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

by Browne, Arthur

  Six years later, one of the shooters would say on his deathbed, “We didn’t intend to kill cops. We thought they were friends of [the mobster’s], so we let them have it.”

  Shot through the heart, Garvey fell dead on the curb. Gleeson survived chest and head wounds. The next day, Garvey’s widow, Pauline, spoke to a newspaper reporter in the family’s apartment. Helen, a New York University freshman, was with her.

  “Killed on duty.” Pauline pondered the phrase. “He was always on duty.” Then she said of her husband, “He was always saying that if he had to go before retirement, and that would have been in four more years, he wanted to die in the line of duty—in harness. I don’t mean he didn’t want to live. I mean, if he had to get it, he wanted it to be that way.”50

  Amid skirling bagpipes, Battle passed down the ranks and into Garvey’s parish church for a solemn requiem Mass. Officers in full-dress blues filled the pews. All were agreed: Jimmy Garvey had been a cop’s cop and a brave man. For Battle, there was more: Jimmy Garvey had been a brother.

  TURNED OUT IN a black tuxedo, white waist jacket, white tie, white gloves, and white carnation, Battle extended an arm to Charline. She took hold at his elbow. The organist played the opening notes of the “Wedding March” from Wagner’s Lohengrin. All heads turned toward the rear of Mother AME Zion Church. Battle and Charline stepped forward in slow cadence, her matron of honor spreading the long train of Charline’s ivory satin gown. Four bridesmaids in powder-blue gowns and picture-book hats followed under a canopy of pink June roses and white peonies.51

  Thornton Cherot waited at the altar. He too wore a black tuxedo, white waist jacket, tie, gloves, and carnation. A top hat waited nearby to perch at jaunty angle on his head. He had won over Florence completely, and Battle had warmed to a young man who had left behind the early swing of a carefree male. Cherot had secured a divorce from the woman he had married too young in life, and he had completed studies in chemistry at New York University. The NYU credential had enabled Cherot to win a well-paying position as a foreman for a fabric-dying company—the NYU credential plus his light skin. The firm was whites-only. Cherot had felt no obligation to explain the calculus of his bloodlines to its managers. Let them jump to their own conclusion. In the parlance of the day, he was “passing.”

  No one knows how many people met the mathematical definition of black yet moved through society as white. Walter White, longtime secretary of the NAACP, would estimate that “approximately twelve thousand white-skinned Negroes disappear” from the black census annually. He wrote that virtually every discernibly black American “knows at least one member of the race who is ‘passing’—the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites, men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American color line imposes on them.”

  Born with light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, White committed to a black identity as a young teenager while imperiled by white-on-black rioting that swept Atlanta in 1906. “In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I knew then who I was,” he wrote. “I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me as a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance, in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority, a proof patent and inclusive, accessible to the moron and the idiot as well as to the wise man and the genius.”52

  There were degrees of passing. Some would deny blackness entirely; some would work in the white world and otherwise live in the black. Cherot had chosen the latter course in order to overcome the Depression’s narrowed opportunities. Having suffered the trauma of working in hostile company, Battle had to admire the fortitude displayed by his soon-to-be son-in-law in sublimating identity, forced to silently accept an antiblack culture, in order to support family. It was inconceivable that an employer would have given Cherot authority to supervise whites had his racial makeup been known. That, too, Battle understood.

  On Mother AME Zion’s altar, the Reverend James W. Brown watched the wedding party’s approach beside Battle’s brother, the Reverend William Battle, pastor of the Columbus AME Zion Church of Boston. This was William D., who had shared Battle’s dormitory cot way back when Battle was a redcap and William D. was a Pullman porter. At the appointed spot, Charline handed a bouquet of hanging gardenias and lilies of the valley to her matron of honor. Battle kissed her and then gave the hand of the “pretty born” baby he had wheeled so proudly in her baby carriage to the man who would be her husband. Then Battle slipped into a pew next to Florence. Twenty-nine years earlier, at sixteen years of age, she had kept him waiting for two hours while she shopped for clothing. Then he had married her in the home of the Reverend George Sims. And here she was, in a flowered chiffon gown, in a church filled to overflowing, her two sons in white-tie formal attire; her daughter, a college graduate who was looking forward to a master’s degree. They smiled to reminisce, and when the vows were exchanged, the pronouncement was made, and the organist had keyed the recessional with Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” Battle and Florence welcomed five hundred guests to a supper reception at a banquet hall. It was the place to be on this night in Harlem because this was the wedding of Samuel Battle’s daughter.

  THE LADIES OF Harlem stood up first. The black community had expanded across 125th Street, the prime commercial boulevard. Although departed whites returned to buy clothing and household necessities, the customer base had shifted toward African Americans. Employment had not followed suit. The color line remained drawn at the sales counter.

  Women shoppers took note and gave rise to a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign. The numbers operators had faced down Dutch Schultz; now, led by the indomitable Effa Manley, the women mapped a drive to boycott stores that limited blacks to menial positions, if that.53

  Manley was the wife of a numbers runner. A light-skinned woman, she was believed at the time to be the daughter of a black father and white mother. Today, it is generally believed that Manley was the progeny of an extramarital affair between her white mother and a white paramour. Raised among mixed raced siblings who were counted as African American, she maintained an enduring racial allegiance by passing for black. She and her husband would become co-owners of the Newark Eagles of the Negro Baseball League. After her husband’s death, she would manage the team and, eventually, would sell the contract of star player Monte Irvin to the New York Giants. In 2006, long after her death, Manley would become the first woman inducted into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

  While still in her thirties, she brought the grievances of Harlem’s women shoppers to the Reverend John H. Johnson, vicar of St. Martin’s Protestant Episcopal Church. She was looking for action. Today, the tactic of applying united public pressure would be taken for granted; in the spring of 1934, it was revolutionary. Society took for granted that employers were free to hire based on race or ethnicity. In Harlem, there was debate about the wisdom of the women’s strategy. Some predicted that white-run companies would retaliate by hiring fewer blacks. African American merchants complained they would lose a competitive advantage if white-owned stores put blacks on the payroll.

  Enlisting eighteen churches, forty-four fraternal and social organizations, and Frederick Randolph Moore of the Age, Johnson convened a mass meeting, out of which emerged the Harlem Citizens League for Fair Play. Participants included Battle’s friends the Reverend William Lloyd Imes and Etta Cachemaille, as well as his long-ago whist instructor Arthur Schomburg, who announced: “In years to come, our children will look into our records to see if we have done our part. Do not let them find us lacking.”54

  The Citizens League targeted Blumstein’s Department Store, the largest, oldest, and most influential business in the neighborhood. After collecting receipts to document how much the store relied on black shoppers, Johnson led a delegation to meet with proprietor William Blum
stein. He stressed that the group wanted Blumstein to hire qualified African American salesclerks of his own choosing without displacing whites presently on the staff.

  “Indignantly, Mr. Blumstein stated that he had been in business for many years, knew how to run his business, and would not be dictated to by anyone,” Battle recalled.

  Backed by the Age, the Citizens League set up picket lines. A month of falling sales brought Blumstein’s around. The store agreed to hire fifteen African American salespersons immediately and twenty more in several months. Battle and the Citizens League celebrated the victory. To Reverend Johnson’s dismay, others then took up a rowdier fight all along 125th Street. The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose father was pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, became a force. So too did communist activists, who tapped into Depression-fueled anger. So, too a turbaned figure who went by the street-theater name of Abdul Hamid Sufi and claimed to be Egyptian. Sufi—real name Eugene Brown—demanded jobs for his followers and would come to be called the “Hitler of Harlem” because of the anti-Semitic cast of his rhetoric.

  Scuffling broke out between shoppers and picketers. The police department assigned Battle to keep the peace, once again placing him across a divide from fellow Harlem leaders. Although Battle was as deeply committed to the cause as they were, duty required him to enforce disturbance-of-the-peace laws that favored the merchants. The Reverend Powell’s wife, Isabelle, challenged him from the picket line:

  “Lieutenant Battle, are you going to arrest me for carrying this sign?”

  “Not as long as you picket legally. I am here to protect both the pickets and the picketed,” he responded.

  Battle was less even-handed when answering complaints from the other side.

  “Storekeepers would rush from their shops crying, ‘Officer, can’t you stop this picketing?’” Battle remembered. “More than once I replied, ‘You can stop them by hiring some of them. Your business lives on community money. Haven’t these people a right to live, too? I am here to regulate the pickets, not stop them.’”

  Finally, in a ruling that highlights how limited mass activism was then, a court barred further picketing on the ground that the law permitted only labor unions to picket. Historic in their own right, the demonstrations stopped. Blumstein’s failed to live up to its commitments, the color line stayed largely intact—and a fuse was lit.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RESPECT

  WHILE WAITING FOR Hughes to finish the manuscript’s last promised chapter, Battle announces that he’s going to take Tony on a drive to the South. Tony hears that he is going and that is all there is to say. When the morning of departure arrives, he climbs into Battle’s black Lincoln and heads into a grandfather’s past and a grandson’s future.

  Map points and the names attached to strangers who are somehow attached to him have faded from Tony’s memory. Recollections lead to country roads. The big car draws stares as they pass hand-built houses and vegetable patches. Homes overflow with people. Wherever they stop, someone moves out so that Battle and Tony can share a bed. Food is prepared in large, fried portions. Between meals, the little store down the road sells Nehi sodas. In a few weeks, a skinny boy becomes a pudgy one.

  On Sundays, there’s long, hot church on hard benches. The men dress in jackets and ties; the women wear white dresses and hats and wave paper fans. There is singing and the preacher goes on and on in spiraling repetitions. In private, Battle talks to Tony about the drawling rhythms of his relatives’ speech. He orders the boy never to speak with the Southern inflections that confirmed backwardness to white people.

  One bit of bustle is New Bern. Battle’s hometown now boasts that Caleb Bradham’s drugstore was the birthplace of Pepsi-Cola, and it shows off the residences of a society from which African Americans are still largely excluded. The old “Black Second,” the congressional district that sent African Americans to Washington in Battle’s boyhood has never done so again.

  He moves in a swirl of the childhood memories that Hughes has rendered on paper. His mind’s eye sees an older half-brother, Tom, who was “wild like myself and loved to fight” and who “loved women and they loved him.” He conjures his father whipping him and his brother John Edward for fist-fighting so much they became known as “The Battling Battles.” He recalls breaking the Sabbath by “swimming with the melons in the river until they got cold” and then sitting “on a shady bank to eat their sweet, juicy hearts.” He remembers his first sexual experience, at the age of fourteen, with a girl who worked in the fields picking peas and beans. He looks back on a boy with a penchant for thievery who learned a life’s lesson in a favorite vignette that Hughes has written into the manuscript in Battle’s voice:

  One autumn I got a job with a Negro businessman, John Dixon, who cured and tanned hides. Since I was a grammar school pupil with more education than his other employees, I was soon entrusted with paying off his help, counting out the money and recording the sums paid out in a ledger.

  When my father learned I was good at figures, he also trusted me with keeping his accounts. My father was the treasurer of the Masonic Lodge in which he held thirty-two degrees. I kept the books for him.

  I also kept small sums of lodge money for myself. Sometimes, when I could get away with it, I pocketed bits of extra change belonging to Mr. Dixon, too. Hating to see money lying idle and not being spent, also desiring to treat the girls, I pried open my father’s trunk and helped myself to a considerable portion of the lodge funds. This was soon discovered of course, and I was punished severely—but not cured.

  What broke me of my thieving were not the whippings that my father gave me. For, increasingly severe as they were, they rolled off my shoulders like water. The cure came from a few bitter words from an employer that suddenly struck me harder than a switch.

  My father’s friend, Isaac H. Smith, had given me my first really responsible job. Mr. Smith had been in the House of Representatives at Raleigh, being the last Negro Representative in the state before the Red Shirt era came that drove colored men out of politics. Mr. Smith was a real estate man who owned a large building in the heart of New Bern’s main business section, Middle Street, directly across from the white Episcopal Church.

  One day he drove up in a big open barouche, and he had a white footman, a white coachman—I’d never seen anything like that in the South. He was a big, stout black man, very wealthy, highly intelligent, well liked by everybody.

  The front of his building was leased to a white dry goods store, another portion to a Negro shoemaker, John Havens. Mr. Smith’s offices were in the rear of the building where he carried on a brisk business, buying and selling houses and lending money to whites as well as Negroes. I became a kind of protégé of his, working in his office at a salary of five dollars a month. Meanwhile, my father aided Mr. Smith in the building of a suburban residential section called Smithtown.

  Mr. Smith took a great interest in me because my father was much older than he and had given him excellent advice. The result was, the first month’s salary, $5 a month—he made me put this $5 in the bank. He said, “I’m going to start you on a bank account and make you save money every month, and someday I’ll have you lending money and buying houses and renting them in your own name, if you stay with me.”

  Well, I thought this was a good opportunity. But I got real smart—as I thought. I used to open up the offices, and I used to watch Mr. Smith—he had a big, high, yellow safe, about four and a half feet high—and he kept all of his records there, important records. He also kept his hand cash. I used to sit on this high stool adjacent to the safe, and I watched him using the tumblers, and I remembered in my mind the way he turned the tumblers.

  When I’d open up the office in the morning, I got so that I could open this safe myself, and I began to pilfer from the safe from time to time—nothing that he would ever miss or anything like that. I thought he had no idea that I would have sense enough to even try to remember or to get into his safe. As a matter o
f fact, he had a lot of confidence in me.

  Later on, however, he began to miss his money. He was smarter than I. He was shrewd, very shrewd. So he made a plant for me. He placed a certain amount of money in this safe where I would naturally find it, and he knew the exact amount that was there. And when he came, he opened this safe and he found that, sure enough, somebody had been there. It couldn’t be anyone excepting me.

  He accused me of it. I wasn’t smart enough to tell a lie about it, and I admitted it was true. He said to me, “If you weren’t Tom Battle’s son—the son of my good friend—I would put you in jail. But you’re young, your life is in front of you, your father is my good friend, and I’m not going to do that.”

  But he said, “I’m going to discharge you, and I never want you to work for me again.” He said, “Young man, before another year rolls over your head you’ll be in state prison.”

  He said that to me. That was the turning point of my life.

  My father came—my father prayed and almost cried, because this was his good friend and I’d stolen from his good friend, and his good friend wouldn’t have me arrested. The result was that I said to myself:

  “From this day on, I shall always be honest and honorable, and I’m going to make Mr. Smith out a liar.”

  With these and many more memories, Battle drives with Tony to Beaufort, North Carolina. There, they stay with Battle’s younger sister Mary Elizabeth. Long ago, after their father’s death, Battle had sent money home for the two years of college that enabled Mary Elizabeth to make her mark as a school principal. Mary Elizabeth had taken in Anne after the great fire, and Anne had died there with Battle at her side. They reminisce about Battle’s life and talk about the biography that the great Langston Hughes is about to finish; Mary Elizabeth will be part of the story. So will Thomas, and so will Anne. Then they imagine making Battle’s life story into a movie. Can you believe it, a movie? Yes, Battle could.