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

by Browne, Arthur

  Within six weeks of Whitman’s activation, the regiment had drawn more than five hundred recruits. But manpower was not matched by money or equipment. As he tried to bring cohesion to the raw corps, Hayward raised funds among well-off whites and found unconventional routes of supply. He leased a vacant Harlem cigar store to serve as a headquarters and took occupancy of a dance hall on the second story of a building a block away that became known as the “armory.”

  Enlistees assembled for drills in front of the nearby Lafayette Theatre. Battle stopped by to cheer the men as they marched in raggedy uniforms, if they had uniforms, and bore broomsticks in the absence of rifles. The unit was a source of pride to many in Harlem and was cause for ridicule to others. The Age predicted that “the Fifteenth will be the crack regiment of New York,” while another newspaper story recounted that onlookers laughed at “these darkies playing soldiers.”41

  Opinion was also sharply divided on the question of whether black men should risk life and limb by joining the military at a time when Jim Crow America appeared to be marching toward an unfathomable war. “The Germans ain’t done nothing to me. And if they have, I forgive ’em,” James Weldon Johnson heard a man say in a Harlem barbershop.42

  While Bahamian-born Bert Williams was excluded from formal service because he was not an American citizen, he backed the regiment with celebrity. Another of Battle’s friends from the bar of the Marshall Hotel gave the regiment additional star power. James Reese Europe was a leading black band director. Trained as a classical violinist, he made his way from Washington, DC, to New York in hope of earning a living as a performer. At the Marshall, he met a wealthy white man seeking a quartet to play the jazzier rhythms associated with black musicians at a social event. Europe got the gig—he is believed to have coined the word—and came into high demand at white society functions. He took over the band that played for Vernon and Irene Castle, white dancers who were wildly popular for introducing whites to then-black dances like the fox-trot.

  On September 19, 1916, at the age of thirty-five, at a time when he had a dozen tuxedo-clad bands playing New York venues, Europe joined the Fifteenth Regiment. He was inspired in part by Vernon Castle, who was English and who had abandoned his career to join the Royal Air Corps. More fundamentally, Europe had fought to improve the lot of black performers, and he believed deeply that Harlem needed strong institutions to help shape the lives of the poorly educated African Americans who were flocking there.43

  Hayward was delighted to have Europe’s company as well as that of Europe’s protégé Noble Sissle, a young bandleader and baritone. Cleverly, Hayward gave Europe free rein to assemble a regimental band that could play Sousa marches with the best and leap into ragtime at the drop of a baton. The ranks grew as Wilson campaigned for reelection as the war-avoiding president, won the White House, and promptly led the United States into a declaration of war on April 6, 1917. By then, the regimental roster included men from every walk of life, from poet to criminal, from farmer to Negro League baseball star. One showed up on Battle’s doorstep.

  Needham Roberts was born in 1898 to a North Carolina family that was intertwined enough with the sprawl of Battle’s kin for Battle to count Roberts as a cousin. His parents, Norman and Emma, had migrated north to Trenton, New Jersey, where Norman earned a living as a porter in a bank and served as pastor of an AME Zion church. Needham dropped out of a segregated high school to work as a hotel bellhop and drugstore clerk. In 1916, he tried twice to enlist in the navy but was rejected for being underage. After the United States declared war, he ran away to New York with money his father had given him to pay the poll tax and headed to the regiment’s recruiting office in the old cigar store. “Readily they signed me up,” he remembered, adding, “In a few hours afterwards I was in the New York National Guard.”44

  ON THE SUNNY morning of Sunday, May 13, 1917, the Fifteenth’s ragtag troops set off for formal training. They assembled near Grand Central Station and marched behind the rousing play of Europe’s band. He greeted spectators with a brassy “Onward Christian Soldiers.” At the New York Central freight yard abutting San Juan Hill, the men boarded trains for a trip up the Hudson River to Camp Peekskill. There, intense drilling produced a regiment that capably assembled and disassembled weapons and qualified in deliberate and rapid fire. They returned to New York on Memorial Day as a disciplined unit.45

  Six days later, America suffered an eruption of white-on-black violence whose fury was unprecedented, even in the era of lynching. The forces of racism and economics flowing from the northward migration of blacks came virulently together in East St. Louis, Illinois, to produce a massacre that Marcus Garvey summarized with the words: “The mob and the entire white population of East St. Louis had a Roman holiday. They feasted on the blood of the Negro.”46

  Located across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, East St. Louis was an industrial and meatpacking city of seventy-five thousand people. The accelerating exodus of blacks from the South brought some five thousand African Americans there between the start of 1916 and the summer of 1917. Most came seeking factory jobs in answer to advertisements. Many wound up living in riverbank shanties and signed on as strikebreakers. Whites resented being displaced, and their anger grew deadly on trumpeted reports of African American criminality.

  On July 1, white men drove through a neighborhood called Black Valley, shooting into houses. Blacks carrying weapons came out into the street. When another carload of whites approached, the blacks opened fire, killing two of the men in the vehicle. They were police officers. Whites by the thousands rampaged the next day. Often encouraged by police and National Guard troops, they shot, stabbed, beat, burned, and hanged blacks over three days. Thousands of African Americans fled as rioters doused shacks with gasoline and set them ablaze. The official death toll was thirty-nine but scores more are believed to have been murdered, their bodies burned or thrown into the river.47

  While Battle was struggling one man at a time to integrate the police force, and while so many of his friends were pleading to place their lives at risk in service of their country, America’s racial hostility had produced mass bloodshed. Then, just as the violence subsided in East St. Louis, a New York police officer assigned to the West Sixty-Eighth Street station encountered two dozen men from the Fifteenth on a San Juan Hill corner. The officer, a white man named Hansen, ordered the troops to move. As they started to disperse, Private Lawrence Joaquin objected, saying that Hansen failed to respect the uniform of a US military man. Hansen arrested Joaquin, only to have a crowd of African Americans attempt to free the soldier. Hansen backed Joaquin into a hallway, fending off the prisoner’s would-be saviors with his nightstick. Neighborhood whites swarmed into the conflict. Soon, the Times reported, police reinforcements found “two-thousand persons gathered around the corner and most of them fighting, with knives and clubs swinging and bricks flying through the air.”48

  Frederick Randolph Moore of the Age and the Reverend George Sims, the pastor of Union Baptist Church, who had married Battle and Florence, protested. “So far as we can ascertain, the men of the Fifteenth were entirely within their rights in standing on the corner. They were in uniform, were perfectly quiet and orderly, and were not interfering with traffic,” Moore said, adding, “The Fifteenth is a picked regiment, composed of the very best, self-respecting, law-abiding negroes in New York. There never has been any complaint against the men of the regiment before and if they are being unjustly treated because of their race we propose to find out about it.”49

  Of course, nothing would come of it.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Battle witnessed a parade of, by, and for African Americans, a parade unlike any he or America had ever seen. Six thousand—some said ten thousand—black men, women, and children walked silently down Fifth Avenue on the steamy Saturday afternoon of July 28, 1917. Led by youngsters dressed in white, they moved to the cadence of muffled drums and carried banners that had been inspired by the killings in East St. Louis, the
lynching in Waco, and other white-on-black violence.

  One banner read, “We Are Maligned and Murdered Where we Work.” Another asked, “Mother, Do Lynchers Go to Heaven?” A third was addressed to Woodrow Wilson: “Give Me a Chance to Live, Mr. President. Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” Black Boy Scouts distributed leaflets that explained “Why We March.” They answered most pithily: “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis, by arousing the conscience of the country, and to bring the murderers of our brothers and sisters, and innocent children to justice.”

  Where Battle had been barred from the department’s annual celebratory march, he now stood sentinel at the Silent Protest Parade, America’s first mass civil rights demonstration.

  THE HOT SUMMER moved on, long days of police work giving way to equally long nights of foot patrol. At 11:45 p.m. on August 6, 1917, Battle got ready to stand post from midnight to morning at the corner of West 139th Street and Lenox Avenue. He was due there in fifteen minutes to relieve Robert Holmes, who was finishing night duty. Holmes had transferred into the precinct. It felt good to have him there, and Battle looked forward to chatting with Holmes as they changed the guard.

  Just then the noise of a burglar opening a window awakened Garfield Rose in a first-floor apartment. Rose rushed to the window and struggled with the intruder. The burglar fired four shots and fled. Holmes ran toward the gunfire and gave chase on Lenox Avenue. The man darted into a building, snuffed a gaslight, and waited in the dark. Holmes dashed in and was felled by two shots to the head.

  Battle was left to look at Holmes’s blood on the floor, red blood like that of any man, yet not the blood of a man who could walk in the police department parade or earn a choice assignment as reward for exemplary performance. To New York, Holmes had not been a policeman, but a Negro policeman.

  News traveled from building to building, apartment to apartment, that Holmes had been killed. Thousands rushed into the street. A superior officer brought the fact of their son’s death to Henry and Ella, whose declining health led the newspapers to describe Henry as elderly at the age of forty-nine and Ella as now blind. The police commissioner—Arthur Woods had assumed the office—said: “In Patrolman Holmes’ death the force loses a faithful and courageous officer, who died as he had lived—a fearless and loyal servant of the public, doing his best to the last to protect the lives of others placed in his charge.” And then, cognizant of Holmes’s race, Woods added: “His work was successful in a neighborhood where there were a great many colored people and he had never had any complaint for his work with white people.”

  The department accorded Holmes a full-dress funeral. He was buried in Queens and was followed to the cemetery by Henry, who died of pneumonia and pleurisy in March 1918, and by Ella, who succumbed to postoperative shock when treated for a uterine tumor in September of that year.

  “The bullet that killed Holmes made another wound which took their lives within fourteen months,” Battle remembered.50

  ON AUGUST 26, 1917, Florence gave birth to the last of the Battle children. They named the boy Theodore in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Battle wrote to the hero he had seen at Yale and had met at Grand Central, and he “received a very pleasant letter in reply.”

  * * *

  WHILE THE ARMY scattered the men of the Fifteenth to guard New York State posts against sabotage, orders came down dispatching a storied unit composed largely of Irish Americans, including the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, to a training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, last stop before France.

  The city scheduled a parade to send the contingent off as part of a Rainbow Division melding troops from twenty-six states. Hayward asked permission for the Fifteenth to march in recognition that they, too, were about to join the fight. Permission was denied. Black was not a color of the rainbow, he was told.51 Raising a hand before his men, Hayward pledged: “Even if they won’t let us parade with them in going away, that we will have a parade when we come home that will be the greatest parade . . . that New York has ever seen.”

  He had the Fifteenth swear in unison “that whichever may be in survival as commanding officer of this regiment when we get back to New York, that we see to it that the glory and the honor of the Negro race in America may be served by having our welcome home parade celebrated.” One witness recalled, “And to that pledge and prophecy, all present clasped hands—and said:—‘Amen!’”52

  THE REGIMENT’S HOPES dimmed with fresh racial violence, this time disastrously involving black troops who were successors to the Buffalo Soldiers. The War Department deployed members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry to Camp Logan outside Houston. Anticipating the arrival of African American servicemen, a newspaper advertisement warned Houstonians to “Remember Brownsville,” site of the trumped-up shooting that lived on as a rallying cry against arming blacks.

  The soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth were experienced men and accustomed to respect. They refused to sit in the blacks-only section of movie theaters or to ride at the back of streetcars. Whites chafed at their seeming insolence. Then, on August 23, a black soldier named Edwards happened upon a group of white police officers manhandling a black woman. When Edwards tried to intervene, the police pistol-whipped and arrested him. A short time later, a black MP, Corporal Charles Baltimore, protested Edwards’s treatment at the stationhouse. He was assaulted and fled under gunfire. A rumor spread that the police had killed Baltimore. Soldiers broke into the weapons storage and, with one yelling, “To hell with going to France, get to work right here,” more than one hundred troops did battle with white cops and armed white civilians. The death toll was sixteen whites, including five police officers, and four blacks. With rapid efficiency and Woodrow Wilson’s approval, the army soon hanged nineteen soldiers.

  The Houston riot “left a bitter taste in the mouth,” Battle remembered. For the men of the Fifteenth, it also raised fears that the War Department would sideline the unit entirely. But, under Hayward’s pressure, the War Department put the regiment on notice of a deployment to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The mayor there told the Times: “I am sorry to learn that the fifteenth Regiment has been ordered here, for, with their northern ideas about racial equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here they will not be treated as anything except Negroes.”53

  On arriving, Hayward appealed to the regiment not to meet “the white citizens of Spartanburg on the undignified plane of prejudice and brutality,” and he urged that “if violence occurs, if blows are struck, that all of the violence and all of the blows are on one side and that side is not our side.”54

  Napoleon Marshall complied when he was ordered off a trolley after paying his fare. When two whites threw a company member into a gutter, the Fifteenth stood down while white soldiers from New York, in a rare show of solidarity, pummeled the assailants. Noble Sissle took a kicking from the manager of a hotel who had knocked his hat off. When white soldiers in the lobby rose up to retaliate, James Reese Europe issued a booming order for calm.55

  Finally, because of Hayward’s relentless persistence, the order arrived: the two thousand men of the Fifteenth would sail for France. On November 8, the regiment assembled on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for its only farewell parade. Battle’s kin, the Reverend Norman Roberts and his wife, Emma, came for last moments with their son Needham, a runaway transformed into disciplined soldier. And there was Napoleon Marshall’s wife, Harriet Gibbs, the first black graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, preparing to part from a man who, well past draft age, was going to make a point. And there were all the others who esteemed Battle as the unit’s godfather.

  James Reese Europe conducted his band of renowned musicians in a program that included “Auld Lang Syne,” “Religioso March,” “a kind of half-syncopated arrangement of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” “Come Ye Disconsolate,” and, finally, George M. Cohan’s swinging, patriotic anthem “Over There.”56

>   WITH THE REGIMENT’S departure, Battle raised his aspirations yet again. He had subscribed to the Equity Congress’s three goals: establishing a black regiment, breaking the color line of the New York Police Department, and integrating the New York Fire Department. The first two were now achieved. Accomplishing the third would require finding the ideal man to seek admission to a firehouse. Battle focused on Chief Williams’s son, Wesley.

  Approaching the age of twenty-one, Wesley was the father of two sons. He supported Margaret and the boys—James, who was approaching two, and Charles, who was a newborn—on the steady, if modest, salary of a postal truck driver. While the job could carry a black man through a career and into a pension, its opportunities for advancement were slim and its duties were purely humdrum. By all rights, an adventurous young guy like Wesley would find greater fulfillment as a firefighter; and the fire department would be lucky to attract a job candidate who had Wesley’s combination of brains, strength, and athleticism. But he would have to force open a barred door and then conquer brutal resistance. Battle judged Wesley to possess the emotional resilience to weather the unceasing hostility of white men in close quarters. Just as important, he also had no doubt that Wesley could whip just about anyone if necessary. Finally, the Chief’s powerful friends could be invaluable.

  Battle broached the idea of joining the fire department with Wesley. Fully aware of the difficulties that had beset Battle, Wesley bought in. His great-grandmother had come through slavery and his grandparents had escaped from bondage. Now, Wesley could endure the worst that white firefighters dished out in order to prove that a black man could excel in the job. Because Wesley knew that he would excel. So did the Chief and Margaret, who was as frightened as Florence had been in Battle’s early days.