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

by Browne, Arthur

  Still, Battle mixed high admiration for La Guardia with optimism about his successor. He viewed O’Dwyer as a friend from the past. While accounts of O’Dwyer’s police career focus on his pounding a beat in Brooklyn, Battle recalled that O’Dwyer “knew me very well, because I helped to break him in” as a patrolman in Harlem.63 When O’Dwyer named Battle to serve on a commission that would plan the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the consolidation of the cities of Brooklyn and New York into Greater New York, Battle proudly foresaw building a close relationship with yet another mayor.

  WESLEY NEARED THE end of his third decade on the fire force. One day in 1949, he sat outside his battalion headquarters in the Bronx. As he would later recall, a chauffeur-driven Cadillac pulled up. A distinguished looking white man stepped out.

  “Do you remember me?” the man asked.

  When Wesley answered no, the man introduced himself as Dick Dawson, sat beside Wesley on an empty chair, and “cried like a baby.” Dawson had been among the firefighters who had conspired to drive Wesley out of the department at the start of his career. He had been among those who had asked for transfers on the ground that they refused to work with a “nigger.” He had also been the first man to leave the company when the commissioner’s one-year ban on transfers had expired. Dawson told Wesley that he had eventually left the fire department and had grown wealthy as a real estate investor.

  “He said he had everything to make him happy but one thing and that it was on his conscience as to how he had treated me those thirty years back. And would I forgive him? That was the only thing that marred his complete happiness. I said, ‘Forget about it. I certainly forgive you.’”

  “He asked me if there was anything that I needed or that he could do for me and I told him, ‘No, thank you.’ The man left with tears in his eyes.”

  AN AIDE TO Mayor O’Dwyer, a black man, made an appointment to see Battle. He showed up with a Democratic elected official, who also was black. Battle knew both men well. He expected nothing untoward. Then his visitors said they were emissaries of a white Tammany Hall district leader who wanted a horseracing bookmaker released from a thirty-six-month sentence. They said Battle “would do all of them a favor. I would not lose anything by it.” Warily, Battle agreed to look into the case. After the emissaries left, he determined that the bookie was connected to a notorious gambling ring and ruled out taking “such a despicable case before the board for review.” Returning to apply pressure, the elected official was even more explicit.

  “This white leader insisted that I do something for this man,” Battle wrote. “If I didn’t, I would be sorry someday. On the other hand, I would be rewarded.”

  Well used to the security of mayoral favor, Battle rejected the demand out of hand: “I sent word by this politician to the white leader that this case stinks to high heaven.”

  Case closed—or so he thought.

  IN APRIL 1948, seventy-year-old Bill “Bojangles” Robinson danced in front of an audience that included Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Irving Berlin and then collapsed backstage at the Copacabana nightclub. Although he had suffered a heart attack, he refused to stop dancing. Nor did he stop gambling or consuming a gallon of vanilla ice cream daily. After another coronary, Robinson died on November 25, 1949. Battle and a group of the dancer’s friends gathered at the Delmonico Hotel, in a room rented by Ed Sullivan, the New York Daily News theater writer who had just launched a variety show on the new medium of television, a program that would become one of the most successful ever. Robinson’s friends planned a grand sendoff.

  The funeral was to be held at Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, but Battle felt the house of worship would be too small to accommodate the masses who would want to pay respects. He arranged for Robinson’s body to lie in state in the cavernous 369th Regiment Armory. An estimated fifty thousand people filed by a flower-bedecked bier, Robinson in a blue suit and white shirt, the foot of his casket draped with the American flag.

  Three thousand people filled the Abyssinian Church for the funeral. The honorary pallbearers included Bob Hope, Duke Ellington, Louis B. Mayer, Cole Porter, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson. At Battle’s suggestion, Mayor O’Dwyer excused Harlem’s children from school so they could line the route of the funeral procession. In the church vestibule, Battle chatted with O’Dwyer, the Reverend Powell, and Battle’s friend the Reverend John H. Johnson. The mayor offered a surprise.

  “Sam, I am going to reappoint you to the parole commission when your term expires and you don’t have to have anyone come to see me about it,” O’Dwyer pledged, relieving Battle of a growing anxiety. His term as commissioner would be finished on January 4, 1950. Remembering all the support he had needed for advancement in the past, Battle was just beginning to strategize about the backing he should bring to bear on O’Dwyer. Now, in the presence of the ministers, Battle thanked O’Dwyer and sat through the funeral with a mix of grief and happiness. He saw more to do in public service, and—who knew?—perhaps he could do more for the race.

  In his eulogy, Powell told the congregation: “Bill wasn’t a credit to his race, meaning the Negro race, Bill was a credit to the human race. He was not a great Negro dancer, he was the world’s greatest dancer. . . . Somewhere, I know not where, but I know it is somewhere, Bill says, ‘Copacetic!’”64

  Outside, Battle marched behind the hearse and dozens of flower cars for a full five miles to New York’s theater district where “beautiful girls, white and colored, of the theatre appeared with tributes of flowers. A choir sang. And all of Broadway paused to pay tribute to the memory of one of its great ones gone.”

  Then, at home, recounting his conversation with the mayor, Battle told Florence that all was copacetic.

  But he was wrong. O’Dwyer appointed another man. Once more, Battle felt the fool for having placed his trust in a white politician. Once more, he sought an explanation for the betrayal. His mind went back to the parole commission’s corrupt currents, to the politicians who had pushed him to release the man who had abused young girls, to the emissaries who had threatened reprisals if he refused to free the gambling ring bookmaker—and he knew that, without La Guardia’s protection and with O’Dwyer’s connivance, the forces that had once sent him into exile in Canarsie had done him in again.

  Out of work for the first time since he had left home at the age of sixteen, and no longer a man of official standing, Battle sought resurrection. The police department had numerous deputy commissioners, as many as seven. After six months on the sidelines, he secured an audience with O’Dwyer. The mayor now promised to make Battle New York City’s first black deputy police commissioner.

  “I went away happy to our summer home,” Battle wrote.65 Yet, knowing better than to trust O’Dwyer, he confided only in Florence. After an apprehensive month, the announcement was made: rather than naming Battle, O’Dwyer chose his mayoral chauffeur, who was also a police detective. The appointment boosted the detective’s $5,150 annual salary to $8,000 and making him eligible for a $6,000-a-year pension—for which he quickly filed. The appointment was nothing more than a going-away gift to a friend, one later rescinded by a court. A police scandal dating to O’Dwyer’s days as Brooklyn district attorney was about to chase him from City Hall. President Harry Truman came to the rescue by naming O’Dwyer US ambassador to Mexico.

  Vincent Impellitieri took over as mayor. Soon, City Hall let it be known that Impellitieri planned to name an African American deputy commissioner. Battle pressed for the appointment. When he visited Sugar Ray Robinson’s training camp with Tony, the boxer gave Battle “the solemn promise that he would recommend and support me for deputy police commissioner to his friend Mayor Impellitieri.” It wasn’t enough. Impellitieri instead chose Billy Rowe, a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier who had been a war correspondent in the South Pacific and had been present on the USS Missouri at Japan’s formal surrender. In his handwritten notes, Battle called “Billy” a friend, adding, “Anyone w
ould have been glad of the appointment.”66

  At that, the four-decade career that had started in hostile silence, carnival debasement, and isolation under the flag of the United States of America was over. Having refused to play ball, Battle wrote proudly: “I would rather have honesty and character than prestige and wealth. I can walk and ride the streets of this city, hold my head up, look all men in the face.”67

  CHAPTER SIX

  FORGOTTEN

  SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT on August 9, 1952, Hughes finishes the final draft of the book they’ve called Battle of Harlem. He and Battle each sign the manuscript. The eighty thousand words go out to publishers. In quick succession, Simon and Schuster, Henry Holt, and John Day decline to take it on. They have good reason. Relying heavily on Battle’s own words, Hughes has vividly brought to life Battle’s coming of age, his Northern ramblings, his courage in breaking the color line, and the brutality that followed. But as Battle’s career progresses on the page, Hughes’s finely realized vignettes give way to rambling chapters. In one, titled “Leisure Time,” Battle meanders for almost five thousand words through parole board records, membership in the Elks, the racial unfairness of general circulation newspapers, ideas for reducing juvenile delinquency, segregation in Harlem movie theatres, the births of his children, and more. Throughout the last half of the manuscript, people enter and leave the story briefly and without context. Important events are half realized. Then, too, there is hardly a market for a book that, properly told, would chronicle the prevailing racism of the day.

  Battle is proud to have started with little and to have risen higher in his life than most white men, regardless of the color of his skin. He remembers being told that if he failed, his failure would be taken as proof of the black man’s inferiority. He knows that he performed better than the white men around him, because that was a black man’s only shot at succeeding. And he knows that he proved wrong all those who damned the race. He wants that story told. He wants to hold in his hands the autobiography of Samuel Jesse Battle, to see it on a shelf in the library, to give a copy to Tony. He wants to watch the movie that was to be made, and he wants his neighbors and New York and all of America to watch the film. But after three years of grudging labor, Battle is left to swallow a bitter pill and move on.

  WITH TIME ON his hands, Battle became even more involved in civic and fraternal organizations like the New York Urban League. The family also opened a liquor store in Harlem, a privilege generally secured by political connections. Happy to leave behind the racism of his workplace, Eddy quit the fabric company to manage the business. Carroll, who had returned to the fire department after the war, helped out, while continuing to serve on a hook-and-ladder company. Battle stopped by the shop regularly to keep things in order. As had happened so often ever since he had gone to work at Grand Central, Chief Williams may have shown Battle the way: his family had earlier established a liquor store in the community.

  For several winters Battle took Florence to the Caribbean. In Jamaica, “our names were announced at the airport over the loud speaker: ‘Commissioner and Mrs. Samuel J. Battle of New York,’” he remembered. In Haiti, Carl Murphy, editor of the Afro-American, Baltimore’s black-oriented newspaper, introduced the Battles to the US ambassador. On a third trip, they sailed to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and then to Miami where “we met segregation and discrimination under the Stars and Stripes.”

  On June 28, 1955, Battle and Florence “had journeyed along together for fifty years.” Two hundred guests celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at a dinner party in a banquet room of the Park-Sheraton Hotel. “My beautiful wife was dressed in a magnificent gold cloth gown,” Battle reminisced, adding, “This was easily the most elaborate and happy affair of our lives.”

  As a gift, Battle took Florence on a cruise to Europe aboard the Ile de France ocean liner. They visited London, Paris, Geneva, Florence, Venice, and Rome. At the Vatican, he secured a certificate signed by Pope Pius XII. They gambled at Cannes. They toured Waterloo. A few months later, Battle and Florence returned to Paris, this time because he represented the Harlem branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association at a centennial celebration of the YMCA’s world alliance. The eighth-grade dropout was proud to say that he participated in a workshop at the Sorbonne.

  From spring through fall, Battle became devoted to the cottage at Greenwood Forest Farms. He sat in the sun on an Adirondack chair, sometimes passing an afternoon with Jackie Robinson. Retired from baseball, Robinson had joined Battle in helping the Urban League, and they would share stories as Tony listened in awe. It was a peaceful time, but Battle also saw the seasons turning. He was diagnosed with diabetes. Never before had he suffered an ailment worse than the flu. In 1948, he weathered the death of his firstborn, Jesse, who had succumbed to a long fight with alcohol at the age of forty-two, as well as the passing of Wesley’s father, James Williams, the Chief, at the age of sixty-nine. In 1952, Wesley was injured when the chauffeur of his battalion chief’s car collided with another vehicle as they raced to a fire. His injuries forced Wesley to step down after thirty-three years in the fire department for a retirement that would last until his death at the age of eighty-nine, when the Amsterdam News would mark his passing with a scant six paragraphs.1 Battle sat on the dais at a testimonial dinner in honor of Wesley’s accomplishments. He described the guests as a who’s who of New York’s civic society. Eventually, Carroll too began collecting a fire department pension. For a time, he operated his own liquor store and later relaxed into a long retirement, living in the Bahamas and Florida.

  Meanwhile, one by one, Battle saw the great figures of old Harlem dying off. He served as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of W. C. Handy, the jazz great who had been his neighbor on Strivers Row. He was among the mourners at the funeral of Dr. E. P. Roberts, who had delivered Jesse, had attempted to save Florence D’Angeles, and had known that his word as a black physician would count for nothing in Battle’s fight to join the police force. The Amsterdam News noted that, in his fifty-eight years as a physician, Roberts had delivered thousands of Harlem’s children and the children’s children as well. The service was marked by “triumph, beauty and dignity,” the paper reported.2

  Frederick Randolph Moore, who had known more about Harlem and had fought harder for Harlem in the pages of the Age than anyone, took to the grave so much that was being forgotten. Among the lost memories were the World War I bravery of Henry Johnson and Battle’s cousin Needham Roberts.

  Just months after returning from France, Roberts had been honored at Carnegie Hall, where “enthusiasm ran riot” in the audience. He had shared the stage with Teddy Roosevelt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Irvin S. Cobb, one of the journalists who had interviewed Johnson and Roberts on the day after their epic combat. A Southerner whose father had fought for the Confederacy, Cobb said the valor of black soldiers had changed his perception of African Americans for good. Filled with hope, Roberts heard Cobb declare: “I do not believe the Negro will be denied credit South or North for the big part he has taken in the war. I am sure that in the future a term sometimes spoke in derision, often in jest, n-i-g-g-e-r, will not spell anything but true American.”3

  Twenty years later, with no job and no prospects for one, Roberts would look back bitterly, telling an interviewer, “Those negroes fought in vain.” Then, as Battle neared forced retirement, Roberts had placed a noose with a fixed knot over his wife Iola’s head, had placed a noose with slip-knot around his own neck, and had hanged them both by kicking a box from beneath their feet.4

  Johnson’s end, too, had been unhappy. Succumbing to poverty and drink, he had died at the age of thirty-two and had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery, his only recognition the French Croix de Guerre. More than a half-century later, in 1996, the US military would award him a Purple Heart and would follow up in 2002 with the nation’s second-highest commendation, the Distinguished Service Cross. At that time, the military would deny Johnson the top recognition of the Meda
l of Honor, finding insufficient documentation of his heroism

  Battle also saw America’s pages turning. The modern civil rights movement was gaining traction. Battle saw the rise of a new generation of African American activists, and they were making unprecedented claims to equal rights.

  In 1954, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund persuaded the US Supreme Court to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that in 1896, when Battle was thirteen years old, sanctioned separate and purportedly equal treatment of African Americans. The landmark reversal—Brown v. Board of Education—established by unanimous declaration of the court’s nine justices: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thus were unconstitutional.

  In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was charged with disorderly conduct. Most of the city’s fifty thousand African Americans boycotted the bus service and drove revenue down for 381 days. The law mandating segregated transportation was unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court declared. In 1957, nine African American students walked into all-white Little Rock Central High School under the protection of the 101st Airborne, dispatched by President Dwight Eisenhower.

  Rejoicing at the milestones, Battle focused anew on the history he made in a day when blacks were even more on their own, when there was no help to be found in the courts, in mass protests, in federal troops, or in the White House. Yet over and again, he had shown the way as a “first.” More than ever, he wanted the story told, to have the record reflect his contributions to the betterment of African Americans, to document that he had set the example. He gave a fifteen-thousand-word interview to a researcher from Columbia University’s Oral History Project. And he returned with new hope to Battle of Harlem. Neither a writer nor an editor, he enlisted an old friend to help revise the manuscript.