One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (30 page)

All too predictably, disease and death followed. Harlem’s mortality rate was 42 percent higher than the city’s. Its infants died twice as frequently as babies elsewhere in New York. Tuberculosis, heart ailments, and pneumonia took lives with grim efficiency.

Meanwhile, across a class divide, some ten thousand people celebrated the dedication in 1925 of a newly constructed neo-Gothic church, still the landmark home today of Battle’s beloved Mother AME Zion congregation.
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Working and professional men swelled the membership of fraternal organizations like his Monarch Lodge. Wives appeared in the
Amsterdam News
gossip column for hosting bridge parties and participating in supper dances.

As the decade’s halfway mark passed, James Weldon Johnson asked: “Will Harlem become merely a famous ghetto, or will it be a center of intellectual, cultural and economic forces exerting an influence throughout the world, especially upon Negro peoples?” He and so many others believed the latter, even as dreams were starting to die in the suffocating grip of race and economics.
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THIS TIME BATTLE INSISTED
, and this time Anne came north to visit.
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The townhouse was as fine a home as she had known in New Bern. Here, though, African Americans owned each and every house. Inside, Anne embraced three grandchildren whose progress in life reflected that they had been reared by two strong parents, unlike the many youngsters who were looked after by single mothers, often hanging about the streets “with keys tied around their necks on a ribbon.”

Twenty-one-year-old Jesse was headed toward completing studies at Morgan State, the historically black university in Baltimore. Eleven-year-old Carroll was a junior high school athlete. Fourteen-year-old Charline was enrolled in a revolutionary institution dedicated to producing career “gentlewomen.” Described by the
Times
as occupying “the finest high school building in the world,” the Wadleigh High School for Girls had opened in 1902 to educate the offspring of Harlem’s white upper crust. The student body remained largely white when Charline entered the five-story, elevator-equipped, French Renaissance–style edifice.
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Passing the spring through the fall of 1927 with Battle’s family, Anne witnessed the start of an intensely eventful and newly happy phase of her son’s career. He told astonishing tales about the Roths. After soliciting the support of wealthy whites whose stolen property had turned up in their vaults, Battle persuaded the district attorney to file a fresh indictment, and he stood ready for a new round of case fixing.

“A well-known Harlem go-between, who made his living arranging deals between gamblers, bootleggers, other law breakers and the politicians, came to me with the offer of a large cash settlement if I would back down on the Roths,” Battle remembered.

He refused, and they persisted: “When it seemed clear that the Roths were going to trial, in spite of all, the word came down to me from higher sources that as much as a hundred thousand dollars would be available for division between the judge, the district attorneys, and myself—if the Roths were cleared.”

Again Battle refused and, on May 31, 1927, the Roths faced judge and jury. After Olive Keene had exacted her revenge from the witness stand, Herbert Roth admitted guilt in a plea bargain, accepting a sentence of up to two years in prison. Joseph Roth was spared incarceration on the ground that he had a weak heart. Anne saw her son hailed in Harlem as a hero, with the
Amsterdam News
stating: “Credit for the arrest and conviction of Roth is due to the splendid work of Detective Sergeant Battle.”

In July, there was more acclaim after Battle and fellow black detective William Boyden arrested career criminal Richard Daly on a robbery charge. “Hardly had Daly gotten in the doors of the stationhouse,” Battle recalled, “when he said that he could ‘put the finger’ on the man who had murdered a grocery store clerk several months earlier.”

Daly said that he knew the killer, a black man, only by the name “Blue.” Battle, Boyden, and a white detective drove Daly up and down the streets until he pointed to twenty-five-year-old Leroy Leeks. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Leeks was literate enough to “read only a few words here and there.” He lived in a tenement just south of Harlem, earned his keep in the building as a janitor and handyman, was active in the neighborhood Baptist church, and had no criminal record.

Battle rolled down the car window.

“Is your name Blue?” he demanded.

“No,” Leeks responded.

“Yes it is. He done it,” Daly said, adding that he knew Leeks as a fellow ex-convict. “He did two bits with me in Sing Sing.”

With that Battle got out of the car, handcuffed Leeks, and searched his apartment with the other detectives. They found nothing. The next day Battle brought Leeks to the scene of the months-old homicide.

“You remember this place?” he asked.

“No, I have never been on West 140th Street before,” Leeks answered.

Regardless, Battle hauled Leeks to court, telling him, as Leeks would swear, “I would never have arrested you if Daly did not say your name was Blue. You’re not indicted by me, but by that boy, Daly.”
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At that, Battle left Leeks to face a capital murder charge based solely on the uncorroborated word of an untrustworthy witness—and without investigating Leeks’s protestations of innocence.

The newspapers bannered the arrest. Three months later, after Anne had returned to North Carolina, the headlines would be anything but complimentary. On the eve of Leeks’s trial, Daly recanted, claiming that Battle and the other cops had bullied him into naming Leeks. Five witnesses, including Leeks’s doctor, reported that Leeks had been sick at home at the time of the murder—none of which Battle had checked.

The
Times
blared:

The
Amsterdam News
reported: “A lie from the mouth of a known criminal without any supporting evidence nearly sent an innocent laboring man to the electric chair.”
⁹

Battle vigorously denied that he had laid a hand on Daly, told Hughes that the brutality allegations had harmed his reputation but never acknowledged in their joint storytelling that he had erred in solely relying on the career criminal’s word.

WHILE THE LEEKS
case was pending and Battle was still riding high, he had had the pleasure of introducing Anne to one of the most luminous of African American celebrities, legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Battle and Robinson were just then starting a close friendship.

Born in Virginia in 1878, Robinson grew up shining shoes and dancing on street corners for pennies. He left home at fourteen to join a touring show that drew black audiences across the South. He arrived in New York around the turn of the century, danced at Tenderloin clubs, and followed the money into vaudeville. The traveling music and comedy shows enforced a “two-colored” standard that barred solo performances by blacks, so Robinson partnered with George W. Cooper. Rave reviews described them in terms like “real Ethiopians” and praised their “chuckling guffaws, pigeon wing steps and cachinnating songs.” After a dozen years, Robinson broke the “two-colored” restriction, went solo, and began to dance more. He wore wooden-soled, slip-on clogs rather than laced oxfords with steel taps. His tapping began to draw audiences.

On the stage of New York’s Palace Theatre, Robinson danced up and down a set of steps. The effect was stunning. Constance Valis Hill, author of
Tap Dancing America
, concluded that Robinson’s “Stair Dance” was “the first tap masterwork of the twentieth century, one of the earliest tap choreographies to attune the listener to the precision, clarity, and rhythmic logic of a tap composition.”
¹⁰

Acclaimed as the “World’s Greatest Dancer,” Robinson was an incandescent figure in Harlem. He was noted for being able to run backward as swiftly as a fast man ran forward, and he was credited with coining the word “copacetic” to mean the “superlative of OK.” Often called on to perform at public events, he happily obliged. That was how he and Battle began to forge their bond.

Sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, Battle had persuaded the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks to hold the group’s 1927 national convention in New York. He organized the extravaganza during Anne’s visit. Thanks to Battle, Harlem greeted the black Elks with “thousands of gaily colored electric lights stretched across the streets . . . and with flags, bunting and decorations in greater profusion than this section has ever seen before.” Throngs watched the Elks parade up Seventh Avenue. Dressed “in a white flannel suit and stopping now and then to knit a dance step,” Robinson led the way. Battle came next with New York’s African American police officers in full-dress formation, giving Anne one memory above all to take home from her final trip to New York.
¹¹

THAT SUMMER, WESLEY’S
name reached the top of the fire department promotion list. It would be only a short time before the commissioner elevated him to lieutenant or passed him over. His fears mounted when a deputy commissioner showed up at Grand Central to seek out white men who worked for Chief Williams as redcaps. How did this black boss treat his white underlings, the deputy commissioner asked, searching for like-father-like-son proof that placing African American Wesley in a superior role would bode ill for white firefighters. When finally the order came down, the news was good: Commissioner John Dorman awarded Wesley the rank of lieutenant. He understood what he was up against immediately. “The Civil Service Commission cautioned me not to make a mistake or do anything wrong as it would throw a reflection on thirteen million colored people,” he would recall years later. “I told them that that was not fair to the race or me. But I must admit that in this country that is the way it works, hard though it is.”

Protests flooded into Dorman’s office. Wesley got word that the commissioner planned to assign him to a water tower company, a post composed entirely of a single lieutenant and two firefighters. Further, Dorman would team Wesley with another lieutenant and a retired firefighter, thus denying Wesley command over any active member of the department. Wesley served notice that he would fight.

“I took orders from white officers,” he told Battle. “White firemen will have to take orders from a colored officer.”

Chief Williams contacted Patrick Cardinal Hayes, leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and US senator Robert F. Wagner. Committing to speak with Mayor Walker, the senator told the Chief that Wesley should “continue on active service in a fire company as this was right and also necessary if a proper pattern was to be established.”
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Hayes was even more specific about his wishes. “The cardinal, God bless him, told the mayor and fire commissioner that I was to stay in Engine Company 55, where I wanted to stay,” Wesley recalled.

The commissioner gave Wesley command authority in the firehouse that had been his posting for eight years. He walked in as superior officer to men who had banished him to separate sleeping quarters, defecated in his boots, thrown away his eating utensils, abandoned him in a fire, and demanded transfers to escape working with a “nigger.” There was a fresh revolt. A firefighter poured honey into a fire engine gas tank to prevent Wesley from responding to an alarm. Thirteen-year veteran John O’Toole walked out in disgust—and was rewarded with a transfer to working on a fireboat. Wesley’s fellow lieutenants did worse than turn their backs. At the time, lieutenants belonged to an association that was akin to a union, but membership was by invitation. The association sent applications only to newly promoted lieutenants who were highly rated by friends or had political support. A man was guaranteed admission if an application came in the mail. If no application arrived, a man learned that he had been blacklisted. To Wesley’s surprise, an application appeared in his box. He sent in the paperwork with an initiation fee. The association returned the money with an explanation: membership was limited to whites.

Celebrating Wesley’s promotion, the
Amsterdam News
noted that he had recently finished reading
The Outline Of Science: A Plain Story Simply Told
, a best-selling work on the interplay of science and religion by Scottish naturalist Sir John Arthur Thomson.
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His new duties placed him at the head of a company of men and kept him in harm’s way. Early on in his command, an iron-columned structure went up in flames in today’s SoHo. A superior officer ordered Wesley to lead his team inside. He pulled his men together. The chaos slowed them ever so slightly; then the building collapsed as they were about to enter.

“We would all have been lost as the entire nine stories fell,” Wesley remembered of an escape so narrow that the Chief who had ordered the men in “came running up and said a prayer,” because he had thought that the whole company, including Wesley, had been killed.

AT THE AGE
of forty-five, in 1928, Battle plunged into two experiences that he vested with lifelong significance. The first was a pilgrimage.

In May, Battle joined the Reverend William Lloyd Imes, pastor of St. James Presbyterian Church, on a 290-mile drive into the Adirondack Mountains.
¹⁴
They stayed overnight in Saratoga before heading on with fifty travelers to North Elba, a tiny town near Lake Placid. Carrying a framed picture that depicted John Brown stopping to kiss a slave child as he was led to the gallows, they were headed to the radical abolitionist’s gravesite on the 128th anniversary of his birth.

Brown had burned with hatred for bondage. His fervor brought him first to Springfield, Massachusetts, an antislavery bastion that he helped build into a major station on the Underground Railroad, and then to North Elba, where a wealthy abolitionist was giving land to poor blacks. Brown bought 244 acres with the goal of teaching the fledgling farmers to work the land. Seven years later in 1855, he went to war against proslavery militiamen in Kansas. The guerrilla conflict climaxed when he sanctioned the massacre of five prisoners. In 1859, Brown led twenty-one men on a raid of the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal with the vision that newly armed slaves would liberate the South. Marines commanded by Robert E. Lee squashed the insurrection, killing ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons, as well as Lewis Sheridan Leary, the first husband of Hughes’s grandmother.