One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (39 page)

Wesley visited captains of the offending firehouses to urge fair treatment. When the captains ignored him, Battle and the Reverend John H. Johnson, who had helped orchestrate the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign and who had been sworn in by La Guardia as a police chaplain, agreed that Wesley should organize New York’s fifty-plus black firefighters into an advocacy group similar to the police department’s Guardians Society.

The effort proved difficult. Some firefighters objected that joining a blacks-only organization would amount to self-segregation. Some worried about career-ending retaliation. Some were assigned to companies where they were fairly treated and saw no need to organize. Wesley told the reluctant warriors: “There will be a Negro fireman organization even if it ends up that I am the only member in it.”

Soon, he knit the men into a unit. In 1940, he founded the Vulcans, naming the organization after the Roman god of fire. When, finally, the commissioner recognized the society, Wesley presented a benign and unthreatening list of objectives. They included reducing fire deaths, developing good fellowship among members, promoting athletics, studying fire department regulations, and providing a death benefit to members’ families. There was not a word about demanding equal rights, but that would come.
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MOST POLICE OFFICERS
looked forward to retirement and a pension as they approached thirty years on the job. Not Battle. He was no ordinary lieutenant. His duties as La Guardia’s troubleshooter were unique.

In February 1940, tension mounted in Harlem after two white cops shot to death a black fellow officer. They were responding to a burglary in the building where John Holt lived with his wife and three young sons. A neighbor summoned Holt to capture the thief. Holt left his apartment in civilian clothes. Jumping to the conclusion that he was the burglar, the responding officers opened fire. The authorities deemed Holt’s death accidental. It fell to Battle to explain the circumstances in the hope of defusing beliefs that the white officers had executed Holt. Battle led the funeral procession. La Guardia joined the march, as did Wesley, who was active with the fire department’s basketball team and had known Holt as a competitor on the police squad.
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Four months later, in June 1940, the NAACP invited La Guardia to speak at its annual convention. The mayor flew with Battle to Philadelphia, happy to have a well-known symbol of fairer treatment as his side. The six-day conference called for integrating the US military, passage of federal antilynching legislation, and abolition of the color line in federal employment.
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Overseas, Hitler had conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, just as he had earlier taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and just as Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia. The NAACP voted a resolution in support of people “who have been enslaved in the labor armies of Germany and Italy whose governments are functioning on the basis of a master race.” The delegates also awarded the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, to Battle’s Strivers Row neighbor Dr. Louis T. Wright. Much lauded at the convention, Battle returned to New York proud of both his performance on a national stage and his stature with La Guardia.

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IN JUNE
1941, he was ringside when Joe Louis, who had come back in 1938 to knock out Max Schmeling in one round, faced a title challenge from light heavyweight Billy Conn. Louis and Conn met at the Polo Grounds. Battle escorted Louis from his dressing room to the ring and stayed at the champ’s corner to watch the fight.

Conn had the better of Louis for twelve rounds. The smaller man seemed likely to win, but in the thirteenth, trying too hard for a knockout, he gave Louis the opening he needed to send Conn to the canvas.

“I lost my head and a million bucks,” he told reporters after the fight.

Speaking with Hughes, Battle filled in what had happened at ringside, suggesting that he had played a decisive role in Louis’s victory:

THAT NOVEMBER AN
all-black football team sponsored by Battle and fellow Harlem sports enthusiasts took the field in the Polo Grounds to compete against an all-white squad. The white players earned wages as members of a professional team that was called the New York Yankees, although it was unrelated to the baseball organization. For this game, they played under the banner of the Yankee All Stars. The black team consisted largely of young men who had been college football standouts and was dubbed the Colored All Stars.

The game drew 22,800 spectators who had never seen interracial competition on this scale. Walking amid the African American squad, which narrowly lost 24 to 20, Battle encountered Kenny Washington, who had shined for four years as a running back for the Bruins of the University of California at Los Angeles.
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Nearby he saw Woody Strode, a tall decathlete who was renowned for his physique and who had been a great wide receiver on the same Bruins team.

Washington and Strode would break the National Football League’s color line five years hence by signing with the Los Angeles Rams. Washington would then go on to work as a police officer and Strode to an acting career, costarring with John Wayne in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
, with Burt Lancaster in
The Professionals
, and with Kirk Douglas in
Spartacus
.

Washington and Strode had been celebrated as members of the 1939 Bruins’ “Gold Dust Trio.” Their third comrade had been by far UCLA’s best running back—perhaps the best running back in all of college football. He was a quiet man, slightly distant. He extended a hand to Battle. His name was Jackie Robinson.

FIVE YEARS OF
selling shoes was all that Carroll could stomach. He had taken up the work after moving to Washington with his wife, Edith, who had found employment as a waitress, and he had continued in the trade after returning to New York for an apartment in Brooklyn’s new black community, Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was a living—but the pay was poor, chances for advancement were slim, and measuring feet wore on the spirit of an outgoing twenty-five-year-old athlete. Carroll wanted more.

Having witnessed the trials that Battle had overcome through the eyes of a young son, he now appreciated his father’s courage from the perspective of a man who was roughly the age Battle had been when breaking the police department’s color line. Carroll also admired Wesley for embarking on his own brave struggle at an even younger age. The exploits of both men had opened doors that were there for him to walk through. He spoke with his father. Battle responded that he would be happy were Carroll to join either the police or fire department—for the salary, for the respect, for the betterment of the race. Battle envisioned passing the torch so that the men of a new black generation would carry on the fight. Carroll chose the fire department. Wesley was delighted. He had known Carroll ever since Carroll had taken his first breaths with a touch of old Mrs. Wagner’s gin on his lips. He was sure that Carroll had the physical, mental, and emotional qualities to win appointment and to succeed in the roughest of environments. So, coached by Wesley, Carroll scored well on the fire department exam and was called for appointment. In 1941, three decades after his father had weathered exile in the flag loft, Carroll took hold of Battle’s torch on a force that still insisted on “black beds.”

THAT YEAR,
1941, Battle crossed paths again with Mrs. Roosevelt. The First Lady was on hand for the dedication of a new branch library. Battle made sure to be there. She remembered him. They chatted. She stood at his side to have their picture taken.

EVER MORE DEVOTED
to Florence, Battle threw a surprise birthday party for her at a Seventh Avenue club. Attire was formal. The menu for the one hundred guests included filet mignon and ice cream molded in flower designs. An eight-piece Cotton Club orchestra entertained with swing music, supplemented by a quartet that played sentimental tunes. Battle had the cake topped with sixteen candles in remembrance of Florence’s age on the day they had married.
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Charline and Eddy broke the news that Charline was pregnant again. Florence had eased Charline’s return to master’s degree studies at Columbia by helping to care for Yvonne. Now, Florence tended to the new needs of her daughter and three-year-old granddaughter. On January 8, 1941, Charline gave birth to the boy for whom Battle would be a lifetime influence. They named the baby Thornton Cherot, after his father. They called him Tony.

A REVERED MAN
died on the night of June 2, 1941. Pride of the Yankees during the team’s most fabled era, Lou Gehrig had meant the world to New York. They called him the Iron Horse for playing in 2,130 straight games. He put muscle into the “Murderers Row” of the legendary 1927 Yanks, chasing Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs with forty-seven of his own. He racked up a lifetime batting average of .340, knocked in an average of 147 runs a season in his thirteen full seasons, and set the record for career grand slams. Moving from a partnership with Ruth to one with Joe DiMaggio, Gehrig was a constant as the Yankees built a spirit-lifting World Series–winning dynasty and the United States emerged from the Depression.

Then, in 1939, he stayed on the bench at his own insistence. After months of subtle deterioration, his athletic body was weaker and less responsive than the body of a major league player had to be. He was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the fatal neurodegenerative condition that came to be called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The Yankees announced his retirement on June 21, 1939, and declared that July 4 would be Lou Gehrig Day at the stadium. There, after numerous tributes, he delivered an address for the ages, beginning with the famous words: “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Soon after, La Guardia appointed the dying Gehrig to an honored position. He had been born in East Harlem. He had completed a year at Columbia University in an entering class whose members had included Hughes. He was an idol to the young. The Yankee great was ideally suited to serve on New York City’s Parole Commission, whose mission included steering youthful prisoners in the municipal jail into productive freedom. Gehrig fulfilled the role superbly until the disease forced a leave of absence. He never returned to work. On June 3, 1941, New Yorkers awoke to the news of Gehrig’s death. La Guardia mourned with the city and turned to the task of naming someone to assume Gehrig’s duties.

He chose Battle.

While he was “loath to leave” the police department, Battle could hardly decline an opportunity to achieve another first for the race. La Guardia said that he had selected Battle because he was the best man for the job, not because he was black. Battle credited the sentiment, even as the mayor added of Battle: “He knows all the children of Harlem from the time of their birth and has been very active in social work in addition to his police duties.”
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Battle saw different racial implications. “I shall try to conduct myself so that this job may be perpetuated for a colored man, and that greater rewards will not be denied us because of anything that I may do during my term,” he promised.

Speaking on the
Wings Over Jordan
, a groundbreaking nationally syndicated radio show that featured gospel choir music and interviews with notable African Americans, Battle told listeners: “The Negro must be better qualified and do a better job than the white man, to compete. Then, if you render service, it means more service and better service in order to always keep advancing. The reward for service is more service. That is reward beyond glory and power.”

Battle inherited Gehrig’s secretary, “an estimable white woman” who reported “that she had been asked if she wished to continue as secretary to a Negro as commissioner.” He became good friends with Margaret Kelly.

“My office was a corner one with large windows through which I could hear the cooing of pigeons and the sounds of traffic below,” he remembered, adding, “In the pulsing heart of the greatest city in the world, I sat at my desk and studied many of the problems of its less fortunate ones.”

DECEMBER
7, 1941. Pearl Harbor. The Day of Infamy. World War II came to the United States, came to Harlem, and came to the great old townhouse.

A quarter-century had passed since Battle had helped found the regiment that became the Harlem Hellfighters and had marched with Needham Roberts in a spectacular parade, the two walking beside the car carrying Henry Johnson, who wore the
Croix de Guerre avec Palme
. Then, so many believed that the unit had earned America’s respect for the race and that everything would be different for New Negroes.

Hopes had, of course, been dashed.

Harlem was more crowded than ever. From 1930 to 1940, the city’s black population climbed by 131,000, pushing the total complement toward a half-million. Fully 40 percent were on relief or making due with temporary jobs.
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Most of the city’s workplaces remained closed. Worse, industries supplying the British in hope of repelling Hitler’s air assault had hired whites while shutting out blacks. “We have not had a Negro working in 25 years and do not plan to start now,” North American Aviation informed the Urban League.
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