One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (21 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
Wesley stared at O’Toole and thought, “A hundred men like him could not make me quit.”
THE RED SUMMER
continued to peak. On July 18 in Washington, DC, a nineteen-year-old white woman married to a Naval Aviation Corps employee reported that two black men had tried to steal her umbrella. Rumors transformed the incident into a serious assault. White mobs began a four-day antiblack rampage that provoked black warfare in response. The dean of Howard University saw a mob hoist a black man “as one would a beef for slaughter” and shoot him. On July 27 in Chicago, black teenagers drifted on a raft toward a whites-only Lake Michigan beach. A white man threw rocks, striking one teen in the head and causing him to drown. After police refused to arrest the alleged rock thrower, a black mob converged on the beach. A black man shot at police. A black police officer returned fire, killing the shooter. Wild stories led to four days of white–black warfare. Men, women, and children—white and black—were hunted, beaten, stabbed, and shot. Buildings were burned. Streetcars were pulled from the tracks. Trapped in his apartment, a black cop held off a mob with an automatic rifle. The toll: 38 dead and 537 injured.
The trajectory of the violence troubled Battle. It had moved north, first to Washington, then to Chicago, a fully northern city. Could New York be next? In Harlem, the police department was the target of intensifying anger. Often harsh, if not brutal, the department had long since expended good will, and now many saw police as working against, not for, blacks. Battle suffered guilt by association. He was a cop, and cops had stood by while white mobs rampaged. He was a cop, and cops had freely swept up blacks in the disturbances. He was a cop, and cops had refused to arrest even the white man who threw the fatal rock in Chicago. More than ever, Battle felt the sting of a perception that would haunt many black cops for decades—that of being viewed as on the other side.
“This was one of the problems inherited by the Negro policeman in New York City at that time,” he remembered. “His duty was to uphold the law—but Negro citizens looked at the law across a bitter color bar.”
In September, New York reached the brink of a riot, with Battle singlehandedly at the center of the action. The events started innocently enough with a man’s straw hat, a style that was fashionable in summer but became the object of youthful sport as the season faded. He remembered:
There was a custom then all over Manhattan of bashing the straw hats of men bold enough or forgetful enough to wear such headgear after September 15th when the season for straws ended. Crowds of young men would pounce upon a straw-hat wearer, snatch the hat from his head and send it rolling down the street, or bash it over his ears.
This custom was tolerated and generally considered amusing—to everyone except the owner of the hat. The law did not take such a pastime seriously. For example, The
Evening World
reported humorously on an irate citizen who had brought a teenager before the Men’s Night Court. The citizen stated, “Your Honor, I was sitting in Seward Park when a gang came up laughing at my hat. The defendant took it from my head and smashed it.” The court declared, “Straw hats have been called in. You’re late, step down.” And the case was dismissed.
After midnight on September 15, Corporal Amanda Hayes changed into street clothes in the locker room of the Harlem stationhouse. He left the building for the walk to a subway entrance with a straw hat atop his head and a revolver in his holster. The night was warm; people seeking relief from the heat filled the sidewalks. A group of young blacks found amusement lying in wait for men who, that very morning, had passed the straw-hat deadline. Along came Hayes, looking very much the ordinary white civilian.
In high spirits, the teenagers reached for Hayes’s hat. Hayes identified himself as a cop. Backed against a building, he ordered the teenagers to move away. They complied. Hayes then chased the purported ringleader into a billiard parlor and placed him under arrest. When Hayes returned to the sidewalk, prisoner in tow, the teens set upon him again. They broke his hat and freed their friend.
“In a twinkling,” the
New York Times
reported, “Hayes was the center of a mob, battling for his life. He was felled by a blow that broke his jaw and continued to be the target for kicks and blows.”
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Struggling to his feet, Hayes fired his gun, mortally wounding a black man named Ephram Gethers.
On duty not far away, Battle raced toward the gunfire. By the time he reached the scene, Hayes was amid a kicking throng. Liberally wielding his nightstick—“striking right and left,” in the description of the
New York Globe
—Battle pushed through the mob to stand over the helpless Hayes with his gun drawn.
“This man is a policeman,” he shouted, waving the club to widen the circle of attackers.
“We’ll lynch him anyway!” came voices in answer.
As Gethers’s life ebbed, hundreds of people flocked angrily to the street on hearing that a white cop had killed a black man. Police reserves poured from the stationhouse. They found Battle standing his ground as Hayes’s protector. Showered by bottles and chairs thrown from above, they launched into a club-swinging drive to restore order. Reinforcements from other precincts sealed the area through the night and the coming day. They all heard the story: the black cop had saved the white cop from rioting blacks.
Finally, in those moments of danger and bravery, Battle had done enough to win the gratitude of the department’s white rank-and-file. They gave him in return a toehold on equal footing. Some knew that Battle hoped to become a sergeant but had been denied admission to the Delehanty Institute. A test preparation course was getting underway. The class voted unanimously to grant him entry—for the first time conceding that a black man, this black man, was fit to command whites.
BETRAYED
TONY HEARS HIS
grandparents talking about Langston Hughes. He will be coming to the cottage again for a couple of weeks. A year has gone by since he last came to Greenwood Forest Farms, and Battle and Florence are frustrated that Hughes has made far less progress on the book than he should have. Florence is especially impatient. The one-time Southern girl who left school well before the age of sixteen had devoted her life to home and family rather than to literary pursuits. Baking pies was her province, not reading poetry. She shrugs at Hughes’s stature. Worse, she takes his elusiveness as a sign that he has little respect for her husband’s heroics. She regards the celebrity unforgivingly. Hughes is universally remembered as genial and fastidious, but Florence’s hostility emerges in complaints that he is an awful houseguest who, undeservedly, expects her to serve him.
“Grandmother accused Langston of being lazy,” Tony recalls. “She didn’t like to take care of him. Clean your own dishes. Help out in the kitchen. He was above that kind of stuff.”
To keep the peace, Battle arranges for Hughes to stay in Mrs. Taylor’s guesthouse across the road from the cottage. He needs the time with Hughes because he has had infuriating difficulty focusing the writer to work on their project. An editor at Simon and Schuster has expressed “our keen—and unanimous—interest in such a book.” Even more exciting, Battle has signed a deal with a screenwriter to develop a movie about his life. Still, he has gotten Hughes’s attention only in fits and starts. What Battle does not know is that many others are similarly frustrated.
Four years earlier, in 1947, Hughes had scored success with
Street Scenes
, an opera about life in a Manhattan tenement produced in collaboration with Elmer Rice and Kurt Weill.
New York Times
critic Brooks Atkinson pronounced that Hughes’s lyrics “communicate in simple and honest rhymes the homely familiarities of New York people and the warmth and beauty of humanity.” Hughes’s share of the proceeds, the largest sums he had ever earned, engendered hope that he had finally attained financial security.
Chasing ever harder after income, he collected in a book the most popular feature of a longtime column he had written for the Chicago
Defender—
imaginary conversations with a regular guy named Simple. He accepted a visiting creative writing professorship at Atlanta University and taught children from kindergarten through high school at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago. With a one-thousand-dollar advance, he took on writing
Just Around the Corner
, a musical play about the Depression.
While the assignment should have been enough for any man, Hughes also agreed to collaborate with a young American musician on an opera commissioned by the American Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Federation of Music Clubs, as well as to write two musical shows planned for Broadway. Despite everything, his income plummeted in the years following 1947, which is why he added Battle’s life to a list of projects that was already too long and dispiriting. “I am a literary sharecropper,” he complained to his good friend the novelist Arna Bontemps.
1
Arnold Rampersad, author of the masterful
The Life of Langston Hughes
, explained, “Often subsisting in a dreary kind of neo-slavery, black sharecroppers toiled on land not their own. In the old days, Hughes had lived like a valiant runaway slave, owning nothing, wanting little besides freedom. Now, slavery apparently over, he had forty acres—but he was the mule.”
Sorrowfully, Rampersad added, Hughes recognizes that “in many ways he was not working as a serious artist,” a truth reinforced by publication of two landmarks of African American literature, Richard Wright’s
Native Son
and Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
.
2
Instead of writing a similarly towering work, Hughes is consumed by the musicals, most of which come to naught, and by Battle’s book, which he now finds a bore. Hounded by all of his collaborators and sponsors, Hughes works to pull together a manuscript, often monitored by Florence, whose disdain is surely as evident to Hughes as it is to Tony.
THE LESSON FOR
Battle after the straw-hat eruption, as well as for Wesley Williams, was that the white man was never more prepared to open a door for a black man than if that particular black man had put his life on the line to save a white man. So be it. Battle studied at the Delehanty Institute with a new stature that extended high up the departmental ranks. At least one commander thought that this big, strong Negro could be of use.
Captain Cornelius Willemse, chief of the homicide squad, summoned Battle to headquarters. Willemse had joined the police force in 1899, learned the ropes in the San Juan Hill stationhouse, and participated in the antiblack police riot of 1900. “How those nightsticks worked—mine included!” Willemse recalled in a memoir.
3
Now, he told Battle that he was looking for a man to go undercover as a prisoner in the municipal jail with the mission of wheedling a confession out of a black inmate accused of murder. Willemse promised Battle that the reward for putting his life on the line, locked in a cell with a hulking murderer, would be promotion to detective. Battle accepted the assignment. Leaving Florence with the four children, and having no idea when he might return, he marched into court in the guise of a criminal arrested for larceny. The magistrate ordered Battle held pending trial. Shackled, he trudged with accused killers, robbers, and rapists to an elevated passageway that connected the courthouse with the jail. It was known as the Bridge of Sighs.
As originally constructed in the first half of the nineteenth century, the jail was said to resemble the burial place of an Egyptian pharaoh and became known as the Tombs. The name stuck even as the structure was torn down and replaced. The incarnation in Battle’s day had four tiers with stone floors. A long, rectangular area separated the cells from the outside wall. Light entered through high windows. Inmates doubled up in cages that were six feet wide and seven-and-a-half feet long.
Battle squeezed into an iron-bound space that was barely large enough for one person, let alone for the oversized Battle plus a violent man who was described by Willemse as a giant “far bigger and more powerful” than even Battle was. With a clang of the door, Battle began the work of gaining his cellmate’s trust. The typical day moved from a cellblock breakfast of hominy, bread, and coffee, to a morning spent in the clamorous open area, to a cellblock lunch of lentil soup, mutton stew, and bread, to milling in the open area, to a dinner of corned beef hash and coleslaw before the cell door locked again for the night at five.
4
This was to be Battle’s life for the duration—although the duration proved not to last long. Willemse had recruited Battle because he needed a black police officer, but, with so few African Americans in the department, Battle was well known to blacks, both the law abiding and the law breakers. After a second day behind bars, someone recognized him. The accused murderer turned on Battle. Battle squared off, ready to fight. Up and down the tiers, inmates cried for combat. The warden called Willemse.
“Somebody’s recognized Battle,” he said. “The whole prison is howling and yelling. There’s hell to pay here.”
Racing to the scene, Willemse found Battle still in the cell. He was “unthinking of his danger but hopping mad that his trick had been discovered.” Willemse wrote, adding, “He was so nervy that his enraged cell-mate hadn’t attempted an attack.”
5
With yet another exploit to his credit, Battle could only wait for the department to award the detective’s shield that Willemse had promised.
AS BATTLE HAD
found a productive refuge in the stationhouse flag loft, Wesley took occupancy of the hose tower. The company was happy to see him climb alone to the rooftop. With Captain Brennan’s encouragement, he equipped the space with barbells for working out and a chair and table for reading. His selections included manuals filled with the information he would need to pass the fire lieutenant’s test as soon as he had racked up the required experience on the job. He had a lot to learn. The exam topics covered the operation and maintenance of every variety of departmental truck and equipment, along with proper procedures for fighting fires, ranging from tenement blazes to conflagrations in varnish factories.
6
Company members scoffed at Wesley’s ambition, with one saying that he “would be an officer over white men when black crows turn white.” But Brennan encouraged Wesley to stick to his studies and to ignore his tormentors.
