One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (7 page)

Within months after Battle’s short visit, Tempy would die, at the age of fifty-five, and her body was returned to New Bern for burial.
⁵¹
Sophia stayed with Cobb, matured into a young woman, and at twenty-one, became Cobb’s wife for the rest of his life. When Cobb retired from the force—the first black to do so—Cobb and Sophia returned to North Carolina. In 1975, at the age of eighty-five, long after Cobb had died, she told the
New York Times
that her husband had remained a doorman for more than two decades before gaining the rank of a true police officer.
⁵²

THERE WASN’T MUCH
call in New York for a partly educated nineteen-year-old, let alone one who was black. Battle fell back on the skills he had learned as a servant in the finer white homes of New Bern. As so many other young blacks were doing, he started on the path that William L. Bulkley, the pioneering black school principal, had described: he became a “boy.”

Battle won a position as a houseboy or, more politely, as a houseman in the home of a retired Spanish banker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Gelio Andreini, on West Seventy-Fifth Street, just feet from Central Park. His salary was twenty-five dollars a month plus meals. He remembered Mr. Andreini as “a fine, liberal man” and Mrs. Andreini as a “charitable church woman,” although she “was so exacting that she made her household staff work like slaves.”

About this time, in 1902, telegrams went out from New Bern with news that Thomas had died. It had been three years since he had sent Battle forth with a prayer, and now the “old man” was gone. Battle felt powerfully called home to stand in honor of his father and to comfort Anne in the loss of her partner of more than four decades, but he chose not to go. Instead, he bought a ticket on the Old Dominion steamship line for his sister Nancy.

“This was one of the saddest times of my life because I was the only child who was not at home,” Battle wrote. “I was indeed homesick and lonesome.”

He also reckoned with the curtailment of his life’s dream. His sister Mary Elizabeth needed tuition for the Slater Industrial School at Winston-Salem, where she was studying to become a teacher, and Anne needed financial support. Battle would no longer be able to afford law school, even as he lived very modestly in a three-dollar-a-month room on West Fifty-Ninth Street, not far from the location today of the 750-foot-tall Time Warner Center. He was north of the Tenderloin, on the edge of another area where blacks concentrated among larger numbers of whites.

Stretching six or seven blocks north from Fifty-Ninth Street on Manhattan’s West Side, the neighborhood had strict racial divisions, blacks toward the bottom of a slope, whites toward the top. There was constant racial skirmishing. Inspired by the fighting, the enclave came to be called San Juan Hill after the site in Cuba of Teddy Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War victory.

Unsurprisingly, Battle’s landlord took a liking to him. James Mayhew served as something of a tutor to Battle, taught him to play the bridgelike card game whist, and gave him a fresh brush with greatness. The players who joined Battle at the card table included a curly-haired man with light cocoa skin—the great Arthur Schomburg.

A decade older than Battle, Schomburg had already embarked on his life’s work of collecting the lost histories and overlooked accomplishments of people of color. Perseverance as a bibliophile would make him a seminal figure of modern African American history and place his name on the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. When he met Battle, he was about thirty years old and working as a law firm clerk.

Battle remembered that Schomburg “took special interest in me” at their twice-weekly card playing. Increasingly focused on fighting for individual and racial dignity, Schomburg believed that blacks needed to stand on the same intellectual level as whites. He impressed upon Battle that learning was imperative. He stressed reading the newspapers. There was Timothy Thomas Fortune’s
New York Age
and there were the white newspapers like the
New York Times
,
New York Tribune
, and
New York Evening Post
. He spoke glowingly of books, be they histories, biographies, or fiction. Often in life, he fondly recalled reading Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
and being enthralled by Alexandre Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
. Battle embarked on voracious reading and, he recalled, “was very much benefited.”

Away from the card table, Schomburg moved among talented black men and women. The center of the world became the blocks of West Fifty-Third Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. There, Battle witnessed wonders that were unimaginable elsewhere—black people with money, blacks who were prominent entrepreneurs, blacks who were popular actors and musicians, blacks who lived in better-quality housing.

The Marshall Hotel was the place to dine, with a restaurant that featured an orchestra on Sundays, and the hotel’s bar was the place to socialize. Here, Battle began to learn from the likes of Harlem Renaissance poet and historian James Weldon Johnson and his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, who collaborated on the music and lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “black national anthem.” Here, Battle got to know and be known by the stars of New York’s “Negro Bohemia.” Bright and affable, he struck up important friendships with Bert Williams and George Walker, the acclaimed musical comedy team of Williams and Walker; with song-and-dance men Charles Avery and Dan Hart; and with rising musician and bandleader James Reese Europe.

The Maceo Hotel was but a half step down in prestige from the Marshall. Weldon Johnson wrote that “the sight offered at these hotels, of crowds of well-dressed colored men and women lounging and chatting in the parlors, loitering over their coffee and cigarettes while they talked or listened to the music, was unprecedented.”

So, too, was style on the street. Jervis Anderson, author of the indispensable
This Was Harlem
, recounted that, on Fifty-Third Street, blacks dressed much as Battle had grown used to seeing whites attired on Fifth Avenue: “The men wore frock coats, vests, and wide-bottom trousers. Their shirts, fastened with studs, had detachable stiff collars and cuffs, made of linen, celluloid, cotton, or paper. Heavy watch chains dangled across their vests. Straw hats were commonly worn in summer, and derbies (or ‘high dicers’) in winter. They carried walking sticks and wore high boots polished with Bixby’s Best Blacking. The women were turned out in heavy-bosomed box blouses and full skirts that covered their ankles.”
⁵³

Seemingly wherever Battle went, he encountered African Americans of accomplishment.

On Sixth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, John B. Nail kept a saloon that catered to upscale black gentlemen. The
New York Sun
described the establishment in 1903 as “conducted with the quietness and manners of a high-class Broadway bar and billiard parlor.” Nail told the newspaper: “You must remember that the object of the wealthy and educated colored man is to be as inconspicuous as possible, so far as white people are concerned. He doesn’t want to spend his hours in being reminded of the fact that the great mass of his fellow-citizens despise him on account of his color.”
⁵⁴

Most clubs were less decorous. Black prizefighters like Joe Walcott ran joints frequented by fellow boxers and by the black jockeys who dominated horse racing. Ike Hines’s club on West Twenty-Seventh Street is credited with introducing ragtime music to New York. Edmond’s on West Twenty-Eighth Street was “a cabaret over a stable,” in the words of composer, lyricist, and pianist Eubie Blake.

And, of greatest significance, there was the Little Savoy on West Thirty-Fifth Street, a nightclub, gambling hall and hotel owned by Baron Deware Wilkins, king of the sporting life, the realm where drinks flowed, music hopped, and money changed hands for sex, drugs, and dreams of beating the odds with a wager or a con.

Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Baron Wilkins labored as boy in a US naval yard. After his parents moved to Washington, DC, he hustled as a bellboy in the Willard Hotel and then as the head bellman of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. Finally, he moved to the big city, there to meet up with fellow Portsmouth native John W. Connor, a Spanish-American War naval veteran who had opened what the
Age
called “the finest cabaret for colored in New York.”
⁵⁵

Wilkins followed suit with the Little Savoy. He was as tough as he was large. He had to be. Competitors were a rough lot, white gangs were given to extortion, and cops and politicians demanded tribute. Wilkins paid up to build bonds with the police and Tammany Hall, and he hired muscle to defend against attacks. Top among Wilkins’s security force was a man who was known as Lamplighter. He stood post in front of the Little Savoy with a six-shooter.

Perry Bradford was a pianist and songwriter of the era. Recalling the Tenderloin nightclubs, he wrote in a memoir, “Most of these joints had gals who could pull up their dresses, shake their shimmies and go to town, which the natives liked and tossed them plenty of kale,” meaning money. The Little Savoy featured similar fun while blossoming under Wilkins’s stewardship into a cultural hothouse.

Rich, famous, and adventurous whites would stream beneath a sign—“No One Enters These Portals, But The True In Heart Sports”—to be wowed by the musicianship of James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, and Willie “The Lion” Smith, who were bridging ragtime and jazz with the rhythmic style of piano playing known as stride.
⁵⁶

“From the stories the boys tell me, Barron Wilkins’ place up to about 1908 was the most important spot where Negro musicians got acquainted with the wealthy New York clientele, who became the first patrons of their music,” recalled jazz composer Noble Sissle, adding, “It was his fabulous spot that sparked off the renaissance of the Negro musician in New York City.”
⁵⁷

Up and down the avenues, houses of worship competed with places of entertainment. The black church was on the rise. When blacks were few in number, predominantly white congregations had welcomed them to participate in what were often known as “nigger pews.” As the population grew, two trends paralleled: white churches encouraged blacks, to put it politely, to exercise their Christianity elsewhere, and charismatic African American clergy stepped to the fore.

Battle’s enduring allegiance, handed down from Thomas, was to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The Reverend Alexander Walters spoke to Battle’s congregation from the pulpit as a seminal civil rights leader. Freed from slavery in Kentucky, Walters was ordained at the age of nineteen and arrived in New York in 1888. Shortly, he joined forces with Fortune. Outraged by enactment of Jim Crow laws and, more urgently, by a rise in lynchings, Fortune published an open letter in 1889 calling for the National Afro-American League’s creation. Walter’s name appeared as the letter’s lead cosigner.

Although the league had petered out, Walters successfully urged Fortune to revive the organization, newly named the Afro-American Council, after the US Supreme Court endorsed the doctrine of separate but equal in
Plessy v. Ferguson
. He served as president for most of the first decade of the twentieth century, the period that led Battle toward integrating the New York Police Department.

African American fraternal organizations were also blooming into a key source of social cohesion.
⁵⁸
Battle joined the first of many to which he would belong. He chose the most prominent, the Elks, or more precisely the black Elks. The long-established Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks had barred African Americans, prompting two blacks in Cincinnati to form the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World—and the New York courts enjoined even the use of that name. No matter. The group carried on and Battle mixed with the many leading African Americans who took part. In 1905, he was a grand marshal of a black Elks parade in Brooklyn.

SURROUNDED BY INSPIRING MEN
, Battle looked upward, but his vista still was limited to household service. He took advantage of the “recommendation of the head bellman of one of the leading hotels” to leave the Andreinis for a position as a liveried butler in the East Fifty-Ninth Street home of Arthur Holland Forbes, a wealthy man who invested in the daredevil sport of hot-air ballooning. At work, Battle greeted guests and performed household chores in formal attire. Off hours, he slipped into New York’s emerging black society, kept up with current events in Fortune’s
Age
, and embarked on a determined course of reading. His selections ranged from histories to fiction and included Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and
The Scarlet Letter
, Hawthorne’s classic of sin, guilt, and judgment, which Battle found to be “a revelation.”
⁵⁹

BATTLE HAD A LIVELY TIME
. He had grown into “a well developed young man, healthy, husky, and—so the women said—handsome.” But physical appeal was not his only asset. Demographics made New York a guy’s paradise. The 1900 census found that black women outnumbered black men in the city by roughly 20 percent. Males like Battle were much in demand. A great observer of the era’s black life, Mary White Ovington, wrote: “In their hours of leisure the surplus women are known to play havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands, for since lack of men makes marriage impossible for about a fifth of New York’s colored girls, social disorder results.”
⁶⁰

Battle circulated through casual relationships. Then, at the age of twenty-two, he took up with Florence Carrington, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Henry and Maria Carrington who had come to New York from Newport News, Virginia. With her fair skin and long, black, and straight hair, the couple’s parallels with Thomas and Anne were striking, Thomas having wed ivory-skinned, silken-haired Anne when she was but fifteen. Battle squired Florence to the haunts where he had become a regular on West Fifty-Third Street, buying her first alcoholic drink at the Marshall Hotel bar. She was pretty and, in counterpoint to Battle’s gregarious personality, reserved. He was smitten, and so was she. The vagabond life of an adventurous young man came to an end.