One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (14 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
Battle’s work chart scheduled his first reserve duty for midnight to 8 a.m. on the Thursday after he started patrol. Finishing a four-to-twelve night shift, he was to sleep in the stationhouse with a platoon on call in the event of an emergency. A dormitory was outfitted with a couple dozen bunks and was draped in the odors of overworked men, discarded shoes, soiled linens, and tobacco smoke.
Fetid air and all, the officers of the Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse resolved that this was a whites-only domain. Cops carried a cot upstairs to a room on the second floor, where the precinct stored the American flag, and left the mattress and springs under Old Glory as the black man’s accommodations.
Without complaint, Battle went up to the flag loft. Several times, a captain named Thomas Palmer asked Battle how he was faring with fellow officers. Just fine, Battle reported. “I don’t expect the men to talk to me and take me in their arms as a brother,” he told the captain.
Inevitably, newspaper reporters caught wind that Battle was subjected to silence and isolation. They sought him out, but he held firm to voicing no unhappiness. Interviewed by the
Times
three weeks after he arrived at the stationhouse, Battle made sure to state that no officer had uttered offensive epithets, and he responded, “I have nothing to say about that, Sir,” when asked about his fellow officers’ refusal to speak with him.
As if to make a much larger point, he shared with the reporter the Battle family lore that had been handed down through bondage and that represented a claim to fully earned United States citizenship: the story of his great-grandfather, a slave, fighting beside a young master in the American Revolution.
“He is a good sensible negro, and his conduct is above reproach,” Palmer told the
Times
, adding, “He seems to know what he bargained for in taking a place on the force.”
8
While that was surely true, alone in the flag loft, Battle would still consider the chasm between the ideals of the banner unfurled overhead and the abuse to which he was being subjected:
Sometimes, lying on my cot on the top floor in the silence, I would wonder how it was that many of the patrolmen in my precinct who did not yet speak English well, had no such difficulties in getting on the police force as I, a Negro American, had experienced.
Some of them had arrived so recently in America that they spoke as though they had marbles in their mouths. Some of them again knew so little about New York City that they could not give an inquiring stranger any helpful directions. Yet, these brand new Americans could become policemen without going through the trials and tribulations to which I, a native born American, had been subject in achieving my appointment.
My name had been passed over repeatedly. All sorts of discouragements had been placed in my path. And now, after a long wait and a lot of stalling, I had finally been given a trial appointment to their ranks and these men would not speak to me. Native-born and foreign-born whites on the police force all united in looking past me as though I were not a human being. In the loft in the dark, with the Stars and Stripes, I wondered! Why?
True to form, Battle made a blessing of exile. Privacy afforded him the opportunity for self-education. He read, concentrating on police training manuals to start preparing for the promotion exam for sergeant. These men who would not speak with him today as an equal would answer to him tomorrow as a superior. Far from the others, he recited the police department’s rules and regulations, and then he relied once more on Florence to test his knowledge.
“When I went home after a night of study, at breakfast my wife would check me to see what progress I had made,” he recalled, adding, “Alone in the loft I could kneel quietly at prayer before going to sleep, talking with God for strength to carry on.”
On the street, Battle met the demands of pounding a beat, 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., 4 to midnight, midnight to 8, and sometimes 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps with eight hours off between shifts, perhaps with twenty-four. He offered collegiality but was rejected time and again. “Bright and sunny this morning, isn’t it?” he would say on relieving a man on post. There was never a reply.
After midnight, the precinct deployed men in pairs, one posted for two hours at the center of a fixed intersection, one to patrol the neighborhood for two hours and then to switch labors. The man in the intersection was prohibited from approaching the curb.
Battle strove for perfection, even offering help to any white officer who appeared to need assistance, because, he said, “I knew I was on trial, and through me, my race.” But scrutiny, ostracism, study, and the standard rigors of policing combined to produce fatigue. After three months on the job, while still on probation, Battle slipped.
“One rainy night, soaked to the skin, having been out of doors during my entire tour of duty, I went home for a brief rest before reporting for reserve. There was no one at home, so I fell asleep in a chair and failed to awaken in time to report at midnight. A complaint was sent in and I had to stand trial at headquarters.”
Well aware that the department needed scant excuse to cut him, Battle threw himself on the mercy of the tribunal and was fined two day’s pay. His staying power now clear, Battle faced still harder tests as the crucial six-month deadline neared. Death threats arrived in the mail. He hid them from Florence. Then, he found a note pinned over his bed. It was pierced to resemble a bullet hole, and the block-lettered words read: “Nigger, if you don’t quit, this is what will happen to you.”
9
Battle told Hughes that he had shrugged off the warning as the work of a coward, “turned back the covers on my bunk, knelt down praying for God’s care and turned in for a good night’s sleep.” Hughes was properly astonished. Facing Battle across the corner of Battle’s townhouse desk, one pencil behind his ear, another in his hand scribbling notes on paper held by a clipboard, the tape recorder microphone standing between them with his secretary Nate White at the controls, Hughes exclaimed: “Wheeeeee-ooooooo-eeee! You mean right in the stationhouse this happened?”
Next, Battle’s enemies wielded a weapon that had been lethal, often literally, to a black man: the specter of sex with a white woman.
The site of the entrapment was Manhattan Square Park, a bower located on the land today occupied by the Museum of Natural History. Battle was alone on foot patrol. The time was after 2 a.m. A voice called demurely. A well-dressed white woman was sitting on a bench almost entirely obscured from view. Battle approached, but he quickly knew better than to linger.
“When I asked her what she wanted, she began to make coy advances, telling me that she had for some time been attracted to me,” he remembered. “I would not allow her near me, and I told her if she didn’t get out of the park at that hour of the morning I would arrest her. She left. Some time later, I learned she was quite friendly with other policemen.”
Then, ten days before his probationary period was to expire, Battle confronted a trumped-up accusation of malingering. The night watchman of the Ansonia Hotel reported that he had seen “that black cop, Battle,” in shirtsleeves, asleep in a restroom.
Hurriedly, the department filed charges and summoned Battle before a second disciplinary tribunal. He would get no slack on a finding of guilt. Recognizing that it would be his word of denial—the word of a black—against the word of a white, he turned for help to the one person who could support his innocence. His future came down to the honor of a white sergeant. For once, he was treated fairly. The sergeant certified that he had given Battle a twenty-minute relief break.
ON DECEMBER
27, 1911, Battle rose from probationary recruit to full-fledged police officer. The newspapers took stock of the historic event, with the
Times
reporting: “Six months ago men thought that Battle would be hazed into resigning, or at least into asking for transfer. Now they know he isn’t that sort and he has made himself respected.” But, the paper also stated: “The ‘silence’ that began when Battle entered the Precinct last July is as deep as ever today, not because Battle is a Negro—although that was the reason at first—but because every white policeman is now afraid of what would be said to and about him if he made any attempt to bring the ‘silence’ to an end.”
The
New York Sun
offered an unnamed officer’s words about Battle as typical:
He has never said anything uncivil and he does more than his share of the work. For instance, one day there was a mess of a grocery cart and an automobile on Central Park West. There were three prisoners and all I could tend to under the circumstances were two. Along comes Battle on his way to the stationhouse. Says he: “Want me to take one of them in?” Breakin’ my rule about not speakin’ to him I says: “I certainly would be obliged.” So he takes the prisoner to the house as cheerful as you please; and if you know how the ordinary policeman hates to do anybody else’s work, you know what that means. But as for sayin’ “Howdydo” to Battle in the station house—not me.
The
Sun
reported that, at the moment, Battle was reading a work by Winston Churchill, had just finished Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
, and that he also favored best-selling author Marie Corelli, whose
Thelma
was a love story set in Norway. The paper noted that Battle had read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
but that he felt it was more important to understand American history about which, the
Sun
concluded, “his memory is accurate.”
10
Never was Battle more alone, and never was he more open to scrutiny by internal affairs shoo-flies who lurked in the dark than when standing fixed post from midnight to morning. Even Inspector Max Schmittberger—the feared Schmittberger—came by personally to check. Once as corrupt as a cop could be, Schmittberger had confessed his crimes before a state senate investigating committee, emerged a hero, and become the scourge of rule breakers. Battle withstood his spying, as well as the unforgiving gaze of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, whose windows overlooked Riverside Drive and Eighty-Sixth Street. “We used to look up at Mr. Hearst—he would come and look down on the policemen, and we were afraid not to be there,” Battle remembered.
11
Decades later, putting pencil to paper in the great old townhouse, he revealed the depths of the torment that dogged him:
With my fellow officers it was a sin to be a Negro, hence the fight of survival and achievement was on. It seemed that all was against me, including God, in whom I had and have a great deal of faith and to whom I prayed fervently and religiously.
The weather was as much as five below or it seemed to me to be even more. I received supervision early and often, but I prayed and carried on, was never given any of the preferred assignments and didn’t ask for them.
I had prescribed my medicine and I took it like a brave soldier. Through these my hardest years I went with the prayers of my faithful and devoted mother and wife. Without these I could not have made it alone.
12
On Sunday afternoons, Battle became a regular at meetings of the Equity Congress in the largest hall of J. C. Thomas’s funeral home. There he associated with the leading figures of the Harlem that was coming to life, activists like Reverdy Ransom, Timothy Thomas Fortune, J. Frank Wheaton, and, when he was not on a stage tour, Bert Williams.
13
They kept abreast of Battle’s progress, while trying to recruit young black men to join him on the force, as well as to find anyone brave enough to try for the fire department. The Equity Congress was also fully engaged in a drive to establish a New York National Guard unit for blacks. This was a long-held dream of men who believed that, by serving in the US military, blacks would prove that they had equal right to the full benefits of American citizenship. As early as 1898, in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, Fortune and Reverend Alexander Walters had pressed New York’s governor for permission to raise a regiment. Now, in 1911, Equity Congress members pursued two strategies for creating a unit open to blacks.
They enlisted an assemblyman who represented the changing Harlem to introduce and, hopefully, push through authorizing legislation; and they named lawyer Charles W. Fillmore to lead what was known as a provisional regiment, an unofficial company of volunteers who would apply for mustering into service. Fillmore was a rare example of an African American who had led black troops, the Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry Battalion. Now he took lonely command of a unit that lacked for everything—including men. The Equity Congress began calling on African Americans to enlist as a way of proving loyalty to a country that would surely respond with respect. The renowned dancer and entertainer Bert Williams gave star power to the recruitment drive.
By Lincoln’s birthday the following year, Fillmore had a large enough troop to parade in whipping snow from Columbus Circle to the Great Emancipator’s monument in Union Square for a wreath laying. The display was meant to demonstrate that New York’s African Americans were ready to uphold the tradition of the four black regiments that had emerged from Union troops to become the Buffalo Soldiers and that had fought with distinction in the Spanish-American War.
Battle could do little more than wish his friends well. Although many police officers were tied to Tammany Hall, the department barred cops from engaging in political advocacy. There was little doubt that Battle would suffer severe repercussions if he stepped to the fore in seeking a regiment. More, he had his hands full coping both with the rough edges of life in Harlem and on the police force.
On the streets, there was constant danger of racial violence. In one episode in the fall of 1911, a black man accidentally bumped into a white man, provoking whites to pursue him in growing numbers. The black man fired a revolver without hitting anyone and attempted to run.
