One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (27 page)

As Wilkins knew, running a cabaret in New York City entailed buying the favor of the police and Tammany Hall. At first, the tab was fifty dollars a month, paid through Leroy, who was the front man for the Astoria Café near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 135th Street. Connor handed over seventy-five dollars a month as proprietor of the Royal Café, just down the block. In 1913, after the Manhattan district attorney indicted a Harlem police inspector, the prosecutor questioned Connor and Leroy Wilkins. Asked why he paid the bribes, Leroy “replied that he wanted to run an all-night saloon, and that even if he just wanted to run a straight, legal place the police, he was sure, could easily frame him up and put him out of business. To pay was the easiest way.”
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Cultivating police and politicians was especially necessary for Wilkins because the good citizens of Harlem had mixed feelings about saloons. Straight-laced Frederick Randolph Moore, for one, was appalled by the rise in drinking. He railed in the
Age
in 1914 that Harlem was “infested” with more than eighty-five establishments that “thrive by selling whiskey principally to members of the race.”

Headlined “Too Many Saloons in Harlem,” Moore’s editorial described the whiskey as “the kind that makes you fight your mother,” complained that the businesses were dominated by white men who opened their “side door entrances” to black women, and reported that the “colored saloonkeeper seems to have a difficult time making a living at best.”
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With rivals for the drinking dollar on every corner, Wilkins factored the purchase of police and politicians into the cost of doing business. The Exclusive Club stayed open to all hours, even as headquarters repeatedly hauled him into court. No matter the evidence, magistrates dismissed the charges or imposed nominal fines. Time and again, Battle and fellow cops watched Wilkins return unscathed to the scene of the party, seemingly untouchable.

Then one of Wilkins’s friends brought two young men into the club. They drank liberally and went on their way. Over the coming weeks, they became familiar faces, stayed late, and took an interest in other pleasures available to the trusted. Finally, Wilkins opened that door. An associate brought the men to an apartment in the Tenderloin, where a madam welcomed them into the company of Linette, Rose, and Rosie. After the third such jaunt, the men came out from undercover as agents of the Manhattan district attorney.

For the only time in his life, Wilkins spent the night in jail. With characteristic panache, he complained only of personal betrayal, saying, “The man who turned me up was a man I would have trusted with $20,000. That is what hurts me.” In fact, he had little to worry about. Time and again, anti-vice crusaders had targeted Wilkins, only to have Tammany magistrates dismiss charges for a supposed lack of evidence. This time, Wilkins dodged jeopardy with the announcement that he would run a simple bar, flamboyantly named the “Get What You Want.”
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But retirement was never the plan. The lesson learned was that a man could never have too much protection, so Wilkins began assiduously befriending politicians with well-aimed generosity. Most importantly, he bonded with Tammany Hall’s Jimmy Hines.

BORN ON MANHATTAN’S
East Side, Hines was the son of a police and fire department blacksmith. He captained a Tammany district that stretched along the Hudson into West Harlem. Refined manners put him in good stead with the business elite, while a gracious personality earned him the affection of the working class. He arranged for patronage jobs, fixed traffic tickets, made sure no one went hungry, and kicked off summers by hosting as many as twenty-five thousand people to hot dogs, soda, and ice cream in Central Park.

Hines was a rogue, too. He had mutually beneficial relationships with gangsters. They delivered money; he delivered services available only through the good offices of Tammany’s most powerful chief. He had only to make a phone call to secure protection or inflict punishment. Both were crucial to Wilkins’s cabaret ambitions, as well as to his determination never to take a fall again. When Prohibition dawned, they also helped propel his Exclusive Club to the top in the remaking of Harlem as New York’s illicit fun zone.

Rebellion against temperance brought nightclubbing there to exuberant life. Hip and chic whites arrived late at night in limousines to let loose in a dark town pulsing with daring rhythms. Finely dressed and carrying fat wallets, they crowded into hot spots that catered to partiers from a hostile culture and that were off limits to regular folks. Few Harlem residents ever stepped through the doors of the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, Small’s Paradise, or Wilkins’s Exclusive Club and into a universe where blacks entertained laughing, dancing, drinking revelers who had little interest in the afflictions of the lives around them.

To enhance the aura that his club was “exclusive,” Wilkins limited admission to whites and light-skinned blacks, with the exception of darker-toned celebrities. A young woman whose name was Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louisa Virginia Smith was at the center of the action. Ada Smith had grown up in Chicago dreaming of show business, and she had made her way to New York in 1914 to see the legendary Baron Wilkins. She was not yet twenty-one and faked her way inside with two under-aged friends.

“Everything about his bar and back room was bigger and better than anything else in the neighborhood. He drew a crowd we called ‘sporty,’” she remembered, adding, “Evidently I’d caught his eye. He was such a big, fat man that it wasn’t easy for him to move around, but he managed to get over to our table. He said to Gertie and Anita, ‘Whose’s that cute kid?’”

They chatted and Wilkins pointed to Smith’s red hair. “You know what,” he said, “I think I’ll call you Bricktop.”
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For the rest of her long life in cabarets, Ada Smith would be known as Bricktop, most famously as barkeep and chanteuse to the Lost Generation writers who congregated in Paris of the 1920s. She was a favorite of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and, yes, Langston Hughes.

Before those expatriate years, Smith returned to the Exclusive Club in 1922. She found a place where liquor and music flowed freely in a land beyond the law. Much to Wilkins’s anger, two headquarters detectives had staged a raid in March of that year. They arrested “ten white and two girls of color” plus “ten white and one man of color,” accusing some of the women of “vulgar dancing.” As ordained, a magistrate promptly dismissed the charges.
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Still, Wilkins said, the police should have known better than to bust in. Next time, if there was a next time, the cops would learn the error of their ways.

The great man took Bricktop on as a singer. Patrons loved her and so did he. When Bricktop said that the club needed a better house band, Wilkins took her advice and imported a five-man combo from Washington, DC. They included a dashing and handsome young piano player; Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington stepped onto the launching pad for his career.

Al Jolson and John Barrymore were regulars, along with playwright Charles MacArthur, who wrote
The Front Page
with Ben Hecht, and Lucille LeSueur, a chorus girl soon to be known as Joan Crawford. And then there was the “nice quiet Irishman” who would say to Bricktop: “Bricky, come on let’s you and me . . .”

“Oh, no that ain’t the play,” she would answer, knowing better than to get tangled up with Jack “Legs” Diamond, the killer who served as muscle for Arnold Rothstein.

“Sometimes the place would be full of gangsters,” remembered Elmer Snowden, who led Ellington’s combo. When the gangsters came in, he said, Wilkins “would close all the doors.”

Everyone on both sides of the law spent wildly. Ellington recalled a scene that many recounted as a regular part of the fun: “People would come in who would ask for change for a C-note in half dollar pieces. At the end of a song, they would toss the two hundred four-bit pieces up in the air, so that they would fall on the dance floor and make a jingling fanfare for the prosperity of our tomorrow. The singers—four of them including Bricktop—would gather up the money and another hundred-dollar bill would be changed and this action would go jingling deep into the night.”

Wilkins’s world, one commentator wrote, was a place where “one easily forgets that all Harlem is not like it. Harlem, the Harlem of the poor, overcrowded, underfed, with children crippled with rickets and scurvy.”
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ENRIGHT’S ORDER
to raid Wilkins’s gambling joint set up a clash between two of Harlem’s most prominent residents: Battle, who was both admired for breaking the police color line and tarred as an enforcer of the dominating structure; and Wilkins, who was both romanticized for outplaying the white powers on behalf of the race and as plugged into Harlem as one could be. He gave generously to charitable causes and to the needy, belonged to the same fraternal organizations as Battle, and was celebrated with Connor as owner of the Bacharach Giants, a popular Negro League baseball franchise. Even Frederick Randolph Moore, guardian of Harlem’s rectitude, was a Wilkins fan. Selling alcohol to wealthy whites, promoting African American musical stars, and spreading the wealth close to home were no sins in the
Age
.

Battle looked for a way out of raiding Wilkins’s joint. There was none. He could only hope that Enright would spurn demands for retaliation, but Battle had no basis for trust. In fact, he had fresh reason for wariness. The newspapers had just told the tale of Albert Pitt, a cop who had conducted a raid that had been fully approved by the commanding officer for Brooklyn and Queens, and still was made to pay. The department transferred Pitt from a post close to his home in the Queens oceanfront community of Rockaway Beach to the Harlem stationhouse, at least two hours away by elevated train and subway. Pitt wrote to Enright, hoping that the commissioner would correct the injustice, got no response, and resigned rather than suffer the misery of a long daily commute to and from work. For good measure, the department falsely accused Pitt of refusing to work in a black community because he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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By then Battle knew that many of Enright’s closest aides—his “understrappers”—had corrupt ties with powerful people.
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Still, he sent an undercover investigator into Wilkins’s game. The officer returned with more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant. Armed with court authorization, swarming cops arrested Wilkins’s lieutenants and more than fifty gamblers. One by one, a magistrate called the defendants before the bench and pronounced the charges baseless. They all walked free from a courtroom controlled by Jimmy Hines.

Long after his association with Hughes was over, Battle would ruefully tell an interviewer: “I didn’t know what I was doing, I guess, because I thought it was honest and honorable to do your work correctly.”
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Under more pointed questioning by Hughes, he explained: “The underworld whispered that both Wilkins and Connor were friends of Inspector Lahey. They predicted that in any case, since the game was protected by a ‘Tammany fix’ nothing would happen to it. They were right. The game continued to run.”

And, then, on October, 14, 1923, the order came down: The department was booting Battle from the Special Service Division to a stationhouse in Canarsie, far out across Brooklyn, where the sewer pipes emptied into the bay. The building was known for that reason as “The Shithouse.”

Battle took sick leave and requested an audience with Enright. When the commissioner refused a meeting, Battle turned to Charles Anderson, who had rallied behind Battle’s fight to join the force and was still a Republican power broker. Anderson spoke with Enright and then reported back to Battle that “Enright advised me to go slow, lay low in Canarsie, and in due time I would be appointed sergeant and brought back to Manhattan.”

His eyes on the prize of promotion, Battle swallowed the bitter medicine of exile to “the hind-end of New York” where “goats, chickens and turkeys ran unmolested down streets and lanes.” He endured the hours-long ride to and from Harlem and the last stop on the subway line while waiting his turn on the promotion list. His new colleagues shared none of his hope about the future. They believed it was only a matter of time before he suffered a painful awakening.

A sergeant, “a very fine man, and officer,” decided to burst the bubble, Battle remembered.

“He said to me, ‘Battle, come here. What does it read over that station house?’

“I said, ‘80th Precinct stationhouse.’

“He said, ‘No. Those words are not emblematic. What it should read is, “All Those Who Enter Here Leave Hope Behind,” meaning that you’re here for good.’”
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MANY SAID THAT
Enright had played Battle for a fool. In Harlem and the Guardians Society, they said that Battle had been too willing to credit Enright with good faith. He had been a dupe, they said. Enright had given him a plum assignment and had let a handful of African Americans form their own organization, and from these small favors Battle had concluded that this commissioner would give black cops a fair shot.

Still more hurtful to Battle, neighbors and police colleagues drew a Shakespearean parallel to his relationship with Enright. They cast Battle as Othello and Enright as the deceitful villain who manipulated the tragically trusting, dark-skinned nobleman in order to achieve his own hidden ends. “Harlemites said that in sending me there Commissioner Enright had become my Iago,” Battle recalled.

AS FALL MOVED
toward winter in 1923, Battle looked toward the top of the slow-moving list for promotion to sergeant. He joined with Wesley, who was still studying for the fire lieutenant’s exam, in believing that the civil service system offered the most certain route to advancement. Wesley was eager to match his brainpower against that of his fellows—plus he wanted to best them physically, black man against white men in the ring.

The fire department sponsored annual boxing championships. Hundreds of firefighters competed. The victors in each weight class went on to fight the men who had prevailed in police department championships. Both forces rooted for the combatants who bore the honors of the rival legions.