One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (31 page)

Six days after Brown was hanged for treason, his wife buried his body on the North Elba farm. Eventually, eleven of his raiders would also be interred there. New York State took over the property in 1895, but it was not until 1922, with the formation in Philadelphia of the John Brown Memorial Association, that the site got sustained attention. A small group began annual wreath-laying pilgrimages, and word spread to several cities, including New York, where a handful of African Americans joined the association. They named their chapter after Frederick Douglass, who had written of Brown: “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Battle joined an annual trek to Brown’s farm as a member of the Douglass chapter. The pilgrims gathered first for lunch and an organ service at a restaurant. As a goodwill gesture, Battle presented the picture of Brown embracing the slave child to the Lake Placid Club, an organization of the area’s leading citizens. Hosting the lunch, a local minister said with evident sincerity, “The black man who died in chains and the white man who died on the gallows both left the slave in bondage. Then beside these two marched a third martyr, and Abraham Lincoln died as the last shackle dropped from the last slave, and America was free.” He left unspoken the fact that the Lake Placid Club barred admission to African Americans “except as servants.”
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Later on the afternoon of May 9, 1928, standing before a roughly carved tombstone, Battle paid homage to a hero who was reviled by many as a murderous terrorist. He would tell Hughes of the events, and Hughes would barely reference them in a list of Battle’s most cherished memories. Hughes’s offhanded treatment of the episode was particularly startling because of his family’s reverence for the raid at Harpers Ferry. Over and again, his grandmother had told the story of how Leary had ridden off from Oberlin, Ohio, to give his life fighting alongside Brown, instilling in Hughes the greatness of his lineage. Often, she had worn Leary’s shawl, shown Hughes its bullet holes, used the cloth to protect him from the cold as he had slept. Then she had handed the shawl down to him and he had kept it in storage for decades until finally donating the cloth to the Ohio Historical Society.
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Yet he limited the labor he exerted for Battle to mentioning the pilgrimage to Brown’s grave to but two sentences.

FOUR MONTHS AFTER
Battle returned from Lake Placid, he took on the most sensational case of his career, the kidnapping of Casper Holstein, one of the least remembered and most influential of the figures who guided Harlem’s evolution in the 1920s. A native of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, Holstein arrived in New York with his mother as an eighteen-year-old in 1894. He finished high school in Brooklyn and took a succession of jobs, including, by one account, reading to the blind matriarch of a well-to-do Brooklyn family. Working as a bellhop in a Manhattan hotel, he learned how to bet on horses from guests who owned thoroughbreds. Then he served in the US Navy, returned to bellhopping, and studied in Chicago to be an embalmer. By 1905, Holstein was in the gambling business. His name surfaced in a
Times
report about a black man who had reported a swindle in a joint called the Fair Play Club.

“Well, Sir, I jes’ play a little monte and I had a roll ob $150 befo’ me on de table when de lights went out,” the story caricatured the man as saying. “Every nigger in de club then grabbed, and everybody got a piece of dat money.”

The police charged Fair Play Club president Casper Holstein with running a gambling house. This was the first of the ten bookmaking arrests he would rack up by 1921. The busts came and went quietly. Holstein was a man of reserved demeanor. Showing none of the flamboyance typical of gamers, he maintained a low profile while building social and business ties both in Harlem, where he helped found the black Elk’s Monarch Lodge, and in Chicago, where the men of the black gambling fraternity counted him among their kind. They marked Holstein’s visits with banquets. The
Chicago Defender
heralded him as a “well-known good fellow and club man of New York City.”

Top among Holstein’s Windy City comrades was yet another black man of outsized accomplishment. Oscar Stanton De Priest was an Alabama-born son of former slaves. He left home for Chicago at the age of seventeen, earned a living as a painter, and found his calling in the city’s Republican machine, the equivalent of Tammany Hall. A talent for organizing gave De Priest command of votes in a growing African American population. He channeled his troops toward the party’s candidates, all of whom where white until De Priest won election as a Chicago’s first black alderman in 1914.

Known by then as the black district’s “King Oscar,” De Priest prospered through the collusion between politics and vice that dominated the era. In 1917, the state attorney charged him with masterminding a “conspiracy to allow gambling houses and houses of prostitution to operate and for bribery of police officers in connection with the protection of these houses.” The renowned Clarence Darrow helped De Priest beat the rap at trial.

Whether visiting De Priest in Chicago, where he was hailed as a “well-known good fellow and club man,” or working in New York, Holstein held a prominent place in the milieu of wagering. In the telling of a biographical sketch written for the WPA Writers Project, Holstein had substantial capital by the start of the 1920s and spent it charitably. Here, he comes to the rescue of the blind white woman to whom he had read as a young man in need of work. After the family goes broke in 1921, Holstein supports her and her loved ones in high style for a dozen years, and then he sits in the family’s pew at her funeral.
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Even more colorfully, writing in the
North American Review
, black critic Saunders Redding depicted Holstein as working in 1924 as a building porter who “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas.” Here, he sits “in his airless janitor’s closet, surrounded by brooms and mops” as well as by stacks of old newspapers that published the daily tabulations of the New York Clearing House, an institution that transferred money among member banks.

“The thought that the figures differed each day played in his mind like a wasp in an empty room,” Redding wrote of Holstein, until “he let out an uproarious laugh and in general acted like a drunken man.”
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In that fabled instant, Holstein recognized that he could build numbers gambling around the Clearing House figures. The game was a precursor to today’s quick-pick-style lotteries. Play was simple: A bettor would select a number from 000 to 999 and place a bet with a “banker.” The banker would hold a drawing and pay anyone who had chosen the number that came up. Although the odds of winning were one thousand-to-one, the banker paid off at six hundred-to-one, all but guaranteeing a substantial profit.

For years, the game had had a relatively small following, in part because would-be players knew better than to trust that bankers would always conduct honest drawings. Holstein’s flash of inspiration brought trust to the game, because no one could fake the Federal Reserve credit balance or the total amount of money the banks had cleared. Suddenly, with every banker and bettor tied to a single independent number—composed of the second and third digits of the clearance total and the third digit of the Federal Reserve balance—people of all walks of life began wagering vast quantities of pennies, nickels, dimes, and dollars.

“All Harlem is ablaze with ‘the numbers.’ People play it everywhere, in tenements, on street corners, in the backs of shops,” wrote Winthrop D. Lane, author of “Ambushed in the City. The Grim Side of Harlem.”
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Spent in volume, the coins and bills accumulated into riches for the bankers, with Holstein at the forefront. “In a year he owned three of the finest apartment buildings in Harlem, a fleet of expensive cars, a home on Long Island and several thousand acres of farmland in Virginia,” Redding wrote.

Battle remembered Holstein as “a quietly well-groomed man of average size, light brown skin in complexion and amiable of manner, who neither drank nor smoked.” Attended by housekeepers, he “entertained celebrities and national politicians and fraternal leaders” in a duplex apartment.
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More tellingly, Battle recalled Holstein as “a kind of community Robin Hood, giving back a great deal of his wealth to the neighborhood in benefactions of one sort or another—such as building modern apartment houses at moderate rentals, spick and span in their maintenance, with the brass always polished.” Holstein was also revered for paying the college tuitions of deserving young people. Battle knew so personally because, he wrote, “I had sent many to him.”
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Holstein was, in fact, a leading black philanthropist. He helped build a home for orphaned children in Gary, Indiana; founded a dormitory for girls in a Baptist school in Liberia; and offered to finance a sanitarium at which black doctors could practice in Harlem. He supported Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement and distributed as many as five hundred food baskets to Harlem’s poor at Christmastime. He paid for an annual boat ride for Harlem children and donated money to historically black Fisk and Howard universities. By donating the prize money for the
Opportunity
magazine annual literary awards—won in 1925 by Hughes—the numbers king also played patron to the Harlem Renaissance.
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HOLSTEIN SPENT THE
evening of Thursday, September 20, 1928, at the Turf Club, one of several Harlem cabarets he owned. Shortly before midnight, a chauffeur drove him to an apartment building where he planned to visit a woman. From that point, witnesses and newspaper accounts provide inconsistent details about everything from Holstein’s abduction to his inexplicable release three days later. Battle’s account is the most authoritative: “As [Holstein’s] car drove off, a curtained black sedan pulled up to the curb. Four white men leaped out, forced Holstein into the sedan and sped away.”

A few hours later, on his day off, Battle rose at 4 a.m. to go ocean fishing aboard a chartered boat off Long Island. He returned with “a box full of iced porgy and weakfish” to find cops at the townhouse with news of Holstein’s kidnapping and orders to take command of the investigation. Witnesses supplied only vague descriptions of the curtained sedan. There was no ransom demand. Early Saturday morning, more than thirty hours after the abduction, Battle theorized that the kidnappers might force Holstein to make a bank withdrawal. The manager of the Harlem branch of the Chelsea Exchange notified banks across the city to alert Battle if anyone tried to cash a check signed by Holstein. Shortly, underworld beer runner Michael Bernstein presented a $3,200 draft at a bank in the Bronx.

Battle assigned two black detectives, Paul Moore and George Webber, to pose as members of Holstein’s numbers crew. They visited Bernstein with a cover story about getting tipped that Bernstein was part of the kidnapping.

“Eventually Bernstein was convinced that my men were really racketeers like himself, that they were deeply concerned about the welfare of their backer, and would even be willing to payoff to have him released unharmed,” Battle said.

After Bernstein set the price at $50,000, Battle took Bernstein into custody, “put the fear of God into” him, and arranged for Bernstein to be released on bond. Eight hours later, past one in the morning, after being held for three days, Holstein walked back into the Turf Club. Shortly, he stopped by the stationhouse to tell Battle a patently incredible story of being hit in the head, blindfolded, and then released by kidnappers who had returned his diamond ring, worth $2,000, and given him $3 for cab fare.

With good-humored obstructionism, Holstein said that he had paid no ransom and insisted that he could not identify any suspects, including Bernstein. When a reporter asked, “Mr. Holstein, didn’t you recognize any of your captors?” the story related: “A smile overspread Holstein’s face. ‘Well, you know, how it is,’ he said. ‘I could’—a slow wink went with this—‘but I can’t.’”
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Regardless, Battle sent Bernstein to Sing Sing on the strength of the check he had attempted to cash. Relating the story to Hughes, he spared Holstein even a hint of criticism for refusing to cooperate with the investigation, and he placed the kidnapping into context as a turning point in Harlem history. There had been a hidden force behind the crime. Holstein’s riches had gotten the attention of the brutal Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer. After using kidnapping, torture, and murder to seize control of bootlegging in the Bronx, Flegenheimer was moving in on Harlem’s rackets at the vanguard of a white takeover. Holstein’s comic postkidnap performance conveyed to an audience of one—Dutch Schultz—that he had no interest in a futile fight.

In the aftermath, despite his revulsion for the numbers game, Battle grew close to the very well-connected kingpin. Two months after the abduction, they had much to talk about when Holstein’s friend, Oscar Stanton De Priest won election to the US Congress. No state, northern or southern, had sent an African American to Washington in the twentieth century. No northern state had done so in all of US history. Holstein told Battle about the tough man who had worked the levers of machine politics to make history. Battle shared with Holstein memories of the last African American who had served in Congress, George H. White, a lawyer who been principal of a school for blacks in New Bern during Battle’s boyhood.

De Priest strode into the Capitol in 1929 and was immediately rebuffed. One after the other, House colleagues refused office space that adjoined the quarters provided to De Priest. Then a white man from New York, a colorful progressive from the Italian stronghold of East Harlem, spoke with moral clarity. Battle would long remember that Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia dispatched a telegram to the Speaker of the House, stating: “Have noticed in press agitation among some members against allotment office to our colleague, the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. De Priest. I will be glad to have him next to my office. It is manifestly unfair to embarrass a new member and I believe it is our duty to assist new members rather than humiliate them.”
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