One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (26 page)

Composer. Musician. Conductor. Entrepreneur. Architect. Boxer. Surgeon. Cop. An accomplished man among accomplished men, Battle could see futures of greater opportunity for Jesse, Charline, and Carroll. The children enrolled in public schools where stern women taught English, arithmetic, history, geography, science, and every other subject, including Latin. Many were the barriers still before the kids, but Battle could see the barriers breaking. And he could look past the swelling arrivals of poor uneducated Southerners to envision Harlem as the place where the barriers would first fall. He was glad to be raising the children here, to have placed them among tall-standing role models who were to be found nowhere else in such numbers.

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A SUMMONS TO
come home, to Anne, confirmed his thankfulness.

Gale-force winds buffeted New Bern. When a chimney flue caught fire, forty-five-mile-per-hour gusts whipped sparks into the air and down onto cedar shingle roofs in the preserve of New Bern’s black citizens, including Anne, who still lived at 8 Primrose Street. A residence on this street caught flame and then a house on that one, and New Bern’s Great Fire of 1922 was underway. Joe Gaskill McDaniel witnessed the inferno through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.

“Flaming shingles, careening on the breast of the gale, flew through the air for blocks and set widely scattered conflagrations,” McDaniel remembered in 1992, adding, “Pitiful humans screamed everywhere, like trapped animals fleeing from a flaming forest.” Anne joined the escaping throng.

The fire destroyed more than one thousand buildings. Thirty-two hundred people were homeless; nine out of ten were black. Battle’s younger sister Mary Elizabeth, who was now principal of Beaufort, North Carolina’s “Free School” for blacks, took Anne in. Mary Elizabeth was married to Curtis Oden, a shoe cobbler and Beaufort’s first black undertaker.
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Traveling to New Bern, Battle found the family home to be a blackened pile in a blackened field. Only the chimneys remained standing. Those, Thomas had built to last, Battle well knew. All around, he told Hughes, “the pretty little cottages of my youth were no longer standing,” and he added bitterly that “today where I was born there is a pickle factory” because the whites had broken a promise to create a park.

Battle invited Anne to live with him. Anne declined. She preferred the country to Harlem, the South that she knew to the North that she didn’t. So, glad that Anne was in Mary Elizabeth’s good hands, Battle returned alone to the distant universe where he worked as a Prohibition-era vice cop and where he lived side by side with trailblazers who were the pride of his race.

BATTLE RETURNED TO
hard times as a New York cop. For months, black Harlem had been inflamed by the death in police custody of a nineteen-year-old transplant from Charleston, South Carolina. The passions that were to be unleashed by Herbert Dent’s fatal encounter with blackjack-wielding detectives were more intense than any previously aimed at Battle and fellow members of the Guardians Society.

The pressures began building before midnight on December 19, 1921. The cops of Battle’s former base, the West 135th Street stationhouse, were changing shifts. A few blocks away his friend Jasper Rhodes was leaving his beat for the night. He spotted two men in the shadows of a doorway.

“You two fellows come out here,” Rhodes ordered. “I want to get a good look at you.”
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One of the men drew a gun and opened fire. Bullets hit Rhodes in the stomach and shoulder. The pair fled. In Harlem Hospital, Rhodes told detectives that darkness had prevented a good look at either man, but he did know that his assailants were black. Rhodes was strong at the age of twenty-nine; doctors predicted a full recovery. Still, they all knew—Florence, Jesse, Charline, and Carroll knew, and Rhodes’s wife, Isadora, knew—that two of New York’s first three black officers now had been shot in the line of duty. Battle was the exception.

Crime was on the rise across New York and nowhere more so than in what the newspapers called the city’s black belt. Over the next six months, young, male African Americans shot five more police officers, three fatally. Luther Boddy was the most notorious of the gunmen.

A swaggering twenty-two-year-old, Boddy had spent time in prison for burglary. Detective sergeants Francis J. M. Buckley and William Miller picked him up for questioning in connection with the Rhodes shooting. Boddy had hidden a gun in his coat sleeve, tied in such a way that the weapon would drop into his armpit if he raised his hands. Two hundred feet from the stationhouse, he fatally shot Buckley and Miller at point blank range.

All of twenty-five days passed between the murders and a jury’s finding of guilt. Central to the trial was the question of why Boddy had shot the two white detectives. He testified that he saw the stationhouse as a torture chamber where, on previous occasions, police had beaten him with blackjacks and rubber hoses in hope of eliciting confessions or of coercing him into informing on others.

“They did not succeed in either,” Boddy’s lawyer told the jury, “but they did create in his mind a horror and fear of the police which meant physical agonies and torture of the human soul.”
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Regardless, the jury convicted and the judge swiftly condemned Boddy to death. His fate had been doubly sealed when, in the middle of the trial, a mentally disturbed black man fatally shot a white cop through the head.

Police had arrested Frank Whaley for general disorderliness. They brought him to the stationhouse that covered southern Harlem. He appeared docile. Officer Otto Motz went about business seemingly without cause for wariness. Then, suddenly, Whaley snatched Motz’s gun from his holster and fired.

The murder demanded explanation. A rationale quickly emerged. Calling Whaley a “crazed negro,” the
Times
attributed his madness to racial rage. He was believed to have acted in “revenge for the arrest of Luther Boddy.”
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Next, Officer Patrick McHugh was shot in the head while trying to arrest three armed robbers. Then, a janitor shot a lawyer in a fee dispute and wounded Officer Henry Pohndorf in a running gun battle.

Increasingly convinced that Harlem’s criminal element had declared open season on cops, the men of the West 135th Street stationhouse patrolled on war footing. Detectives worked in three-member teams instead of pairs. Commanders beefed up night rounds under special supervision.
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The full roster took up the mission of imposing justice on the perpetrator of the single unsolved shooting, that of Officer Patrick McHugh. Soon, detectives zeroed in on Herbert Dent, and a judge issued an arrest warrant.

Dent had but a few hours to live. The official account of his death appeared in the newspapers of June 28, 1922. Casting one of Battle’s Guardians Society colleagues in a central role, the story was patently incredible: It is two-thirty in the morning. Wesley Redding, the city’s first black detective, is alone in the stationhouse. An informant places Dent in a saloon five blocks away. Redding sets out to capture New York’s most wanted man, an alleged member of Boddy’s robbery gang, without back-up. Redding hauls Dent to the detectives’ room. Still alone, Redding makes the same error that had proven fatal to Motz: He drops his guard, enabling Dent to grab his holstered gun. Fighting furiously, Redding yells for help. Detectives McGrath and Gorman rush into the room and subdue Dent with their blackjacks, saving Redding’s life. A short time later Dent dies at Harlem Hospital. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Norris attributes the death to acute alcoholism. “If he had not been drinking the beating would not have caused his death,” Norris says, and the district attorney closes the case as the unfortunate result of justified police action.
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One man would have none of it.
New York Age
editor Frederick Randolph Moore led the newspaper into challenging every aspect of the official account. Three days after Battle purchased his Strivers Row townhouse, he read that Dent had been an elevator boy and not a member of Boddy’s robbery gang, that a white officer named Scott had actually arrested Dent, and that Dent had never snatched Redding’s gun. Over the next months, Moore’s revelations pointed increasingly toward homicide. People who lived near the stationhouse said they often heard screams as men and women were brutalized inside. A woman said that “moans and groans” and the “sounds of blows” had awakened her on the night Dent died.

Two doctors retained to review Dent’s autopsy found a “cerebral depression,” a break in “one of the principal veins leading to the brain,” and no evidence of alcoholism. Then, a white US Secret Service agent who happened to have been in the stationhouse said that detectives McGrath and Flynn had struck Dent repeatedly with a blackjack and a nightstick to force him to confess. While Dent was prone, the agent said, McGrath broke the nightstick with a swing that hit both Dent and the floor. A black uniformed officer got a fresh baton.

“McGrath and Flynn continued beating this man with their blackjacks,” the agent said. “Flynn broke his blackjack and then picked up the nightstick which the patrolman had brought back to the room, struck the man across the side of the head—and then everything was in silence for a moment.”

Detective Gorman ran for some alcohol.

“Then they took the bottle and tried to force some whiskey down the colored man’s throat by holding his jaws open,” the agent recounted.

The
Age
’s revelations infuriated Battle’s neighbors. Awaiting execution at Sing Sing, Boddy took on the quality of a folk hero who had answered the barbarism of white cops on behalf of all blacks. His corpse came home to Harlem in spectacle. Thirty thousand people filed by his casket, and thousands more lined Seventh Avenue to watch his hearse pass the corner where he had gunned down the two detectives.
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Battle suffered guilt by his association with the New York Police Department. Where fellow path breakers on Strivers Row basked in unequivocal admiration, he bore the stigma of membership in an institution seen as a muscular representation of white repression. Few were surprised when the district attorney ruled out proceeding against anyone involved in Dent’s death.

BATTLE BID BON
voyage to Sam Belton on August 25, 1923. The inspector sailed on the
Homeric
for a sixteen-week excursion to Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Brussels, and London. Enright had announced that his Special Service Division chief would study “police conditions” on the continent in order to bring innovative crime-fighting strategies home to New York. The commissioner often took months-long cruises to the West Indies, Europe, or South America, sent off in staterooms overflowing with flowers, chocolates, fruits, and cigars. Now, he was similarly rewarding a trusted aide with the help of thievery more damning in its pettiness than the underworld cash flowing through police headquarters.

Enright had founded a charity whose stated purposes were to support the families of slain cops and to tide over officers who had run into financial difficulties. While the public had donated more than $95,000, Enright was on his way to providing all of $3,131 to widows and fatherless children. Instead, he was buying diamond-studded “honorary” deputy commissioner badges for influential New Yorkers. He also helped Belton tour Europe in style with $2,000 in spending money.
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Leading the high life, Enright and Chief Inspector William Lahey were among eighty-two thousand spectators who filled the Polo Grounds on September 14 to watch a heavyweight bout. Jack Dempsey had held the color line against Harry Wills and instead was fighting Argentine Luis Firpo, the so-called Wild Bull of the Pampas. According to
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, a posthumously published as-told-to autobiography some authors rely on and others trash as fiction, Luciano held court ringside at row A, seat 1. Having bargained his way out of an arrest for heroin possession, Luciano bought respectability again by distributing tickets to two hundred elite New Yorkers, including James Joseph “Jimmy” Hines, the broad-shouldered, ice-blue-eyed Tammany Hall chief from Manhattan’s West Side. Stars of stage and screen came by to shake Luciano’s hand. So did New York’s top two police officials.

“It was a pretty big thing when Dick Enright, the police commissioner of the whole city, come over to see how I was feelin’,”
The Last Testament
quotes Luciano as saying. “And right with him was Bill Lahey, his police chief. Why not, they were on our payroll.”

In this telling, Luciano delivered $10,000 a week to headquarters in paper bags. While the figure is beyond confirmation, the coauthors of the well-researched book
NYPD: A City and Its Police
concluded that “few people have disputed [Luciano’s] assertion that headquarters was for sale.” More, the day before the fight, a court had subpoenaed Enright in a case in which two detectives were alleged to have demanded a $2,500 bribe to overlook a shipment of liquor and admitted they had released the bootlegged goods after being told that it was actually owned by three high police officials.
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AMID THESE ROILING TIDES
, an inspector named Gaines took command of the Special Service Division in Belton’s absence. He delivered an order directly to Battle. In Harlem, he said, wives had complained that husbands were playing craps in a gambling hall on West 144th Street. The women were black, the men were black, and Battle was the division’s only black. Gaines told him to shut the place down.

This was no two-bit game. This operation was the property of Baron Deware Wilkins. More than a dozen years had passed since Battle had stood beside Wilkins, awaiting Jack Johnson’s arrival at Grand Central after Johnson had defeated Great White Hope Jim Jeffries. Wilkins had been a big man then, and he was bigger now.

As his Little Savoy cabaret passed into history, Wilkins, his brother Leroy, and John W. Connor, who partnered with Wilkins in owning Negro League baseball teams, had opened clubs in Harlem. The musicians who were revolutionizing the American popular idiom followed to a nightspot at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street that would gain fame as Wilkins’s Exclusive Club. There, dressed all in black at the keyboard of an upright, was Jelly Roll Morton, described by cultural writer Stanley Crouch as “the first theoretician of jazz and almost certainly its first great piano player.” There, watching and listening in awe, was young James P. Johnson, soon to be known as a master of stride piano and composer of “Charleston,” the anthem of the Roaring Twenties. And there, maybe, was a child prodigy by the name of George Gershwin. The future composer’s first biographer, David Ewen, describes Gershwin as roller-skating past Wilkins’s club as a boy about six years old. In this account, the strange new sound of jazz mesmerizes young George, whose itinerant family lived for a time in the white quarters of Harlem.
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