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

by Browne, Arthur

  And so, on March 6, 1891, Overton left his wife Francis and his daughters, nine-year-old twins Beulah and Mabel, and headed to the stationhouse in Brooklyn’s First Precinct, a building a few blocks from the East River anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. Outside, Overton looked upon the primitive headquarters of primitive ranks. Waiting inside was Captain James Campbell, who was at an age when his hair and moustache had turned snowy white. Campbell gave orders to lieutenants for execution. Those men in turn relied on roundsmen, today’s sergeants, to supervise the precinct’s cops. Finally, there was a doorman who ushered officers and visitors into the stationhouse and performed janitorial services. This was the sole job in the building open to blacks.

  Inside, Overton met determined silence and discovered that the department had yet to secure a uniform for him and, further, that none of his new colleagues would lend a spare regulation shirt, pants, coat, or hat. As night fell, Overton set out in civilian clothing to patrol until midnight. He walked the gaslit streets of Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of townhouses overlooking New York Harbor, home to Brooklyn’s wealthiest citizens. The Eagle noted that a Sergeant Reeves found that “Overton’s carriage was good and that he gave promise of making a first class patrolman.”38

  The work hours were incomprehensibly grueling. A typical schedule called for a police officer to stay on duty for as long as thirty-six hours straight, including time spent in the stationhouse—on reserve—to respond to emergencies. While on reserve, officers slept in dormitories stocked with cotlike beds and thick with men in flannel underwear who smoked pipes and cigars or chewed Virgin Leaf Tobacco. Officers set the legs of their beds in kerosene-filled pans to keep roaches from climbing up from the floor.

  Overton clocked in for his first reserve duty at 9:58 p.m. on a Wednesday night. In the stationhouse barracks, he knelt to say prayers beside his assigned bed. Then he lay down, and four men in the room went downstairs to a lounge. They would not sleep in close quarters with an African American.39 Although commanders ordered the boycott ended, Overton faced still greater hostility. The Eagle reported that First Precinct cops had hired career thief William Scheff, described as “a man who breaks stones with his fists in dime museums,” to assault Overton “either with his bare fists or with brass knuckles and a pistol . . . to make the colored officer useless for further service on the police force of this city.”

  Based on the word of a confidential source and on corroborating accounts from Scheff, who said he had been “hired to knock out the nigger,” and a police officer, who was quoted by name, The Eagle’s headline read: “Hired to Whip Overton. The Remarkable Story of a Police Conspiracy.” After the quoted police officer denied the statements attributed to him by the Eagle, Hayden dismissed the story as unworthy of belief.40

  Already, though, Overton’s superiors had begun to bring him up on departmental charges. In the first case, Overton discovered that Vaughan’s Saloon was doing a roaring business at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. A fellow officer was among the carousers. Overton was cited for failing to arrest the proprietor. He explained that he had been specially assigned at the time “to find a mulatto boy . . . who was wanted by the police for stabbing an Italian.” He also argued that the first officer on the scene had been responsible for shutting down the saloon. Campbell punished Overton with a reprimand.41

  Undeterred by the hardships inflicted on Overton, three more African Americans took—and passed—the next hiring exam. Philip W. Hadley worked as a horse-drawn coachman. The Eagle reported that he was “a quadroon and a remarkably bright looking young man.”42 John W. Lee served as a stationhouse doorman and hoped to rise above janitorial duties. Moses P. Cobb was a longshoreman who had been born into slavery in Kinston, North Carolina, and who had walked from there to Brooklyn. He was married to Tempy Fumville, a woman of particular note because she was from New Bern and was friends with Battle’s parents. The Eagle reported that Cobb was “somewhat taller than Overton and he is built on a handier model, for he is raw boned and strong looking while Overton is chunky and has a tendency to run to fat.”43

  In April 1892, the paper quoted a police official as saying, “The appointment of the three colored men whose names are on the eligible list is sure to make trouble unless the commissioner assigns them to do duty as doormen.” The following month, Cobb became Brooklyn’s second African American officer.44 The commissioner placed him in a precinct that included a concentration of black residents. Even so, the department restricted Cobb largely to the duties of a doorman rather than place him in uniform on the street. And, increasingly, the department treated its African American officers like a virus needing expulsion.

  In June 1892, when Overton failed to signal the stationhouse from a call box at the appointed hour, a roundsman discovered him “in a restaurant much frequented by colored folks.” Commissioner Hayden fined Overton ten day’s pay, three times the fine he imposed on a white officer who was found drunk on duty and five times the fine he administered to a white cop who went AWOL.45 In July, Hadley won appointment to the force. The next month, the commissioner fined Cobb two day’s pay for sitting down during a tour of duty, but gave a white officer just a reprimand for sitting on a doorstep.

  “Colored policemen are not turning out to be the models they were expected by their enthusiastic backers to show themselves,” the Eagle opined. “Strange to say, they have the same weaknesses as white men, and to judge from certain recent official utterances, not made in a public way, it will be quite a while before their number is increased.”46

  Hayden again hit Overton with a ten-day fine after a roundsman reported seeing him in civilian clothes while on duty. In November, Hayden fined Overton an additional five day’s pay after he was found in a milk depot while on duty. Within a week of this final punishment, twenty months after he was appointed to the force, Overton announced that he was quitting in hope of moving to a position as a United States government clerk. He expressed no recriminations. With a federal job on the line and, perhaps more important, with Cobb and Hadley on the force and Lee climbing the civil service list, he said, “I have no complaint to make of the treatment which I have received. My fellow officers have been very courteous to me, while I have nothing to say of the conduct of my superior officers toward me.”47

  Overton’s attempt to resign without generating animosity toward his fellow blacks proved futile. Less than two weeks later, the commissioner fired Hadley on a charge of drunkenness. He had lasted all of four months. At the same time, the commissioner fined two drunken white officers ten day’s pay.48

  Soon, the last of Fortune’s candidates dropped plans to become a police officer. On the verge of appointment, Lee asked Commissioner Hayden’s permission to remain as a doorman, while collecting a police officer’s higher salary. Hayden obliged, prompting the Eagle to write that Lee, “about whose race origin there can be no doubt,” was “evidently an astute individual and knows pretty well what he is about. As a patrolman he would not have received any too an effusive welcome by his fellow officers. As a doorman he will not interfere with existing conditions, nor in any way offend their more or less refined susceptibilities.”49

  Lee’s decision to accept the title of patrolman but perform a doorman’s duties set a pattern that held for years to come. Almost a decade later, when African American “patrolman” John Nelson left the force, the Eagle would report, “Like all the colored patrolmen on the force Nelson has been doing the work of a doorman.”

  Stalwart Moses P. Cobb fell into that reduced state. He was still on the force when Battle arrived in Brooklyn in need of accommodations after his wanderings in Connecticut. Battle called on Cobb because his household in the East New York countryside included the friendly faces of Cobb’s wife, Tempy Fumville, and Battle’s sister Sophia, who was living with the couple’s family.

  While spending a few days with the young girl he hadn’t seen in years, Battle got to know Cobb and something of his work. Battle said both that Cobb had “been a p
oliceman for a number of years” and that Cobb and a handful of others “were patrolmen, but were not in uniform on the beats, but were turnkeys and stationhouse attendants.”50 Denied promotions, they were generally limited to plainclothes so as to spare the white public the sight of a black cop in uniform, Battle said.

  Within months after Battle’s short visit, Tempy would die, at the age of fifty-five, and her body was returned to New Bern for burial.51 Sophia stayed with Cobb, matured into a young woman, and at twenty-one, became Cobb’s wife for the rest of his life. When Cobb retired from the force—the first black to do so—Cobb and Sophia returned to North Carolina. In 1975, at the age of eighty-five, long after Cobb had died, she told the New York Times that her husband had remained a doorman for more than two decades before gaining the rank of a true police officer.52

  THERE WASN’T MUCH call in New York for a partly educated nineteen-year-old, let alone one who was black. Battle fell back on the skills he had learned as a servant in the finer white homes of New Bern. As so many other young blacks were doing, he started on the path that William L. Bulkley, the pioneering black school principal, had described: he became a “boy.”

  Battle won a position as a houseboy or, more politely, as a houseman in the home of a retired Spanish banker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Gelio Andreini, on West Seventy-Fifth Street, just feet from Central Park. His salary was twenty-five dollars a month plus meals. He remembered Mr. Andreini as “a fine, liberal man” and Mrs. Andreini as a “charitable church woman,” although she “was so exacting that she made her household staff work like slaves.”

  About this time, in 1902, telegrams went out from New Bern with news that Thomas had died. It had been three years since he had sent Battle forth with a prayer, and now the “old man” was gone. Battle felt powerfully called home to stand in honor of his father and to comfort Anne in the loss of her partner of more than four decades, but he chose not to go. Instead, he bought a ticket on the Old Dominion steamship line for his sister Nancy.

  “This was one of the saddest times of my life because I was the only child who was not at home,” Battle wrote. “I was indeed homesick and lonesome.”

  He also reckoned with the curtailment of his life’s dream. His sister Mary Elizabeth needed tuition for the Slater Industrial School at Winston-Salem, where she was studying to become a teacher, and Anne needed financial support. Battle would no longer be able to afford law school, even as he lived very modestly in a three-dollar-a-month room on West Fifty-Ninth Street, not far from the location today of the 750-foot-tall Time Warner Center. He was north of the Tenderloin, on the edge of another area where blacks concentrated among larger numbers of whites.

  Stretching six or seven blocks north from Fifty-Ninth Street on Manhattan’s West Side, the neighborhood had strict racial divisions, blacks toward the bottom of a slope, whites toward the top. There was constant racial skirmishing. Inspired by the fighting, the enclave came to be called San Juan Hill after the site in Cuba of Teddy Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War victory.

  Unsurprisingly, Battle’s landlord took a liking to him. James Mayhew served as something of a tutor to Battle, taught him to play the bridgelike card game whist, and gave him a fresh brush with greatness. The players who joined Battle at the card table included a curly-haired man with light cocoa skin—the great Arthur Schomburg.

  A decade older than Battle, Schomburg had already embarked on his life’s work of collecting the lost histories and overlooked accomplishments of people of color. Perseverance as a bibliophile would make him a seminal figure of modern African American history and place his name on the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. When he met Battle, he was about thirty years old and working as a law firm clerk.

  Battle remembered that Schomburg “took special interest in me” at their twice-weekly card playing. Increasingly focused on fighting for individual and racial dignity, Schomburg believed that blacks needed to stand on the same intellectual level as whites. He impressed upon Battle that learning was imperative. He stressed reading the newspapers. There was Timothy Thomas Fortune’s New York Age and there were the white newspapers like the New York Times, New York Tribune, and New York Evening Post. He spoke glowingly of books, be they histories, biographies, or fiction. Often in life, he fondly recalled reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and being enthralled by Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Battle embarked on voracious reading and, he recalled, “was very much benefited.”

  Away from the card table, Schomburg moved among talented black men and women. The center of the world became the blocks of West Fifty-Third Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. There, Battle witnessed wonders that were unimaginable elsewhere—black people with money, blacks who were prominent entrepreneurs, blacks who were popular actors and musicians, blacks who lived in better-quality housing.

  The Marshall Hotel was the place to dine, with a restaurant that featured an orchestra on Sundays, and the hotel’s bar was the place to socialize. Here, Battle began to learn from the likes of Harlem Renaissance poet and historian James Weldon Johnson and his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, who collaborated on the music and lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “black national anthem.” Here, Battle got to know and be known by the stars of New York’s “Negro Bohemia.” Bright and affable, he struck up important friendships with Bert Williams and George Walker, the acclaimed musical comedy team of Williams and Walker; with song-and-dance men Charles Avery and Dan Hart; and with rising musician and bandleader James Reese Europe.

  The Maceo Hotel was but a half step down in prestige from the Marshall. Weldon Johnson wrote that “the sight offered at these hotels, of crowds of well-dressed colored men and women lounging and chatting in the parlors, loitering over their coffee and cigarettes while they talked or listened to the music, was unprecedented.”

  So, too, was style on the street. Jervis Anderson, author of the indispensable This Was Harlem, recounted that, on Fifty-Third Street, blacks dressed much as Battle had grown used to seeing whites attired on Fifth Avenue: “The men wore frock coats, vests, and wide-bottom trousers. Their shirts, fastened with studs, had detachable stiff collars and cuffs, made of linen, celluloid, cotton, or paper. Heavy watch chains dangled across their vests. Straw hats were commonly worn in summer, and derbies (or ‘high dicers’) in winter. They carried walking sticks and wore high boots polished with Bixby’s Best Blacking. The women were turned out in heavy-bosomed box blouses and full skirts that covered their ankles.”53

  Seemingly wherever Battle went, he encountered African Americans of accomplishment.

  On Sixth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, John B. Nail kept a saloon that catered to upscale black gentlemen. The New York Sun described the establishment in 1903 as “conducted with the quietness and manners of a high-class Broadway bar and billiard parlor.” Nail told the newspaper: “You must remember that the object of the wealthy and educated colored man is to be as inconspicuous as possible, so far as white people are concerned. He doesn’t want to spend his hours in being reminded of the fact that the great mass of his fellow-citizens despise him on account of his color.”54

  Most clubs were less decorous. Black prizefighters like Joe Walcott ran joints frequented by fellow boxers and by the black jockeys who dominated horse racing. Ike Hines’s club on West Twenty-Seventh Street is credited with introducing ragtime music to New York. Edmond’s on West Twenty-Eighth Street was “a cabaret over a stable,” in the words of composer, lyricist, and pianist Eubie Blake.

  And, of greatest significance, there was the Little Savoy on West Thirty-Fifth Street, a nightclub, gambling hall and hotel owned by Baron Deware Wilkins, king of the sporting life, the realm where drinks flowed, music hopped, and money changed hands for sex, drugs, and dreams of beating the odds with a wager or a con.

  Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Baron Wilkins labored as boy in a US naval yard. After his parents moved to Washington, DC, he hustled as a bellbo
y in the Willard Hotel and then as the head bellman of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. Finally, he moved to the big city, there to meet up with fellow Portsmouth native John W. Connor, a Spanish-American War naval veteran who had opened what the Age called “the finest cabaret for colored in New York.”55

  Wilkins followed suit with the Little Savoy. He was as tough as he was large. He had to be. Competitors were a rough lot, white gangs were given to extortion, and cops and politicians demanded tribute. Wilkins paid up to build bonds with the police and Tammany Hall, and he hired muscle to defend against attacks. Top among Wilkins’s security force was a man who was known as Lamplighter. He stood post in front of the Little Savoy with a six-shooter.

  Perry Bradford was a pianist and songwriter of the era. Recalling the Tenderloin nightclubs, he wrote in a memoir, “Most of these joints had gals who could pull up their dresses, shake their shimmies and go to town, which the natives liked and tossed them plenty of kale,” meaning money. The Little Savoy featured similar fun while blossoming under Wilkins’s stewardship into a cultural hothouse.

  Rich, famous, and adventurous whites would stream beneath a sign—“No One Enters These Portals, But The True In Heart Sports”—to be wowed by the musicianship of James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Willie “The Lion” Smith, who were bridging ragtime and jazz with the rhythmic style of piano playing known as stride.56

  “From the stories the boys tell me, Barron Wilkins’ place up to about 1908 was the most important spot where Negro musicians got acquainted with the wealthy New York clientele, who became the first patrons of their music,” recalled jazz composer Noble Sissle, adding, “It was his fabulous spot that sparked off the renaissance of the Negro musician in New York City.”57

  Up and down the avenues, houses of worship competed with places of entertainment. The black church was on the rise. When blacks were few in number, predominantly white congregations had welcomed them to participate in what were often known as “nigger pews.” As the population grew, two trends paralleled: white churches encouraged blacks, to put it politely, to exercise their Christianity elsewhere, and charismatic African American clergy stepped to the fore.