiness. He saw more to do in public service, and—who knew?—perhaps he could do more for the race.

In his eulogy, Powell told the congregation: “Bill wasn’t a credit to his race, meaning the Negro race, Bill was a credit to the human race. He was not a great Negro dancer, he was the world’s greatest dancer. . . . Somewhere, I know not where, but I know it is somewhere, Bill says, ‘Copacetic!’”
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Outside, Battle marched behind the hearse and dozens of flower cars for a full five miles to New York’s theater district where “beautiful girls, white and colored, of the theatre appeared with tributes of flowers. A choir sang. And all of Broadway paused to pay tribute to the memory of one of its great ones gone.”