One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (32 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
Soon, supported by De Priest and “Bojangles” Robinson, Holstein recruited Battle into a drive to install Holstein as national Grand Exalted Ruler of the black Elks. With Holstein spending liberally, Battle jumped into electioneering at a convention in Atlantic City. Longtime incumbent J. Finley Wilson campaigned just as vigorously to hold his post. At an emotional high point, a Wilson bodyguard attempted to block Battle from mounting the convention platform, and Robinson backed up Battle by drawing a golden pistol that he was famed for carrying.
In the end, Holstein, Battle, Robinson, and De Priest went down to defeat. More important, Battle’s association with these three leading figures at the time points to his arrival at a happy station in life. Back in New Bern, on the day of his last whipping for smacking a white who had called him “nigger,” Thomas had worried that his bullyboy son would never learn to succeed among either his own race or the other. Now, no matter the
difficulties
, he was a New York Police Department detective sergeant, peer to Congressman De Priest, peer to gambler Holstein, peer to dancer Robinson, peer to all the Strivers—a Striver.
A GROUP OF
detectives threw a party to celebrate Battle’s forty-sixth birthday on January 16, 1929. The guest list mixed whites and blacks. The department now counted ninety African Americans in the ranks, mostly cops, five detectives, one sergeant, and one police surgeon, Dr. Louis T. Wright. Battle took pleasure in the dark-skinned faces who wished him well, and the moment was all the sweeter because an old friend, perhaps his closest white friend, had organized the event.
Way back at the beginning, Jimmy Garvey had defied the conspiracy of silence. After the department transferred Battle to Harlem, they had stayed close, Battle coming to Garvey’s side when Garvey’s daughter Helen, not yet two years old, contracted polio in the 1916 epidemic, Garvey offering moral support to Battle after Enright banished Battle to Canarsie.
Garvey was still an active cop. His wife would describe him as an officer who “never stopped looking for suspicious persons.”
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He had made detective in 1921 and had welcomed Sergeant Battle to the division five years later. He talked often about Helen, who wore a metal brace from left thigh to heel, and called home regularly to speak with her. She was a freshman in high school. Garvey wanted Helen to go college. Battle had the same hope for Charline, who was approaching graduation from Wadleigh High School.
True to form, Charline had ideas of her own. She talked about applying to schools in Boston. Battle and Florence balked at sending her so far away at the age of sixteen. Battle turned for advice to James Weldon Johnson. He counseled that Charline should consider New York City’s Hunter College, a school that had been founded to offer free public higher education to women both black and white. Battle also introduced his daughter to a young woman who was as fine a role model for Charline as Battle could find. The granddaughter of a slave who had purchased freedom, Eunice Carter had earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College in Massachusetts, then and now an all-women’s college, then and now among the most demanding of America’s liberal arts schools. She was about to enter Fordham University Law School, perhaps kindling hope in Battle that his daughter might be the lawyer in the family. Carter would become Fordham Law’s first black woman graduate, first black woman Manhattan district attorney, and the legal strategist behind racket buster Thomas Dewey’s successful prosecution of Lucky Luciano in 1936. She certified Hunter as a fine choice, Charline won admission, and Battle savored sending the second of his children to college.
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THEN, THE TIDES
of life turned. Mary Elizabeth telephoned with word that Anne had been stricken. Battle remembered, as only he could:
In the summer of 1929 I was called to Beaufort to the home of my sister, Mary Elizabeth, where my mother had gone after the great fire. She had been overcome by a stroke. I found her helpless, unable to move, so I remained to lift and nurse and bathe her. Because of her modesty, even in her condition, she would attempt to push me away when she needed attention.
The doctors had given her up. I knew that she resented a long and lingering illness. She never wished to feel that she was a burden upon anyone. I knelt beside her bed and prayed that for her sake this would not happen, that God in His mercy would not let her suffer indefinitely, and that I might remain with her until the end.
On the eighth of August she died at the age of seventy-six—the best and loveliest mother in all the world to me. She lay in state at St. Peter’s Church in New Bern, and was buried beside my father in the Cedar Grove Cemetery. Over the graves of our parents, we have built a monument of granite, but to their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren, the example of their Christian lives will live longer and tower higher than any monument of stone we could give them.
Then the tides of history turned too.
On October 29, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged for a second day. Ten miles north and a world away, Harlem had scant reason to notice. Few of Battle’s neighbors had ridden the stock market’s tenfold rise during the 1920s, so sudden losses totaling $30 billion passed as the misfortune of people who lived in a distant world. There was, of course, more to it: Black Thursday marked the start of the Great Depression.
Shrinking businesses pushed 10 percent of the American workforce into unemployment during 1930. New York City was hit even harder, as one in every six workers lost jobs, and Harlem was pummeled harder still—the toll was one in four workers.
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“Men and women stand in line from 1:00 a.m. till 9:00 in near zero weather and fight their way past policemen in order to get a chance at $15.00 a week jobs,” the New York Urban League reported, citing a pay scale that was less than half the amount deemed adequate for a Manhattan family of four.
Even so, the cumulative damage was slowly realized. For a time, the clubs poured illicit drinks and played swinging music, and church and The Stroll enlivened Sundays. Weldon Johnson, ever the optimist, wrote of Harlem in 1930 that “as a whole community it possesses a sense of humour and a love of gaiety.” Confident that the writers, artists, and performers of the Renaissance were “helping to form American civilization,” he predicted that “the Negro in New York ought to be able to work through discrimination and disadvantages.”
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But hope was fleeting, and the party soon over. As if on cue, on August 17, 1931, a cerebral hemorrhage felled grand hostess A’Lelia Walker at the age of forty-six. More than eleven thousand people filed past the casket of the wealthy woman who had lived in high style and had invited Hughes into parties where, he would write in an autobiography, “Negro poets and Negro numbers bankers mingled with downtown poets and seat-on-the-stock-exchange racketeers.”
Hughes took his place at the funeral, aware that he and black America had passed milestones. Having broken with his patroness, “Godmother” Charlotte Mason, in one of the most wrenching rifts of his life, he had seized full control over his destiny as a writer, one who would choose his own projects, one who would survive without patronage, one who longed for the approval of the African American masses yet who wrote verse that was challenging for anyone, one who saw the waning of white interest in things black.
A nightclub quartet called the Four Bon Bons sang Noel Coward’s “I’ll See You Again,” and “they swung it slightly, as she might have liked it,” Hughes remembered. A friend read a poem, “To A’Lelia,” written by Hughes. And, seven years after its birth at the
Opportunity
magazine awards dinner, where Casper Holstein had endowed the literary prizes, the Renaissance came to a symbolic close.
Hughes would later write in his autobiography: “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem, the period that had begun to reach its end when the crash came in 1929 and the white people had much less money to spend on themselves, and practically none to spend on Negroes, for the depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”
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THE SALARIES OF
skilled workers fell by half. As a result, Harlem’s median income in 1932 dropped 43 percent below its level three years earlier. For want of rent, landlords threw families into the street, touching off fights between police and newly energized activists, whose ranks included communists. “Police and riot squads come with bludgeons and tear-bombs, fights and imprisonments, and deaths,” wrote Nancy Cunard, a British heiress who devoted her life to fighting racism and fascism.
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At the outset, government offered little help. Jimmy Walker, mayoral rascal of the good times, appointed a relief committee only after thirty-five thousand unemployed New Yorkers marched on city hall. Rather than tap public money, the panel solicited contributions from municipal workers in order to distribute food, clothing, and coal, and to stave off evictions. Harlem’s churches and fraternal and social organizations provided similar assistance. Even white gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden, the power behind the legendary, whites-only Cotton Club, offered aid. He bought goodwill on Christmas Eve 1934 by having the nightspot hand out bags overstuffed with a four-and-a-half-pound chicken, five pounds of potatoes, five pounds of apples, and additional provisions.
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The demand for basic nutrition was overwhelming. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were only then starting to take hold. Looking back, researchers for the Federal Writers Project drew a dire portrait: “When the Federal Emergency Relief Administration began operations, it found a majority of Harlem’s population on the verge of starvation, as a result of the depression and of an intensified discrimination that made it all but impossible for Negroes to find employment.”
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In 1935, New York City’s jobless rate was 15 percent; Harlem’s was 40 percent, an acidic level that combined with racism and governmental neglect to corrode the essentials. Public schools that had educated Jesse, Charline, and Carroll were now overcrowded firetraps. A visitor to one found an offensive odor, a dilapidated principal’s office, and ten burned-out classrooms. Hungry children sat listlessly in classes or failed to show up at all. When police work took Battle inside Harlem Hospital, he entered an institution radically different from the one Dr. Louis T. Wright had integrated fifteen years earlier. Patients moved between floors in an elevator shared by garbage. The kitchen ventilation system was long broken. A doctor and nurse performed a bloody operation in a public area in front of twenty-five children. When Battle stepped out of the townhouse and walked east along Strivers Row to the corner of Seventh Avenue, he looked across the street at a block of apartment houses crammed with far too many people. On this block a few hundred yards from Battle’s home, men, women, and children were massed at the city’s highest human density, 620 souls per acre, all struggling for survival.
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BATTLE’S EIGHTEEN YEARS
of indignities and successes had paid off in the job security guaranteed to senior members of the New York Police Department. After Jesse took a job with the US Post Office and moved out, never to become a lawyer, Battle took in two young redcaps as lodgers. Many in Harlem were renting space in their homes and apartments to stay afloat financially. Battle opened the townhouse to supplement a comfortable wage and to do a good turn, one old redcap to a new pair. His income placed Battle on an elevated social plane.
Three months after the crash, in celebration of Battle’s forty-seventh birthday, Florence welcomed eighteen guests into the townhouse for a seven-course dinner followed by dancing. Less than a month later, Mrs. Maude H. Ferguson played hostess to the Las Estrellas Club in her family’s home, located across the Strivers Row rear courtyard. As reported by the
Amsterdam News
, Florence was a “Mesdames” of this bridge-playing society. Just weeks later, Battle and Florence entertained sixty-five guests at a bridge party, dinner, and dancing in celebration of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Charline served as tournament timekeeper.
A family friend doted on her. Henrietta Cachemaille was the wife of a Cuban émigré who made a living as a cigar maker. Charline knew the couple’s son well. A rough contemporary in age, Enrique was a student at Lincoln University, the historically black school from which Langston Hughes had recently graduated. Henrietta, Etta to the Battles, shared their concern that Charline was struggling at Hunter. Charline had finished her first semester in January 1930, and was coming through her second term with disappointing grades: D in Composition, C in Greek and Roman Civilization, C in Elements of Economics. It was an unhappy time for Charline. In 1931, she withdrew from school for six months. Battle would write in longhand that she was “near breakdown” during her studies. To ease her burdens, Battle and Florence sent Charline on a grand cruise with Etta Cachemaille. On June 25, 1932, they boarded the SS
Pennsylvania
and set sail for Los Angeles via Havana and the Panama Canal. Etta had just lost Enrique to medical complications following a car accident and, grief-stricken, she was only too happy to have Charline’s company.
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The steamer was equipped with the latest amenities, including en suite bathrooms in some first-class cabins and a swimming pool. Its course soon reached the heat of southern waters. Charline donned her bathing suit, only to be told poolside that the
Pennsylvania
’s five hundred passengers were welcome to swim as long as they were white. She dove in and “used the pool without question the rest of the trip.” In Los Angeles, Charline and Etta attended the 1932 Summer Olympics before returning cross-country by train with stops to visit Yosemite National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Salt Lake City. There, they stayed in a hotel whose dining room was closed to blacks. Having no other choice, they ate in their room.
