One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (17 page)

Battle watched as
The Birth of a Nation
enjoyed a forty-four-week run on Forty-Second Street and, like African Americans at large, he could only lose hope after Wilson issued a legendary presidential stamp of approval following a White House screening. The movie was “like writing history with lightning,” Wilson is reported to have pronounced.

Shortly, violence against blacks began to rise. Editing an NAACP journal called the
Crisis
, Du Bois amassed a count, titled “The Lynching Industry,” of extrajudicial killings that had taken place from 1885 through 1914. His tabulations totaled 2,732 murders, with 69 blacks and 5 whites slain in 1914 alone. In 1915, the annual death toll climbed to 94: 80 blacks, 14 whites. Of the blacks, 71 were hanged, 5 were burned at the stake, 3 were shot, and 1 was drowned.
²⁹

Never a day passed when Battle was not aware that the broad spectrum of white society deemed him inferior. In one episode, orders came down that he and Jasper Rhodes were to report for special training: they had been designated to march—the first blacks ever—in the police department’s annual parade.

Appreciating the honor, they reported to a National Guard armory. A captain named Jake Brown called attention. Battle and Rhodes fell into line. Brown’s eyes stopped on the two dark-skinned men. He ordered them to stand aside.

“Why are you sending us back?” Rhodes challenged. “Because we are colored?”

On the verge of an insubordination charge, Battle and Rhodes accepted dismissal. Battle long bore a resentful grudge.

“This affected me so deeply that many years later when I was finally invited to participate in the parade, I refused,” he remembered. “However, I have since forgiven Captain Brown, and have participated in a number of parades, including the St. Patrick’s Day from which, in the old days, Negroes were also barred.”

AS WINTER GAVE
way to spring in 1915, Florence once more discovered that she was pregnant, and fatherhood again steered Battle’s course.

The family’s cramped quarters had little enough room for Jesse and Charline; squeezing in a third child was out of the question. Battle needed space, but space was at an increasing premium in the burgeoning new Harlem, the bastion from which whites had fled and the Mecca to which blacks were flocking in ever-larger numbers. Much as he loved “the familiar feeling of being back home in the Negro section of a Southern town, hearing again the accents of my childhood,” it was time to move elsewhere.

He had followed Chief Williams to Harlem, and now, with far-reaching consequences for both families, as well as for New York, he followed the Chief to the Bronx. Renting the top floor of a house owned by a hospitable German woman recalled only as Mrs. Wagner, Battle and Florence joined Williamsbridge’s small African American community and renewed neighborhood ties with the Chief, Lucy, and their children.

Wesley was now an imposing eighteen-year-old. Thickly muscled, he had gained a reputation for feats of strength, including a 3,600-pound hip lift, 625-pound one-armed dead lift, and 345-pound overhead press.
³⁰
By taking the civil service test, he had moved on from working as a redcap to a position with the US Post Office. Mail delivery was then changing from horse-drawn wagons to motorized vehicles. Wesley had trained as a driver. Wearing a double-breasted utility coat and a brimmed cap, he negotiated the crowded streets in a rattling, numbered truck with a cargo bed, wooden spoke wheels, and a wooden sign reading “2190 United States Mail.”
³¹

With the confidence that came with a steady paycheck, Wesley had proposed to Margaret and they had set a date for the fall. Battle offered the young man hearty congratulations and advice. As Arthur Schomburg had done for him, Battle stressed to Wesley the importance of self-education. Wesley followed his counsel. Over the coming decades he would build a fifteen-hundred-book library, and his readings would extend to German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche and American psychologist and philosopher William James.

On November 9, 1915, Battle and Florence, round with full-term pregnancy, gathered with a small congregation to celebrate the marriage of Wesley Augustus Williams and Margaret Russell Ford. Wesley’s sister and brother, Gertrude and Charles, stood witness.
³²
The next day, Florence went into labor. Battle was on duty, and Dr. Roberts was miles away in Harlem. She called down to Mrs. Wagner, a woman given to baking pies for Jesse, who was about to turn ten, and for Charline, who was almost three. Mrs. Wagner helped deliver a boy, Carroll Henry, “giving him a slap on the behind and a little gin in his mouth to start him out in life.”

The Williams family celebrated the two happy occasions with the Battles; the mothers of the clubhouse group supported Florence through recovery and Carroll Henry was baptized at Mother AME Zion Church. Then life returned to order, Battle at work most of the time, Florence at home nurturing three children, while coping with the fear that shadows the wife of every police officer: Would he come home safely?

THE PERILS WERE
real and could be all the more threatening when inflamed by the passions of race. In the summer of 1916, Battle confronted death in the form of an angry white mob.

New York’s brute character extended to labor-management relations, and nowhere was the clash between worker and boss harsher than on the city’s streetcar lines. A struggle erupted over pay and working conditions, with the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway and Motor Coach Employees seeking terms that the rail companies deemed to be radical, such as a maximum ten-hour workday.
³³

Strikes began in July and built into September. The line operators readily found strikebreakers among unskilled, unemployed men, while the union fought to enforce its shutdown with violence. Mayor Mitchell deployed two thousand cops to ride the streetcars in hope of maintaining service. Often the cars, and the officers, were bombarded by rocks, bolts, and construction debris.
³⁴
At the corner of Madison Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street, strikers set upon a streetcar carrying Battle. Rocks crashed through the windows.

Drawing his gun, he leaped from the car. Battle chased two of the attackers, firing, he said, into the air. (Two wounded rioters later alleged that he shot them, but nothing came of the charge.) Battle’s quarry darted up a stoop and into a building at the corner of Park Avenue. Battle followed and took the men into custody. Outside, strike sympathizers seethed with hostility.

“Don’t let the nigger cop arrest you,” the crowd shouted.

Gun in hand atop the stoop, Battle called back, “The first person that tries to stop me, I’ll blow your brains out.”

No one dared mount the steps. When police reserves arrived, Battle took his prisoners to the stationhouse and would eventually win convictions in court. He looked back on the incident with pride, saying, “In my first real test alone with a crowd of angry whites, I had triumphed as an officer of the law,” but at the time he brought home to Florence the dangers that the family shared because of their skin color.

OTHER THREATS WERE
nondiscriminatory and grew out of the day’s precarious balancing of life and death. In the hot summer of 1916, an invisible killer stalked New York, hunting children like Jesse, Charline, and Carroll the most mercilessly.

Before the turn of the century, New York City’s Department of Health revolutionized public health with the realization that poor sanitation bred disease. Drives against fetid water, refuse, and animal excrement helped to eradicate cholera and typhoid at a time when medical science was embarked on combating the germs that carried illnesses. It was an era of important breakthroughs and of at least one tragic consequence.

As sanitation improved, infants and children lost exposure to some microbes critical to developing immunities. Notably, they grew up lacking contact with the poliomyelitis virus. The hidden effect emerged when New York became the epicenter of America’s first large-scale polio epidemic.

The city announced the outbreak on June 17, 1916. Health authorities were mystified by the spread of an illness that primarily afflicted children and progressed from fever to crippling paralysis or death. As the toll rose to 8,900 cases, including 2,400 deaths, the health department quarantined stricken children. Those who could not be isolated in crowded tenements were forcibly taken from their families. The city placed placards on the homes of the sick, published names and addresses in the newspapers, and posted warning signs in neighborhoods with multiple cases. A typical one read: “Infantile paralysis is very prevalent in this part of the city. On some streets many children are ill. This is one of the streets. Keep Off This Street.”
³⁵

Battle and Florence plunged into praying against a day that Jesse, Charline, or Carroll might show the feared symptoms. Like hundreds of thousands of parents, they grasped for strategies to keep their children safely isolated, while also accepting that Battle’s duties would place him inescapably at the center of frightening throngs.

Many a cop grew fearful after word spread that Jimmy Garvey, the friend who broke the conspiracy of silence against Battle, had brought the disease home to his year-old daughter Helen. Battle could offer only commiseration. Much later in life, Garvey’s wife Pauline would point to a steel brace that supported Helen’s leg from heel to thigh and say bitterly: “It was in 1916 during the epidemic, while he was still a patrolman. Jim carried a man to an ambulance in his arms and he came home without changing his uniform. The baby ran out and hugged him. Two days later she was stricken.”
³⁶

The scourge passed with the cooler weather of October. The Battles survived the threat unscathed, but it was clear that service on the NYPD demanded an awful lot—and perhaps all.

THAT JUNE, BATTLE
passed the milestone of five years on the force. By longevity, he was now eligible to take the promotion exam for sergeant. He applied for test preparation at the Delehanty Institute, and proprietor Michael J. Delehanty slammed the door just as forcefully as before. At the same time, Battle and the Equity Congress crossed a second five-year mark. Their drive to create an African American regiment had gotten nowhere in all that time. Now, though, the drums of war grew louder, even as Wilson ran for reelection with a campaign that boasted he had kept America out of the conflict. Battle, J. Frank Wheaton, Bert Williams, and the rest of the Equity Congress decided the time had arrived to lobby Governor Charles Whitman to activate the black unit that had been authorized by the legislature. Battle’s friends expected him to stay on the sidelines because of the department’s prohibition on political advocacy. But at a bitter time in a bitter season, ignoring the ban at risk of his career, Battle wrote to Whitman urging the unit’s activation and waited tensely for a reply or retribution.

DURING THE WAIT
, there was a lynching in Waco, Texas, that stands as a savage milestone in white-on-black violence. The Fryer family tilled a farm. Jesse Washington was a hired hand. He was black. At seventeen years of age, he had a volatile temper, could neither read nor write, and was, perhaps, mentally retarded. According to a chronicling by Du Bois, who accepted the likelihood that Washington was guilty, the hulking young man raped and murdered Mrs. Fryer while her husband and two children labored in a distant field.

The authorities brought Washington immediately to trial in a courtroom that was built to accommodate five hundred spectators but was crammed by as many as two thousand people. The proceedings lasted just a few hours before the jury returned a guilty verdict. An investigator sent to the scene by Du Bois reported what happened next:

Du Bois left nothing of “The Waco Horror” to the imagination by publishing graphic photographs of the lynching, including a picture of Washington’s charred and dismembered body hanging by a chain from a tree.
³⁷

THE MEN WHO
hoped to serve in the military admired Battle’s courage in writing to the governor. They were relieved when the letter passed without harm, and they were forever grateful when Whitman signed a regimental establishing order on June 16, 1916.
³⁸
They would one day refer to Battle as “godfather” of the regiment.

While the timing was right, cause and effect were, at best, attenuated. Instead, the regiment had an unlikely champion. William Hayward was a white Nebraskan whose father had represented that state in the US Senate. He was trained as a lawyer, served as a captain in the Spanish-American War, and appeared on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
as the handsome, rock-jawed image of the ideal soldier. After his service, Hayward’s career took him to working as Whitman’s gubernatorial counsel.

Military command was an important credential for social or political advancement, but openings for officers were few. Hayward saw his opportunity in leading the black regiment. Although lacking cachet, the position was his to seize. More, Hayward had come home from the Cuban expedition with a deep respect for the soldiering of his black comrades. Whitman named him colonel of the regiment, with one condition: that Hayward bar blacks from the ranks of superior officers.
³⁹

Battle, Wheaton, and Bert Williams celebrated a great victory—a largely unqualified one because Hayward disregarded Whitman’s restriction. While he built a command structure of socially prominent whites for this new Fifteenth Regiment, he gave the rank of captain to Charles W. Fillmore, the rare black commanding officer who had built the provisional unit from nothing, and bestowed the same standing on the extraordinary figure of Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall.