One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (29 page)

Later that year, Spurgeon Johnson staged a literary competition “to encourage the reading of literature both by Negro authors and about Negro life, not merely because they are Negro authors but because what they write is literature and because the literature is interesting.”
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The competition offered monetary awards. A broad panel of judges included Fannie Hurst and Eugene O’Neill. More than three hundred people attended an elegant dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Hughes took first prize for “The Weary Blues,” a masterpiece that captured the rhythms of a musical form infused with the American black experience. It opens and closes:

It was a heady time for the young writers. They were wanted at downtown A-list parties, and they were welcomed at fabulous soirées thrown by wealthy hair-care heiress A’Lelia Walker, later described by Hughes as “the joy-goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Amid the carousing and the high that came with being in fashionable demand, the writers took to calling themselves the “niggerati.” Ever affable yet ever inscrutable because he was never known to have opened a deeply personal, let alone sexual, relationship with anyone, Hughes remained the movement’s leading light. He spelled out its lofty ambitions in an essay in the
Nation
that declared: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
⁷⁵

Soon, at the age of twenty-five, Hughes published a volume of poetry that biographer Rampersad described as “his most brilliant book of poems, and one of the more astonishing books of verse ever published in the United States—comparable in the black world to [Walt Whitman’s]
Leaves of Grass
in the white.”
⁷⁶

Evoking the lives and ways of poor African Americans, the book scandalized much of the black establishment with such starkly revealing poems as “Red Silk Stockings,” which spoke of a black woman dressed to allure white men. Unfortunately titled “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” a reference to poor people selling their clothing to pawnbrokers, most of whom happened to be Jewish, the collection was Hughes’s declaration of freedom for his generation of African American artists. That it didn’t sell well seemed of little consequence in a time when black expression was the essence of hip. A wealthy, elderly white woman, Charlotte Mason, known endearingly to Hughes as “Godmother,” became his patron, funding him with $150 a month, asking only for an accounting and, far more important, a say over his writing projects.

Swept up as well, many in the black intelligentsia predicted that the cultural outpouring would lead whites, at long last, to see blacks for all their humanity. “I am coming to believe that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator and contributor to American civilization,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.
⁷⁷

WALKER’S TAMMANY HALL
background gave Battle little reason to hope for a reprieve, nor did Walker’s unlikely appointment of George V. McLaughlin as commissioner. Then serving as New York State Superintendent of Banking, McLaughlin had no experience in policing and seemed ideally suited to act as Tammany’s puppet. Regardless, the new commissioner summoned Battle.

“Officer, have a seat,” McLaughlin said. “I want to ask you do you know why you were not promoted to sergeant when your turn came?”

“I do not,” Battle answered.

“The only complaints I find against you in the files are anonymous letters. I have torn them up and thrown them into the wastebasket. Unsigned letters have no status with me. When I make my next appointments, Battle, I shall make you a sergeant. And when I appoint you, you will be a sergeant—not a Negro sergeant.”

Battle’s promotion came though on May 21, 1926. After almost fifteen distinguished years of service, including, by his count, two years, seven months, one week, and two hours in Canarsie, Battle was a sergeant, Shield No. 612, and for the first time the New York Police Department had authorized a black man to give orders to white men.

The Monarch Lodge of the Elks threw Battle a testimonial dinner. The Harold C. Clark Melody Orchestra played. The lodge’s exalted ruler toasted Battle as “a symbol of benevolence, activity, truth, tenacity, love and elasticity.” Dressed in a peach-and-orange crepe dress, Florence declined to speak, saying only that “one Battle a night was enough.”
⁷⁸

Battle stood before his admirers as a forty-three-year-old man, almost twenty-one years a husband, the father of three children, one on the verge of manhood himself. He remembered that, in his days as a redcap, friends had warned him not to try for the police department, but he had tried, and today he had a higher rank than most of the white men on the force. He had been ostracized in the stationhouse and gawked at on the streets. They had not. He had been barred from a parade and threatened with death. They had not. He had been jailed with a murderer and saved a white officer’s life. They had not. And he was a sergeant, and they were not.

In his pocket, Battle had a telegram, sent by Anne from Beaufort, where she was living happily with Mary Elizabeth. Anne reminded the son who had been born so large “that his good fortune was due to God and to prayer.” And a quarter-century later, long after Enright had faded into obscurity, shortly before he would die at the age of eighty-two in a fall down a flight of stairs on Long Island, Battle would write of his tormentor, “I asked the Lord to forgive him.”
⁷⁹

TONY JUMPS INTO
Battle’s black, turtle-shaped Lincoln and across the front seat from his grandfather. Battle is taking the boy to see Sugar Ray Robinson, the world’s greatest boxer, at his training camp in Greenwood Lake.

Battle first met the fighter when Robinson was a junior high school student. The Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church had brought the two together. The neighborhood around Cullen’s house of worship teemed with children who “were wild, bad, even vicious,” Cullen would remember. The roughest had a headquarters “in a cellar deep underground” and called their club “The Crescent.” Cullen persuaded the Crescent president, recalled only by the name Bunk, to take advantage of a gymnasium in the church basement. Thus was born the Salem Crescent Athletic Club.
¹

Then one day, Cullen found Robinson playing craps behind the church. The pastor took the boy to a cellar window through which he saw a boxing ring, punching bags, and a basketball court. Eventually, Robinson went in.

“About 20 guys were working out,” he recalled. “Sparring in the old ring. Skipping ropes. Punching the bags. Doing calisthenics. And sweating, the perspiration dripping like leaky faucets off their bodies. Over the years, the sweat had permeated everything in the gym.”

Robinson most remembered the smell. “The thick stale odor hung in the air and it hung in my nostrils,” he told a biographer. “Later on, it would represent a strange perfume to me.”
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Cullen recruited black police officers to keep the boys on the straight and narrow. Battle was at the top of the list. Boxer that he was, he got on famously with the fast-fisted boy and then the man.

“Robinson has been and still is a sort of protégé of mine,” he told Hughes. “I have been close to him through the years as he rose to the championship, having been at one time champion of two classes at once.”

TONY IS ACCUSTOMED
to his grandfather’s standing among prominent people. He meets Paul Robeson on a Sunday when he performs before the Mother AME Zion congregation for forty minutes. America’s Communist blacklist has driven Robeson from the public sphere, but his brother, the Reverend Benjamin Robeson, is pastor, and nothing can stifle the tenor’s powerful voice on this stage. On other Sundays, Battle takes Tony to the Polo Grounds. Grandfather and grandson sit in a box behind the dugout. There, Battle introduces Tony to Don Newcombe, the pitcher who followed Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers and had won the 1949 National League Rookie of the Year Award.

But, clambering from the big Lincoln, Tony has never witnessed a welcome as extravagant as the one Sugar Ray Robinson extends to Battle.

“The entire program is choreographed to ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ with Sugar Ray dancing, skipping rope and sparring, all with the music going,” Tony remembers.

Hughes, too, counts Sugar Ray as a friend. He’s a regular at Sugar Ray’s nightclub in Harlem. He makes his own trip to the boxer’s camp in that summer of 1952, having returned to Greenwood Forest Farms for a few more weeks. Almost three years have passed since Battle began working with Hughes, and now finally, Hughes is showing Battle drafts of the manuscript in progress. Battle reads the stories that he has told to Hughes and that Hughes has put down on paper, and he goes over them with Hughes to get the stories right. Hughes promises that he has only one more chapter to write. Finally, Battle is happy.

OLIVE KEENE KNEW
all about the sergeant who lived on Strivers Row, and she walked up the townhouse steps hoping to get help from the one cop who might provide it. Battle opened the door to find “an attractive brown skin woman” who had a story to tell about two powerful white men.

Joseph Roth and his son Herbert were pawnbrokers. They lent money at high interest rates to people pressed for cash. To guarantee repayment, they took property as security, “everything from pocket knives to diamonds.” Although exploitive, the pawn business was legal. Another aspect of the Roths’ trade was criminal. They worked as fences, buying stolen goods low at two shops, and reselling high elsewhere. Their version of the racket was particularly pernicious. They encouraged “domestic servants working in the homes of the rich to steal for them,” and then blackmailed the servants into stealing more.

Olive Keene was one of the thieves. Now, though, standing on Battle’s doorstep, she was furious that the Roths had paid her less for stolen goods than she had expected.

“Arrest me, Officer Battle,” she said. “I want to give you a case against the Roths. First put me in jail—and protect me. I’m afraid.”

Three months had passed since Battle’s promotion. He was assigned to the detective squad in the familiar quarters of the Harlem stationhouse. His first homicide case had been an immersion in bloodshed: a locked apartment; a butcher knife, razor, and scissors; a man’s dismembered body, head missing. The neighbors said they had heard the man arguing with his wife. Battle tracked her to Jersey City and made the arrest.

And, here, was Olive Keene, demanding to testify against two men who were connected to Tammany Hall. Harlem political leaders warned Battle to back off. He pressed on. Perhaps he felt safe because, to Tammany’s horror, Commissioner McLaughlin was taking on the rackets without fear or favor. Or perhaps it was simply as Battle said: “I was a member of the Harlem community, not only as a policeman, but as a parent-citizen, and I felt it was my duty to help rid the community of the menace of men like the Roths.”

Their vaults contained jewelry that wealthy New Yorkers had listed as missing, as well as firearms that had been reported stolen. Battle arrested father and son. When finally the trial was called, a judge dismissed the charges with the all-purpose case-fixing declaration: “lack of evidence.” The pawnbrokers resumed business, and Battle set out to build a new case against criminals he saw as perpetrators of racial injustice.

THE HARLEM THAT
he had pioneered and that had grown into the proud black metropolis was being transformed once more. For a time, spanning roughly the second half of the 1920s, social extremes abided side by side as if in competition, the hopeful culture of the middle and upper classes pitted against the arrival of poor and uneducated Southerners.

“It is a motley group which is now in the ascendancy in the city,” Charles Spurgeon Johnson wrote in the March 1925 issue of the
Survey Graphic
. “The picturesqueness of the South, the memory of pain, the warped lives, the ghostly shadows of fear, crudeness, ignorance and unsophistication, are laid upon the surface of the city in a curious pattern.”
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Less politely stated, many of the emigrants had neither the resources nor the backgrounds to meet expected standards of living.

“Whether it is apparent or not, the newcomers are forced to reorganize their lives—to enter a new status and adjust to it that eager restlessness which prompted them to leave home,” Spurgeon Johnson continued. “It is not inconceivable that the conduct of these individuals which seems so strange and at times so primitive and reckless, is the result of just this disorientation.”

From 1920 to 1930, New York’s black population more than doubled to 327,706. The big city channeled the arrivals into narrow straits. Half of the working men held jobs as janitors, porters, messengers, waiters, drivers, and elevator operators. Six in ten of the employed women were laundresses or servants.

Meanwhile, housing demand soared as African Americans filled Harlem to its limits, and white resistance in abutting neighborhoods hemmed blacks into this limited territory. Built for large families, the neighborhood’s spacious apartments were ill suited for an influx of young, single people. Tenants packed into shared rooms, driving the population density to a level 50 percent higher than in Manhattan at large. Rents doubled between 1919 and 1927.