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

by Browne, Arthur

  The department turned naturally to Battle when the Reverend Major J. Divine—the wildly flamboyant Father Divine—asked the police commissioner to assign fifty officers on horseback to escort his annual Easter parade in 1935. Father Divine preached that he was “the written word” who had come “to comfort you, bless you, give you homes for your bodies, rest for your souls, relief from all sorrow.” He ran grocery stores, barbershops, and newsstands. Many of his adherents lived in “heavens,” where he served lavish meals. He was wildly popular.

  Tactfully, Battle informed Father Divine that the department would not call out the cavalry on his behalf. Instead, he marched beside Father Divine’s $25,000 Rolls Royce, “while on one running board a beautiful white female angel waved, and on the opposite running board a beautiful brown female angel smiled.”

  Similarly, City Hall called on Battle when racial tensions split the Democratic Party. Tammany Hall had never nominated an African American to serve as a district leader, partly because of prejudice, partly because black enrollment had never reached a critical mass in any district. But, with Harlem’s growth in a district that also included white communities, blacks had gained a shot at a place in the party hierarchy. African American restaurant owner Herbert Bruce stepped forward to challenge a longtime incumbent. Orders came down: Battle was to be on hand when party members convened to elect their leaders.

  “The white folks saw that Bruce was about to win and they wanted to walk out and close the meeting,” he remembered. “I said to the captain of the precinct, ‘Captain, I’m only a lieutenant but I’m sent up here to help you. I want to avoid interracial disturbances, so if I was you, tell them they can’t close this meeting.”14

  The captain did as Battle recommended and Bruce broke Tammany Hall’s district leader color line.

  Shrewder than he once had been and more comfortable in the gray areas, Battle bid farewell when Casper Holstein went to prison on a gambling conviction in 1936 and found useful common ground with Tammany’s Jimmy Hines, who would soon be on his way to prison as well.15

  “Many times when poor people were being dispossessed for lack of rent, many times when poor people didn’t have coal or fuel, I went to Jimmy Hines, and Jimmy Hines would call the city marshal and say: ‘Come and see me, don’t dispossess those people.’” Battle recalled. “He did so many things from the humanitarian standpoint for those people. All those things are overlooked. Of course, we know he had to get the money from somewhere, and where he got it from—well, he suffered for that afterwards.”16

  Battle also forged a deep bond with Inspector John De Martino. When the moment was right, Battle told De Martino a story from his rookie days on the force. He recalled that half a dozen men had pulled up at his post in a car with a police insignia. One of the men had said he was a commissioner, had asked Battle whether he would like to join the detective division, and had ordered him to appear at headquarters. Battle told De Martino that he had done as instructed, only to be turned away, humiliated.

  Then he asked a question about which he had long wondered: Had De Martino been one of his tormentors?

  De Martino laughed, “You know who it was?”

  “I think it was you.” Battle smiled. “You were one of them.”17

  De Martino would say no more, and Battle let the matter rest—no hard feelings toward a man who had become a friend.

  AT THE MIDPOINT of the decade, Battle stood proudly with Florence at Carroll’s wedding to a fellow New York University student. Edith, whose maiden name was not to be found in either the census or news accounts, had finished four years of classes and had graduated. To Battle’s displeasure, Carroll had left school after three years and was setting out to build a future in Washington, DC. Trying to dissuade him was futile. So, resigned to the ways of young people who were sure they knew best, the Battles wished the best for their youngest son and his wife.18 Battle and Florence were rapidly approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of his joining the force and their thirty-first year of marriage. An Amsterdam News reporter interviewed Florence “among her plants in the yard behind her home” on Strivers Row. “She is a modest, charming woman—the sort of woman who strides side by side with her mate over roads that are built for those unafraid of life,” the journalist reported. “And, you know, he is still studying,” Florence said of her husband. “He hopes to be a captain. Perhaps after he achieves that, we can have a home in the country where I can have an honest-to-goodness garden.”19

  Mother AME Zion Church was packed on the afternoon of the anniversary, June 28, 1936. More than eight hundred people rose to their feet when Battle came forward to speak. “Too often we Negroes have allowed ourselves to look upon ourselves as an inferior race,” Battle pronounced, adding: “I’ve lived with you, prayed with you, socialized and fraternized with you. I’ve done everything with you, including arrest you. Make your own opportunities. When you see them, take hold of them and never give up.”

  When an interviewer asked about racial prejudice, Battle responded optimistically, “I couldn’t conceive of it being wholly eliminated. But it is gradually decreasing as Negroes are improving themselves educationally and financially. But we do not seek social equality. What we want is an equal opportunity to enjoy life and to make our own way.”20

  * * *

  GIVEN HIS PROMINENCE in Harlem and his love of sports, boxing most of all, it was all but inevitable that Battle would cross paths with two of the greatest black athletes of the era: Joe Louis and Jesse Owens.

  At twenty-one, they called Louis “The Brown Bomber.” In the spring of 1935, he donated the proceeds of sparring matches to enable Sam Langford to undergo surgery for a detached retina after a reporter had found the retired champ sitting in a food distribution center, “a fat old fellow in a tattered overcoat and decadent shoes, with a black cap pulled down over his curly gray wool.”21 Louis staged the exhibitions at Harlem’s Pioneer Sporting Club. They were great fun to watch for Battle, who was a charter member, as well as for Eddy Cherot, who had played his semipro baseball for Pioneer teams.

  On June 25 that year, Louis fought former world champion Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium. As with any heavyweight bout featuring a black contender, the public transformed man-to-man combat into a racial and political drama. Carnera was Italian and, taken as the personification of dictator Benito Mussolini, was particularly noxious to many African Americans because fascist Italy had invaded Ethiopia. Louis knocked out Carnera in the sixth round. In September, again at Yankee Stadium, Louis dispatched a second former champ, this time sending Max Baer to the canvas in four rounds. Ernest Hemingway described the fight as “the most disgusting public spectacle outside of a public hanging” he had ever seen.22

  Nine months later, Louis climbed into the ring against Max Schmeling, a German and symbol of Adolf Hitler’s doctrines of Aryan superiority. In the second of his autobiographies, I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes described how towering a hero Louis was to African Americans, writing that “thousands of colored Americans on relief or W.P.A., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs.”23

  It was taken for granted that, after defeating Schmeling, Louis would next fight for the world championship, because Louis was the better fighter. Unfortunately, Schmeling was the better prepared. He knocked out Louis in the twelfth, throwing black America into mourning, including Hughes who had watched the fight at the stadium. Afterward, he remembered in his autobiography, “I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting on the curbs with their heads in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

  Joy soon returned. In August, in Hitler’s Germany, Jesse Owens took the 1936 Summer Olympics by storm. Born in Alabama, raised in Cleveland and not yet twenty-three, Owens was the star of a US track-and-field delegation that included outstanding black athletes. He led his fellows onto a
pressure-packed world stage. These Games were more than games. The stadium in Berlin was seen as a proving ground for Hitler’s master race theories. It wasn’t to be. Over a span of seven days, with the future fuehrer looking on, Owens took gold in the one-hundred-meter dash, the two-hundred-meter sprint, the four-by-one hundred-meter relay, and the long jump.

  His accomplishments brought the back of white America’s hand. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped his amateur status, along with his ability to compete, after Owens declined to participate in fund-raising exhibitions in European cities. Instead, he sailed home on the Queen Mary. His father, Henry; his mother, Emma; and his wife, Ruth, traveled from Cleveland to meet the ship in New York. There, four hotels denied them rooms.

  The press turned out in force at the Queen Mary’s berth. Reporters wanted to find out: Had Hitler snubbed Owens? Owens would say no, but later in life he would say yes. They also wanted to discover whether Owens would cash in on his celebrity. In fact, he had been swamped with money offers—$40,000 to appear in song-and-dance man Eddie Cantor’s act, $25,000 to play joke-telling warm-up for a California orchestra. As the Queen Mary approached the harbor, Bill Robinson had cabled Owens: “Don’t do anything until you see me!”24

  About to set foot in an overwhelming city, Owens placed his trust in the New York icon. Robinson arranged for police to escort Owens to Robinson’s apartment in Harlem, where police stood guard. All day, notables paid their respects, no doubt including Battle, who might well have commanded the security detail. That evening, Owens headed home to Cleveland for a parade. Columbus staged one as well. Then he set up base in Harlem to pursue commercial opportunities. For a time, Carroll Battle remembered, his father welcomed Owens to stay on the top floor of the great old townhouse.

  The minister of Owens’s church urged President Roosevelt to invite the American victor to visit the White House. FDR demurred. Running for reelection while seeking good relations with the South, the president offered not a word of public recognition. La Guardia stepped into the breach. On September 3, 1936, New York threw a ticker-tape parade for the entire US Olympic team.

  Owens and his wife Ruth took pride of place in an open car at the head of the motorcade. The route stretched from the Battery at the foot of Manhattan up Broadway to Harlem and then across the Triborough Bridge to an athletics stadium on Randall’s Island. Almost four weeks had passed since Owens had won his fourth medal. By this time, the reception was more curious than passionate—except in Harlem, and there it was mixed. Many a spectator was offended that parade organizers had placed Jack Dempsey in the lead car with Owens. Worse, the organizers had seated the other black Olympians in cars toward the rear of the procession.

  “Jesse Owens, Jim Crowed. Jesse Owens, Jim Crowed,” some in the crowd chanted.25

  On Randall’s Island, the audience cheered Owens warmly.

  “Jesse, on behalf of New York City, I hail you as an American boy,” La Guardia said.

  Deeply moved, Owens gave the friendliest face in a hostile world—that of Bill Robinson—the first of the gold medals he had won.26

  Now, Owens needed to earn a living. One by one, the money offers extended to the black phenom evaporated. He accepted a healthy sum to stump for Alf Landon, FDR’s doomed Republican challenger. Over the next months, Owens moved in and out of Harlem, accepting fees at promotional events and crossing paths with Battle.

  He threw out the first ball in the second game of a Negro National League doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, a portion of whose proceeds benefited Sam Langford. The Pittsburgh Crawfords and the New York Black Yankees took the field, the Crawfords getting the win behind the pitching of the legendary Satchel Paige. “Samuel Battle was on hand in all his regalia directing the police activity,” the Amsterdam News reported.27

  Weeks later, Owens served as a starter and Battle as chief marshal at a five-mile footrace that rounded through Harlem, and he addressed the congregation of Battle’s Mother AME Zion Church, telling his listeners about thrills they could only imagine, as well as about trials they knew only too well.

  ON JULY 16, 1937, Charline gave birth to a girl as “pretty born” as she had been. Charline and Eddy named their daughter Yvonne and brought the baby home to the great old townhouse. Passing for white, Eddy still worked as a textile factory foreman, while Charline had enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in pursuit of a master’s degree in psychology. She left her studies to tend to Yvonne, along with Florence.

  Charline and Eddy invited Bill Robinson and his wife, Fannie, to serve as Yvonne’s godparents. The Robinsons accepted and opened a bank account for the infant.28 Robinson was then at the peak of his popularity. He had played roles in five movies, most notably with child star Shirley Temple in hit films like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Later that year, Battle and Florence drove to Los Angeles to visit Bill and Fannie at their new $65,000 home.

  FIRST LADY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT was coming to Harlem. The date was November 7, 1937. The place was the Young Women’s Christian Association. Battle was to make sure that all went smoothly. He arrived early at the YWCA. Financed partly by John D. Rockefeller, the building featured a gymnasium, pool, residence for 260 women, and a packed auditorium. The Y had opened the room for a meeting of the National Council of Negro Women.

  A stout, ebony-toned woman who carried a cane as an affectation greeted Battle. He saw in Mary McLeod Bethune a most formidable woman. The fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, she grew up picking cotton in South Carolina. When her elders recognized her intellectual gifts, they enrolled Bethune in Presbyterian-based education. She excelled, moved on to schools that trained missionaries, and, in 1904, opened a school in Daytona Beach, Florida, “with $1.50, faith in God and five little girls for students.”29

  Stressing “Self-control, Self-respect, Self-reliance and Race Pride,” the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls grew to offer college and teacher preparation on a twenty-acre campus. Eventually, Bethune merged Daytona Educational with the Cookman Institute to lead a school that developed into today’s Bethune-Cookman University.

  In 1934, Mrs. Roosevelt invited Bethune to join the staff of the National Youth Administration. She accepted and would eventually become its director of Negro affairs. The post and a growing bond with Mrs. Roosevelt installed Bethune in FDR’s so-called Black Cabinet. She spoke frankly to both Roosevelts and, from her first visit to the White House, became known for a singular sense of rightful place. As she walked up the lawn, the sight of a black woman headed toward the main entrance disturbed a gardener.

  “Hey there, Auntie, where y’all think you’re going?” he called.

  Bethune walked up to the man, studied his face, and asked: “I don’t recognize you. Which one of my sister’s children are you?”30

  In 1935, Bethune united twenty-nine organizations with eight hundred thousand members under the umbrella of the National Council of Negro Women. She invited Mrs. Roosevelt to address the group’s New York chapter. That evening, the First Lady ran late. Dorothy Height was assigned to greet Mrs. Roosevelt at the front door. Newly hired as the Y’s assistant executive director, she instructed the receptionists to notify her as soon as Mrs. Roosevelt’s car pulled up.

  Born in Richmond, Virginia, Height came of age in a working-class, integrated, steel-mill town near Pittsburgh. At the age of eight, she learned that she was a “nigger” in the eyes of her best friend, the blond girl next door. At twelve, the Pittsburgh YWCA barred her from its pool. At fifteen, a Harrisburg hotel denied her a room when she visited the state capital to compete in—and win—the Pennsylvania high school speaking competition. At seventeen, she won a national speech contest, came away with a four-year college scholarship, secured admission to prestigious Barnard College, and was turned away because Barnard had filled its quota of two black students. Instead, Height earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at New York University.

  Now, she was anxious to flawle
ssly escort the First Lady from the front door. Mrs. Roosevelt upset those plans. She drove to Harlem in her own car and entered the Y through a service door. Alerted by a janitor, Height intercepted the First Lady and showed her into the auditorium. There, Battle saw how deeply the women adored Mrs. Roosevelt.

  The First Lady was a vocal civil rights advocate. In 1934, she hosted an unprecedented White House meeting at which America’s black leaders discussed issues of pressing importance, including high unemployment and the low amounts of money provided to schools attended by African American children. She had tea with the Hampton Institute choir and lunch on the patio with the NAACP’s Walter White. And nothing resonated more with black America than Mrs. Roosevelt’s activism against lynching.

  The 1930s brought a resurgence in white-on-black mob killings. Congress took up legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to prosecute local officials who let a lynching pass without prosecution. Mrs. Roosevelt supported the bill; her husband declined to get behind it for fear of alienating powerful Southern members of the House and Senate. Two years later, the First Lady again pressed FDR after particularly savage lynchings gave the legislation new urgency. Again FDR refused to act. The antilynching bill died an ignominious death. Hitler scoffed that Jews were better off in his pre-Holocaust Germany than blacks were in the United States.

  Palpable anger swept black America—exempting Mrs. Roosevelt. Fighting the good fight generated the genuine affection for the First Lady that Battle witnessed at the YWCA. When the evening was finished, the audience sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to her.

  As Mrs. Roosevelt prepared to leave, Bethune turned to Height. “We need you at the National Council of Negro Women,” she said, making a fist to indicate that women should bond against injustice. “The freedom gates are half ajar. We must pry them full open.”