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

by Browne, Arthur

  George Edmund Haynes had been the first African American to secure a PhD in economics from Columbia University and had cofounded the National Urban League in 1910. While Haynes set out to place the happenings of Battle’s life “in the larger national framework into which my New York progress led me,” Battle approached Mrs. Roosevelt to ask whether the former First Lady would write a promotional foreword for the work. Of course, she remembered Battle, and, of course, she agreed to his request.

  While they spoke, Battle recalled the glass of ice water that Mrs. Roosevelt had brought to blacker-than-night Mary McLeod Bethune in a hot, crowded auditorium. Mrs. Roosevelt responded simply: “But she wanted it. She needed a glass of water.”5

  After reading the manuscript, on May 6, 1960, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote five paragraphs that urged readers to look past the clutter of Hughes’s half-hearted efforts to appreciate the sweep and significance of Battle’s story:

  This is a record of a man’s life and as he tells it you not only see one life but you see the struggles and the victories and the defeats of a whole group of U.S. citizens. What courage it took, what remarkable stamina to be the first Colored policeman in New York City: There were qualities of mind and heart and body that were purely personal but above everything else there was the realization that he was fighting not for himself alone but for his people. That comes out in the pride when each “first” is won.

  There are records, of course, here of people met and incidents that occurred that some people may not find very interesting but as a whole story I think there are few people who will not feel not only an interest but a pride in each hard won victory.

  I want to recommend this book to those who think that success in life comes purely by luck. In this case it came through hard work and staunchness of purpose, and I surmise that for many people this is the only way success arrives.

  At 75 years of age Samuel J. Battle is active and still an interested and good citizen of a democracy. I hope he will continue for many years for his example will do more to help the young people of his race who have to struggle against difficulties than all the words that their teachers and those who try to help them can possibly speak.

  Congratulations on a life well lived!

  Battle updated the book to record that the fire department then had six hundred black members, including three captains and fourteen lieutenants. He counted twelve hundred African Americans in the police department, including sons of his fellow pioneers.

  “They are all my children and some grandchildren for whom I look back with great pride and forward with pleasure,” he wrote.6

  It all came to naught.

  Battle and Florence now lived alone in the great old townhouse. Charline and Eddy had bought a home in the suburb of Englewood, New Jersey. The high school there was integrated so that about 10 percent of the student body was black. Gym classes included social dancing. Teachers paired boys and girls only of the same race. Charline, who had risen to a top administrator for New York City’s after-school programs, objected. The school board abolished the dance program. “Pretty-born” Yvonne was nonetheless elected homecoming queen. Battle noted proudly that she and Tony had gone on to colleges of the high caliber he had wanted for them. Yvonne was at Bard and Tony was at Bates, each school an elite liberal arts institution.

  In 1966, Battle fell ill. The diagnosis this time was leukemia. Although the outlook was fatal, visitors to the townhouse would find him in good spirits. “There is nothing to worry about,” he would tell them.

  One afternoon, he summoned to his bedside four of his nephews and a grand-nephew, the grandson of Moses P. Cobb and his sister Sophia. His last words to the five young men were: “The torch has been passed.”7

  When he was younger than they were, Battle had seen Booker T. Washington in the flesh. As his life came to a close, he witnessed the majesty of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the inspiration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the by-any-means-necessary fire of Malcolm X. He saw a hard struggle ahead for the race but, ever optimistic, he also expected progress.

  “Not just for the Negro’s sake, but for the sake of my country I look forward to the day when all of us will do unto others as we would have others do unto us,” he had written to close his book.

  On August 7, 1966, Samuel Jesse Battle died at the age of eighty-three, a man who had bent the long moral arc as far as he could and then was erased from memory.

  APPRECIATIONS

  G, always G.

  My readers: Bren, Mame, Court, Brent, Pat, Chris, Lauren, Barbara, Vince, and Jim.

  My rascals: Jerry, Didi, Mary, Orla, Liam, Bridgey, Arthur, Joe, Agnes, Peter, and a player to be named later.

  Mort Zuckerman, enabling publisher; Sam Roberts, New York treasure; Helene Atwan, perceptive editor; Seth Fishman, steadfast agent.

  Bry, uncle Bry.

  G, forever G.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AMN—Amsterdam News

  BDE—Brooklyn Daily Eagle

  BN—Battle’s written notes, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  CD—Chicago Defender

  COH—“The First Black Policeman Remembers,” from “The Reminiscences of Samuel J. Battle,” February 1960, Oral History Collection of Columbia University

  NYA—New York Age

  NYT—New York Times

  WWP—Wesley Williams Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

  CHAPTER ONE: QUEST

  1. BN.

  2. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods, 1902, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17854/17854-h/17854-h.htm

  3. COH.

  4. “Negro Policeman Hazed by Silence,” NYT, August 17, 1911.

  5. Alan D. Watson, A History of New Bern and Craven County (New Bern, NC: Tryon Palace Commission, 1987), 58–59, 158–59; Vina Hutchinson, Images of America: New Bern (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000), 27, 32, 36; Lynn Salsi and Frances Eubanks, Images of America: Craven County (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2001), 12, 25, 28.

  6. US Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census, 1880, Ancestry.com; Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2002), 51.

  7. State v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 (1829).

  8. Milton Ready, The Tar Heel State: A History of North Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Watson, History of New Bern, 375, 398–99, 401–2.

  9. John W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History: Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent (Washington, DC: American Negro Academy, 1914), 172.

  10. Hatley, History of African Americans, 80.

  11. Watson, History of New Bern, 488.

  12. Ibid., 489.

  13. Eubanks, Images of America, 11, 56; Watson, History of New Bern, 559.

  14. Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1996), 30.

  15. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1050.

  16. Ibid., 1073.

  17. Idell E. Zeisloft, The New Metropolis; 1600—Memorable Events of Three Centuries—1900; from the Island of Mana-hat-tan to Greater New York at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Appleton and Company, 1899), 104, 109.

  18. Letter from Robert Hunter, June 23, 1712, at http://people.hofstra.edu/alan_j_singer/Gateway%20Slavery%20Guide%20PDF%20Files/3.%20British%20Colony,%201664-1783/6.%20Documents/1712-1719.%20Slave%20revolt.pdf

  19. US Bureau of the Census, Eighth Census, 1860.

  20. US Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900.

  21. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 132.

  22. Zeisloft, New Metropolis, 124.

  23. COH.

  24. COH.

  25. BN.

  26. “West Side Race Ri
ot,” New York Tribune, August 16, 1900.

  27. “The Riot in Akron,” NYT, August 24, 1900.

  28. Garry L. Reeder, “The History of Blacks at Yale University,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, January 31, 2000, 125.

  29. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 54.

  30. “Yale Commemorates Her Bicentennial,” NYT, October 24, 1901.

  31. Timothy Thomas Fortune, “A Boy’s Life in Reconstruction,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, August 13, 1927.

  32. Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 3–34.

  33. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Owl Books, 1994), 38.

  34. Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 44, 105–11, 124–25, 137–286.

  35. US Bureau of the Census, Eighth Census, 1860.

  36. “Brooklyn’s Colored Policeman,” BDE, March 8, 1891.

  37. “On the Force,” BDE, March 5, 1891; “Colored Policeman,” BDE, March 6, 1891.

  38. “Overton’s First Tour of Duty,” BDE, March 7, 1891.

  39. “Colors Clash,” BDE, March 27, 1891.

  40. “Hired to Whip Overton,” BDE, April 19, 1891; “Think It False,” BDE, April 20, 1891.

  41. “Stand by Him,” BDE, March 30, 1891; “Let Off Light,” BDE, April 7, 1891.

  42. “Eighteen New Policemen,” BDE, July 9, 1982.

  43. “The Color Line,” BDE, April 25, 1892; “Still Another,” BDE, May 14, 1892.

  44. Ibid.

  45. “Maybe Overton Has a Good Case,” BDE, June 12, 1892; “Patrolman Overton Fined,” BDE, June 14, 1892.

  46. “Points About Policemen,” BDE, August 14, 1892.

  47. “Overton Will Resign,” BDE, November 18, 1892.

  48. “Colored Patrolman Hadley Dismissed,” BDE, November 29, 1892.

  49. “Another Colored Policeman,” BDE, December 8, 1892; “Points About Policemen,” BDE, December 11, 1892.

  50. COH.

  51. Borough of Brooklyn Death Certificate, No. 18138 of 1901, New York City Municipal Reference Library.

  52. “$3-Million Police Station Dedicated at 123d and 8th,” NYT, October 30, 1975.

  53. Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 25–26.

  54. “New York’s Rich Negroes,” New York Sun, January 18, 1903.

  55. “John W. Connors, Founder Organized Colored Baseball in New York, Is Dead,” NYA, July 17, 1926.

  56. Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), 169.

  57. “The Southland Troubadour,” NYA, October 23, 1948.

  58. Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazon, and Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  59. “Negro Policeman Now a Regular Cop,” New York Sun, January 18, 1912.

  60. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), 148.

  61. US Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900.

  62. Wesley Williams, The Seven Generations That I (Wesley Williams) Have Witnessed; Up from Slavery: Four Generations of the Williams Family Span the Modern History of the Republic, from Pre-War Slavery Days to the Present, WWP.

  63. “Bowery Derelicts Pay Thorley Honor,” NYT, November 21, 1923.

  64. Abram Hill, “Chief James H. Williams,” WPA research paper, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Eric Arnesen, ed., The Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, Volume 1 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 665.

  65. “57 Years a New York Doctor,” AMN, October 13, 1951.

  66. Mary White Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 40.

  67. New York City certificate of marriage, Borough of Manhattan, No. 13951 of 1905, New York City Municipal Reference Library.

  68. Ovington, Half a Man, 40–41.

  69. “After Brutal Policemen,” NYA, July 27, 1905; “Guilty Police Shall Not Escape,” NYA, August 3, 1905.

  70. “Become Police and Firemen,” NYA, December 28, 1905.

  71. Ernst Christopher Meyer, “Infant Mortality in New York City: A Study of the Results Accomplished by Infant Life-Saving Agencies, 1885–1920,” International Health Board, 124; Ovington, Half a Man, 53.

  72. New York State Census, 1905.

  73. “White Landlords Make Objection to Church,” NYA, June 11, 1914.

  74. “Beautiful Homes for Colored People,” NYA, October 25, 1906; Ovington, Half a Man, 47.

  75. “Negroes Filling Up 99th Street Block,” NYT, August 14, 1905.

  76. Register of New York City, Section 7, Liber 127, 365–68; Liber 128, 145–50; Liber 151, 134–46; Liber 152, 297–301; Liber 159, 7–15.

  77. State of New York Certificate and Record of Death, No. 24535, 1908, New York City Municipal Reference Library.

  78. Wilbur Young, “Equity Congress,” WPA research paper, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

  79. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage, 2004), 14–15.

  80. “Crowds See Johnson,” Washington Post, March 30, 1909; “J. Johnson Hits Great White Way,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 30, 1909; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 143.

  81. “Negro Police for New York,” NYA, August 5, 1909.

  82. “The Trouble in Harlem,” NYA, August 5, 1909.

  83. “Subject of Negro Police,” NYA, August 19, 1909; “New York Negro Policemen,” NYA, August 19, 1909.

  84. “Will Not Take Examination,” NYA, September 2, 1909.

  85. Cornelius W. Willemse, A Cop Remembers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933), 147–49.

  86. Reverdy C. Ransom, The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son (Nashville: Sunday School Union, 1949), 215.

  87. “Send Johnson $20,000,” NYA, June 9, 1910.

  88. Bradford, Born with the Blues, 171.

  89. Ibid.

  90. “Whites and Blacks in Many Riotous Battles,” New York Tribune, July 5, 1910; “Eight Killed in Fight Riots,” NYT, July 5, 1910; “Eleven Killed in Many Race Riots,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 5, 1910.

  91. “Johnson in New York,” Washington Post, July 12, 1910.

  92. “Johnson’s Arrival a Negro Gala Day,” NYT, July 12, 1910.

  93. Benton Pride, Wesley Williams: A Credit to His Race, WWP.

  94. Thomas Roy Peyton, MD, Quest for Dignity: An Autobiography of Negro Doctor (Los Angeles: Warren E. Lewis, 1950), 3–4.

  95. COH.

  96. “New York City Has a Colored Police Officer,” NYA, June 29, 1911.

  97. Charles Anderson to Booker T. Washington, July 5, 1911, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress; “Commissioner Waldo,” NYA, June, 1, 1911.

  98. Ibid.

  CHAPTER TWO: STRUGGLE

  1. Langston Hughes to Maxim Lieber, December 30, 1935, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  2. Harlem Home News, July 28, 1911, and August 25, 1911.

  3. “First Negro Named for City’s Police,” NYT, June 29, 1911.

  4. COH.

  5. BN.

  6. “The Negro as a Policeman,” NYT, June 30, 1911.

  7. COH.

  8. “Negro Policeman Hazed by Silence,” NYT, August 17, 1911.

  9. COH.

  10. “Negro Policeman Now a Regular Cop,” New York Sun, January 8, 1912.

  11. COH.

  12. BN.

  13. Wilbur Young, “Equity Congress,” WPA research paper, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

  14. “Crowd Threatens to Lynch Negro,” NYT, October 18, 1911.

  15. US Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900.

  16. Robert Holmes’s World War I draft registration card, National Archives and Records Administration, Ancestry.com.


  17. Rev. Frederick Asbury Cullen, From Barefoot Town to Jerusalem (privately printed, n.d.), 56.

  18. “Identify Two Suspects in Police Killing,” New York Daily News, April 23, 1934.

  19. BN.

  20. “To Test Legality of Covenant,” NYA, February 13, 1913.

  21. “Enthuse over Negro Regiment,” NYA, June 12, 1913.

  22. Peter N. Nelson, A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009), 10–13.

  23. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, 1911), 85.

  24. New York State Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Industrial Commission for the Twelve Months Ended September 30, 1915, 114.

  25. Clifford M. Holland, “‘Blowout’ Difficulties in Tunneling Under East River, New York City,” Railway Review, December 30, 1916.

  26. “Subway Saga,” NYT, November 8, 1964.

  27. “General Miles to Negroes, Talks of War and the Future of the Black Race,” NYT, August 3, 1914.

  28. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson,” Crisis, January 1915, 119–20.

  29. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Colored Men and Women Lynched Without Trial,” Crisis, January 1915, 145; “The Lynching Industry,” Crisis, February 1916, 198.

  30. Benton Pride, Wesley Williams: A Credit to His Race, WWP.

  31. Wesley Williams photograph collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division.

  32. State of New York Certificate and Record of Marriage, New York City Department of Health, No. 3480, 1915, New York City Municipal Reference Library.

  33. “Bad Faith Charged by Street Car Men,” NYT, August 15, 1916.

  34. “Car Strikers Raid Stops Bronx Lines,” NYT, July 27, 1916; “State and City Prepare to Meet Great Car Strike,” NYT, August 2, 1916; “Death and Disruption Have Marked Transit Strikes in this City,” NYT, December 39, 1965.

  35. Tony Gould, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Andrea Ryken, Polio in Twentieth Century America: A “Children’s Disease” in a Child-Centered Culture, April 8, 2008, Undergraduate Library Research Award, Paper 3, http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/ulra/awards/2008/3.