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

by Browne, Arthur

  Six decades on, Tony remembers the long car trip with his grandfather as one of the formative experiences of his own life. He sees a boy who had yet to reach the moment when a young African American awakens to racism. W. E. B. Du Bois reached the milestone at ten. A white girl spurned him as classmates exchanged greeting cards and he realized that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Hughes was six when a teacher stopped a white boy from eating licorice sticks, saying, “You don’t want to eat these, they’ll make you black like Langston. You don’t want to be black, do you?”1 Battle introduced Tony to Jim Crow on the drive, and Tony believes that his grandfather may have taken him to the South for just that purpose.

  He remembers a roadside restaurant in Maryland or Virginia. Tony runs inside while Battle parks the Lincoln. There is a sign on the wall. Tony does not understand what it says. He takes a place at the counter. No one notices because he has light skin. The server, a boy, places a glass of water and silverware in front of Tony. Then Battle sits down. The manager, the boy’s mother, refuses Battle service.

  On discovering that Tony is Battle’s grandson, she scolds the boy: “You know better than to serve him.” Then Tony hears Battle talk about the United States of America and tell the woman: “I could buy your whole store.”

  Farther south, Tony recalls an Atlantic Ocean beach. Battle is on his way to visit someone. He gives Tony permission to swim until Battle returns. Tony skips up a ramp, crosses a boardwalk, and skips down a second ramp to the sand. He rides the waves. Then there’s a commotion on the boardwalk.

  A man in a sheriff’s uniform has blocked Battle from going down the ramp. It’s a whites-only beach, the uniformed man says. Speaking in a strong, sure voice, Battle explains that he is a retired police officer. The uniformed man refuses to relent.

  Finally, Tony sees Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The campus is quiet for the summer. Battle stops the Lincoln in front of an administration building. He goes inside and returns accompanied by a man who, Tony believes, is the university president. He introduces Tony to the man and introduces the man to Tony. He tells Tony that, one day, he should attend a school like Duke, and then he tells the man, cordially but forcefully, that all-white Duke should admit blacks students like Tony.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 7, 1935, the last day of his eligibility, ten months after Battle met the mayor, Valentine handed him the blue badge and single gold bar of a New York police lieutenant. The next morning he was “greeted with slaps on the back and warm handclasps” at the Harlem stationhouse, where many of the department’s 125 black officers now worked. The Times reported that he planned to study for the captain’s exam, undeterred by “the prospect of having to meet college men as competitors.”2

  Wesley, too, had moved up. He had made captain in the fire department. There, the roster included only six African Americans. The commissioner assigned three to a firehouse on the Lower East Side. Its captain barred them from a communal table.3 Battle and Wesley agreed there was a fight to be had—but only after more blacks joined the fire force.

  For now, Battle concentrated on his own accomplishment. An article in the Nation magazine pleased him most. The author was Oswald Garrison Villard, one of the white activists who had founded the NAACP. Because of the police department’s social significance in enforcing the laws, Villard stamped Battle’s breakthrough as a milestone in civil rights and said of Wesley, “He, too, was told that he could not last.”4

  Battle took command of the stationhouse at night, mounting the desk as figurehead of the New York Police Department, whose work, La Guardia declared, was not for the faint-hearted.

  This mayor was comfortable with nightstick justice. In the month after he met with Battle and De Priest, La Guardia had spoken about Jimmy Garvey’s murder to an organization of Catholic cops: “I want you to put so much fear into the heart of every crook in New York that every time he sees a cop he’ll tip his hat,” the mayor said, adding, “Out where I was raised, we didn’t have much of a police department. . . . Our sheriff was quick on the trigger, if you know what I mean.”

  Valentine had gone further. After observing a well-dressed, finely groomed suspected cop killer in a lineup, the commissioner told his troops: “When you meet such men, draw quickly and shoot accurately. . . . When you meet men like this, don’t be afraid to muss ’em up. . . . Blood should be smeared all over that velvet collar. Instead, he looks as though he just came out of a barbershop.”

  La Guardia was fully in tune after police carted a half-dozen suspected jewel thieves with pummeled faces to headquarters. “When six gangsters meet six policemen and the gangsters are mussed up it’s just too bad for them,” the mayor said. “We have no room in the police department for sissies.”5

  Battle was still partial to brawling when necessary. He felt the need after a saloon opened in a Strivers Row townhouse, complete with a transvestite review. No fan of the Jitter Bug Club’s “parade of she-men and a chap who could do tricky things with an alleged piano,” Battle strode into the joint at four in the morning and “turned the place inside out.”

  “It was a one-man raid, but it was handled as effectively as if it had been done by a squad from headquarters,” the Amsterdam News reported.6

  Battle’s officers were sporadically brutal and got away with it.

  Thomas Aikens had waited on a bread line for three hours before a group of men shoved him aside. Cops ordered Aikens to the back, behind several hundred people. He protested. An officer called Aikens a “smart nigger,” and the squad pummeled him unconscious, destroying his left eye. Valentine backed the cops, who were white.

  After drinking heavily, Edward Laurie threatened the manager of a Lenox Avenue restaurant. Officer Abraham Zabutinski arrived. Laurie, who was black, took a drunken swing at Zabutinski, who was white. The cop clubbed Laurie, killing him. Valentine ruled that Zabutinski had applied justified force.

  When the mother of a Scottsboro Boy came to Harlem, five thousand people showed support for the nine young men wrongfully imprisoned in Alabama for raping two white women. A white police officer provoked an hour-long melee by throwing a tear-gas canister into the crowd. Valentine concluded that the officer had used unjustified force, yet he took no disciplinary action.

  Still more grinding on the people of Harlem, the police had little use for civil liberties. A black man in the company of a white woman, or a black woman in the company of a white man, well knew to expect a challenge from a cop. More broadly, police barged without warrants into homes and stopped people on the street to search for gambling slips.7

  Finally, on March 19, 1935, Harlem had had enough.

  That afternoon, Battle rode the subway to Delehanty’s to prepare for the captains’ exam. While Battle was in class, a brown-skinned, sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Lino Rivera walked into the S. H. Kress five-and-ten-cent store on 125th Street. A pocketknife on a counter drew Rivera’s fancy. He slipped the trinket into his jacket and headed for the door. From a balcony above the shopping floor, the store manager saw the theft. An assistant blocked Rivera’s exit and took the knife.

  The two white men struggled with Rivera in front of black customers. Clinging to a pillar, Rivera bit his captors. When they had subdued him, store personnel summoned a cop and called for an ambulance to treat the bite wounds. The cop and the manager brought Rivera to a back room. The manager wanted Rivera released after taking his name and address. The officer agreed. Avoiding a crowd that had gathered out front, the cop escorted Rivera downstairs to leave by a rear basement door.

  Then, in the first of three tragic misinterpretations, a woman cried out that the officer had taken “the boy to the basement to beat him up.” The rumor quickly spread to the people in the street. An ambulance arrived to care for the men Rivera had bitten, seeming to confirm that Rivera had been brutalized. Then, someone noticed a hearse parked behind the store. When its driver entered Kress’s to visit his brother, who worked in the shop, the
conclusion seemed obvious: the cop had murdered Rivera. It was “just like down South where they lynch us,” a woman said.8

  A group of men started a public meeting on the corner. Police dispersed them. They assembled again in front of the store. Atop a lamppost, white City College student Harry Gordon fired up the crowd with stories of brutality and victimization. A bottle flew through the air. Kress’s plate-glass window shattered. Looters rushed in and, as Battle told Hughes, “the Harlem riot was on.”

  Inflamed by the belief that police had murdered a black teenager, people massed on 125th Street. Looters smashed storefront windows and made off with what they seized. The police department ordered more than five hundred uniformed cops, two hundred detectives, and fifty radio cars into Harlem. Downtown, Battle left Delehanty’s assuming that he was headed for a routine night. He emerged from the subway to find chaos. Inspector John De Martino had command in the stationhouse. Battle had answered to De Martino while leading the division’s Radio Gun Squad, and the two men had come to respect each other. Now, Battle assumed the pivotal spot on De Martino’s stationhouse desk, relaying reports from the field, booking prisoners, and dispatching reserves as they reported for duty. Suddenly, La Guardia and Valentine burst in.

  “What are you doing here on desk duty on a night like this, Lieutenant?” the commissioner asked Battle.

  “This is my assignment, Commissioner, according to the chart,” Battle answered.

  Valentine saw a mission that only Battle could carry out. He wanted his black police lieutenant on the street, where everyone could see him and where, he hoped, Battle could be a calming presence.

  “I don’t need to tell you what to do,” Valentine said. “You know.”

  Mobs roamed the neighborhood. Bricks, bottles, and flowerpots rained from widows and rooftops. There was sporadic gunfire. Marauders set buildings ablaze. Black merchants posted “Run by COLORED people” signs; white retailers tried to escape damage with signs reading, “This store employs Negro workers.”

  Battle persuaded saloons and pool halls to close and exhorted cops to distinguish between African Americans who engaged in lawlessness and the much larger number who were bystanders. He ordered “that there be no wholesale clubbing of Negroes.”

  Battle’s pleas had little effect, and sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs paid with his life. Lloyd and his brother Russell had found refuge from the rioting in a movie theater. When the show let out, they approached a crowd in front of an auto parts store. Looters were passing merchandise through a broken window. A police car pulled up. Officer John McInerny jumped out, revolver in hand. The crowd ran. McInerny opened fire. A bullet passed fatally through Lloyd’s body.

  Police brass set out to locate Lino Rivera in order to prove that the teenager was alive and well. Cops found him at home at two in the morning. Battle paraded Rivera around the streets and posed with him for newspaper photographers. Even then, many refused to believe. They insisted that the police had murdered another teenager—that the cops had forced Rivera to claim falsely that he had been the boy in the store.

  Mayhem subsided as dawn approached. By afternoon, Harlem was quiet. After almost twenty-four hours on duty, Battle reported to a stationhouse where La Guardia and Valentine had set up base. Valentine ordered Battle “to remain on outside duty the remainder of the week,” by which the commissioner meant that he wanted his lone African American lieutenant to serve as the reviled department’s goodwill ambassador to Harlem.

  LA GUARDIA APPOINTED a commission to investigate why Harlem had exploded. The panel included Dr. Charles H. Roberts, a black dentist who had run for Congress; Oswald Garrison Villard, the white former newspaper publisher who had celebrated Battle’s promotion to lieutenant; A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who was approaching victory in his quarter-century fight to win a contract with the Pullman Company; Eunice Carter, the former Fordham Law student who had counseled Charline to study at Hunter College and was now engineering Lucky Luciano’s prosecution; and Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.

  This Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem probed employment, housing, health, schools, relief for the poor, and the police department. Civil rights lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays chaired the police inquiry. He summoned Valentine to testify. Valentine refused. Instead, the commissioner ordered surrogates into the lion’s den: Battle and De Martino.

  Hays held public hearings in a Harlem courtroom and announced that audience members could interrogate police witnesses. “Those colored people had a chance to speak up and to grill the authorities who for years had dealt with them with little sympathy and often with brutality,” he recalled in a memoir. “Sometimes the intensity and excitement were reminiscent of a revivalist meeting and the statements of witnesses were greeted with loud ‘Amens!’ and ‘Glory be to the Lord!’”9

  The chamber was filled to bursting when Battle and De Martino took their places. Battle bore the brunt of the fury. When he spoke of Lino Rivera at the first session, an outcry made clear that many of the four hundred spectators believed Battle was covering up the true murder. City College student Harry Gordon testified that he had been clubbed by a police officer outside the department store and beaten by cops in the stationhouse. As Gordon described their alleged blows, the audience shouted angrily at Battle.10

  By the commission’s final hearing, he was the police department’s convenient shield and the crowd’s handy sellout. Hays came armed with a letter sent to La Guardia by a Harlem man. He reported that three plainclothes officers had entered his home without a warrant, searched his dresser drawers, bed, suitcases, and china closet and left without a word. A representative of the Citizens League for Fair Play told Hays that cops would simply “pull citizens into hallways and search them for policy numbers.”

  “That’s true!” spectators yelled.

  Hays asked anyone who had been searched that way to stand up. Twenty-five people got to their feet. Turning to Battle, Hays asked whether he permitted his men to make such searches.

  “No,” Battle answered, touching off boos and catcalls.

  At that, Hays challenged Battle and De Martino to explain the circumstances under which the law authorized police to enter a home without a warrant. They responded that officers could force entry if they had a reasonable ground to suspect a felony had been committed. Hays read aloud the Penal Code. It clearly limited cops to entering a home without a warrant only if they knew—not just suspected—a felony had taken place.

  “You know very well that you would not do it if the person lived on Park Avenue or was someone who was well-known,” Hays said.

  Then he lectured Battle: “I think that you, as a colored officer in the police department, should charge yourself to see that these things don’t happen, especially to your people.”

  The spectators cheered Hays and jeered Battle.11

  Hays further pressed Battle on the case of a man who had been jailed for two days based solely on an anonymous—and false—telephone tip that he was wanted for murder. Battle and De Martino defended the arrest, provoking a new uproar. The commission concluded in its final report that “their interpretation of the law . . . was not in accord with the statute” and that the “large audience was justified in shouting that the law was not being applied in connection with the arrests of Negroes.”

  Ultimately, the commission reported: “The cases which have been cited here indicate to what extent the police of Harlem invade the rights of Negro citizens. This invasion of the rights of Negro citizens involves interference in the association of whites and Negroes, searching of home without a warrant, and the detention of innocent men in jail, and even the mutilation and killing of persons upon slight provocation.”12

  La Guardia withheld the document. Instead, he recruited Harlem Renaissance scholar Alain Locke to write an appraisal of the findings. Ruefully, Locke recalled the time when “Harlem was full of the thrill and ferment of sudden progress and prosperity.” He found “
it hard to believe that the rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925 were more than bright illusions or a cruelly deceptive mirage.” Charitably accepting La Guardia’s expressions of good intent—plus preliminary steps toward upgrading Harlem Hospital, opening new schools, and building public housing—Locke endorsed the commission’s catalogue of discrimination in education, housing, relief, health care, and employment. He focused on Battle in discussing the police.

  After citing the death of Lloyd Hobbs, Locke wrote that “a series of police shootings in Harlem, continuing down to two quite recent killings of children in the police pursuit of suspected criminals, has brought the community to the point of dangerous resentment toward the police.” The hostility ran so deep, Locke wrote, that “many in the Harlem community feel as much resentment toward Negro police as toward white police, and even toward the Negro police lieutenant, who sometime back was a popular hero and a proud community symbol.”13

  THE STING OF Locke’s conclusion must have been profound. Fifteen years later, Battle would tell Hughes about the riot of 1935, while making scant mention of the hearings. No doubt Battle recognized Valentine’s cynicism in making him the brown-skinned face of the police department after he had served for only eighty-two days as a lieutenant. Certainly, Battle also felt the injustice perpetrated by Hays in placing the burden for correcting police abuses on his shoulders rather than on those of the no-show Valentine and of every member of the white power structure who had allowed Harlem to fester. And, quite surely, with emotions running justifiably high among African Americans, Battle never felt so hurtfully the antiblack guilt by association that came with wearing a police uniform.

  ONCE AGAIN, he could only make the most of the black man’s straits, and in this circumstance he took advantage of the value that the mayor and police commissioner suddenly found in having a ranking African American cop at their service. After the riot, Battle never returned to a standard assignment. He took on the functions of visible presence and wise leader as the dour 1930s headed blindly toward the genocides and wars of the 1940s.