One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (6 page)

Described by a scholar as “a Byronically handsome African-American who once seemed destined to inherit the mantle of the great Frederick Douglass,” Fortune was an unparalleled journalistic crusader.
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His newspapers chronicled the evils of Jim Crow and political developments of special interest to blacks. His uncompromising editorials made the
Age
the country’s most influential publication among African Americans. And Fortune did more.

He mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, who was to become the intellectual godfather of the modern civil rights movement, and gave Du Bois his first assignments as a newspaper correspondent. He gave Ida B. Wells a platform in the
Age
to crusade against lynching after vigilantes destroyed her newspaper in Memphis. He founded the National Afro-American League, precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became confidant, collaborator, and critic of Booker T. Washington.
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And, as the 1890s approached, Fortune joined three path breakers in devising a strategy to integrate Brooklyn’s police force. Philip A. White was the first black to receive a degree from the New York College of Pharmacy. Charles A. Dorsey was one of the few black school principals in Brooklyn. T. McCants Stewart was a minister and lawyer who had been one of the first black students at the University of South Carolina.

First, Fortune’s group needed the right men to apply for the job, who were suited to police work, who were capable of achieving a high score on the civil service examination, and who would have the strength to overcome the sure hostility of white cops and citizens. They chose Wiley Grenada Overton to lead the way.

The youngest of at least eight children in a free black family, Overton was born on the eve of the Civil War in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
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In the war’s ebb, at the age of seven, he began his education at a normal school whose mission was to prepare blacks to become teachers. He graduated at fourteen, taught for two years, and then, still only sixteen, followed a brother north to Brooklyn, the independent city across the river from New York. He resumed his studies, this time at a blacks-only grammar school. After graduating for a second time, Overton went to work for a dry-goods merchant, soon taking charge of the company’s sample room. He married, fathered two daughters, and became active in his church. Eventually, he established a successful undertaking business.

Few members of the police force were as well educated as Overton was; fewer still had built successful careers. To Fortune and his colleagues, Overton’s willingness to sacrifice his livelihood at the age of thirty-one for the greater good of the race was a godsend. They had no doubt that, with proper study, he would ace the hiring test—and he did. In 1891, Overton’s name appeared toward the top of the rank-order appointment list. The commissioner was sure to reach him as he called men for mandatory physicals. Fortune arranged for a doctor to examine Overton in order to prevent the police surgeon from disqualifying him on a pretext. The doctor issued a certificate of good health.

The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
sent a reporter to plumb the motivations of the black man who had dared to claim a place on the force. So as not to leave readers guessing, its reporter wrote of Overton: “The race which he belongs to is made plain in the most pronounced way by the color of his skin—he is quite dark.” The story included this colloquy:

Overton also predicted:

Critical of no one and suffused by good will, Overton drew a pleased review from the reporter. He left the interview “impressed with the idea that no city would suffer from having on its police negroes like Officer Overton.” Shortly, Commissioner Henry I. Hayden appointed twenty-two police officers. “He passed a good examination,” Hayden said, “and as the law makes no distinction in regard to color I do not see why there should be any question as to my duty in the matter.”

The following day the
Eagle
declared in a supportive editorial: “There are colored policemen in plenty in states beyond the old Mason and Dixon’s line. If the Southerners can stand the admixture why cannot the Northerners?”
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And so, on March 6, 1891, Overton left his wife Francis and his daughters, nine-year-old twins Beulah and Mabel, and headed to the stationhouse in Brooklyn’s First Precinct, a building a few blocks from the East River anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. Outside, Overton looked upon the primitive headquarters of primitive ranks. Waiting inside was Captain James Campbell, who was at an age when his hair and moustache had turned snowy white. Campbell gave orders to lieutenants for execution. Those men in turn relied on roundsmen, today’s sergeants, to supervise the precinct’s cops. Finally, there was a doorman who ushered officers and visitors into the stationhouse and performed janitorial services. This was the sole job in the building open to blacks.

Inside, Overton met determined silence and discovered that the department had yet to secure a uniform for him and, further, that none of his new colleagues would lend a spare regulation shirt, pants, coat, or hat. As night fell, Overton set out in civilian clothing to patrol until midnight. He walked the gaslit streets of Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of townhouses overlooking New York Harbor, home to Brooklyn’s wealthiest citizens. The
Eagle
noted that a Sergeant Reeves found that “Overton’s carriage was good and that he gave promise of making a first class patrolman.”
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The work hours were incomprehensibly grueling. A typical schedule called for a police officer to stay on duty for as long as thirty-six hours straight, including time spent in the stationhouse—on reserve—to respond to emergencies. While on reserve, officers slept in dormitories stocked with cotlike beds and thick with men in flannel underwear who smoked pipes and cigars or chewed Virgin Leaf Tobacco. Officers set the legs of their beds in kerosene-filled pans to keep roaches from climbing up from the floor.

Overton clocked in for his first reserve duty at 9:58 p.m. on a Wednesday night. In the stationhouse barracks, he knelt to say prayers beside his assigned bed. Then he lay down, and four men in the room went downstairs to a lounge. They would not sleep in close quarters with an African American.
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Although commanders ordered the boycott ended, Overton faced still greater hostility. The
Eagle
reported that First Precinct cops had hired career thief William Scheff, described as “a man who breaks stones with his fists in dime museums,” to assault Overton “either with his bare fists or with brass knuckles and a pistol . . . to make the colored officer useless for further service on the police force of this city.”

Based on the word of a confidential source and on corroborating accounts from Scheff, who said he had been “hired to knock out the nigger,” and a police officer, who was quoted by name, The
Eagle
’s headline read: “Hired to Whip Overton. The Remarkable Story of a Police Conspiracy.” After the quoted police officer denied the statements attributed to him by the
Eagle
, Hayden dismissed the story as unworthy of belief.
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Already, though, Overton’s superiors had begun to bring him up on departmental charges. In the first case, Overton discovered that Vaughan’s Saloon was doing a roaring business at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. A fellow officer was among the carousers. Overton was cited for failing to arrest the proprietor. He explained that he had been specially assigned at the time “to find a mulatto boy . . . who was wanted by the police for stabbing an Italian.” He also argued that the first officer on the scene had been responsible for shutting down the saloon. Campbell punished Overton with a reprimand.
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Undeterred by the hardships inflicted on Overton, three more African Americans took—and passed—the next hiring exam. Philip W. Hadley worked as a horse-drawn coachman. The
Eagle
reported that he was “a quadroon and a remarkably bright looking young man.”
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John W. Lee served as a stationhouse doorman and hoped to rise above janitorial duties. Moses P. Cobb was a longshoreman who had been born into slavery in Kinston, North Carolina, and who had walked from there to Brooklyn. He was married to Tempy Fumville, a woman of particular note because she was from New Bern and was friends with Battle’s parents. The
Eagle
reported that Cobb was “somewhat taller than Overton and he is built on a handier model, for he is raw boned and strong looking while Overton is chunky and has a tendency to run to fat.”
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In April 1892, the paper quoted a police official as saying, “The appointment of the three colored men whose names are on the eligible list is sure to make trouble unless the commissioner assigns them to do duty as doormen.” The following month, Cobb became Brooklyn’s second African American officer.
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The commissioner placed him in a precinct that included a concentration of black residents. Even so, the department restricted Cobb largely to the duties of a doorman rather than place him in uniform on the street. And, increasingly, the department treated its African American officers like a virus needing expulsion.

In June 1892, when Overton failed to signal the stationhouse from a call box at the appointed hour, a roundsman discovered him “in a restaurant much frequented by colored folks.” Commissioner Hayden fined Overton ten day’s pay, three times the fine he imposed on a white officer who was found drunk on duty and five times the fine he administered to a white cop who went AWOL.
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In July, Hadley won appointment to the force. The next month, the commissioner fined Cobb two day’s pay for sitting down during a tour of duty, but gave a white officer just a reprimand for sitting on a doorstep.

“Colored policemen are not turning out to be the models they were expected by their enthusiastic backers to show themselves,” the
Eagle
opined. “Strange to say, they have the same weaknesses as white men, and to judge from certain recent official utterances, not made in a public way, it will be quite a while before their number is increased.”
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Hayden again hit Overton with a ten-day fine after a roundsman reported seeing him in civilian clothes while on duty. In November, Hayden fined Overton an additional five day’s pay after he was found in a milk depot while on duty. Within a week of this final punishment, twenty months after he was appointed to the force, Overton announced that he was quitting in hope of moving to a position as a United States government clerk. He expressed no recriminations. With a federal job on the line and, perhaps more important, with Cobb and Hadley on the force and Lee climbing the civil service list, he said, “I have no complaint to make of the treatment which I have received. My fellow officers have been very courteous to me, while I have nothing to say of the conduct of my superior officers toward me.”
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Overton’s attempt to resign without generating animosity toward his fellow blacks proved futile. Less than two weeks later, the commissioner fired Hadley on a charge of drunkenness. He had lasted all of four months. At the same time, the commissioner fined two drunken white officers ten day’s pay.
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Soon, the last of Fortune’s candidates dropped plans to become a police officer. On the verge of appointment, Lee asked Commissioner Hayden’s permission to remain as a doorman, while collecting a police officer’s higher salary. Hayden obliged, prompting the
Eagle
to write that Lee, “about whose race origin there can be no doubt,” was “evidently an astute individual and knows pretty well what he is about. As a patrolman he would not have received any too an effusive welcome by his fellow officers. As a doorman he will not interfere with existing conditions, nor in any way offend their more or less refined susceptibilities.”
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Lee’s decision to accept the title of patrolman but perform a doorman’s duties set a pattern that held for years to come. Almost a decade later, when African American “patrolman” John Nelson left the force, the
Eagle
would report, “Like all the colored patrolmen on the force Nelson has been doing the work of a doorman.”

Stalwart Moses P. Cobb fell into that reduced state. He was still on the force when Battle arrived in Brooklyn in need of accommodations after his wanderings in Connecticut. Battle called on Cobb because his household in the East New York countryside included the friendly faces of Cobb’s wife, Tempy Fumville, and Battle’s sister Sophia, who was living with the couple’s family.

While spending a few days with the young girl he hadn’t seen in years, Battle got to know Cobb and something of his work. Battle said both that Cobb had “been a policeman for a number of years” and that Cobb and a handful of others “were patrolmen, but were not in uniform on the beats, but were turnkeys and stationhouse attendants.”
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Denied promotions, they were generally limited to plainclothes so as to spare the white public the sight of a black cop in uniform, Battle said.