One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (9 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
The police made a rush into the saloon and into the adjacent houses. The back room of the saloon was cleared and a number of shots shattered all the back windows. . . . Later the policemen, firing in all directions swept across the billiard and pool room of Walter Frazier . . . and rushing pell mell into his place of business, where nothing had occurred, and where men were indulging in recreation and sitting around, placed every man under arrest. According to the testimony of Frazier, one policeman said to the other: “Shall we arrest all of these men?” and one of the officers replied: “Yes, arrest every nigger you see.”
Dozens were hauled to the stationhouse, where, the
Age
reported, “they found prepared for them a modified form of the Indian torture called ‘running the gauntlet.’” One by one they were shoved into a darkened room in which “police officers with clubs proceeded to beat these upon the head and bodies until they were nearly dead.”
For weeks after the nightsticks had swirled around Battle and Florence, Fortune trained the
Age
’s editorial firepower on Police Commissioner William McAdoo, writing: “By no one, except Commissioner McAdoo whose enthusiasm over the force too often outruns his judgment, has the behavior of the police in these ‘riots’ been praised; on the contrary, it has caused blistering denunciation from the most influential members of the metropolitan press, we mean the
Times
, the
World
, the
Evening Post
and the
Evening Mail
.”
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As 1905 closed, Fortune published an unsigned letter to the editor under a headline that exhorted, “Become Police and Firemen.” The author detailed the required physical qualifications. Barred were obesity, “rupture in any form,” “fissures, fistulas and external or internal piles,” varicose veins, color-blindness, and much more, including “very offensive breath.” It was mandatory that heart, brain, kidneys, and genitalia be in good working order.
The author also warned—presciently, as Battle would discover—that an applicant might face medical sabotage after passing the written civil service test: “I am informed that it has been, and is now, the custom when Afro-Americans apply for examination for the examiners to fake up some technical physical defect and thereby reject them, while a white man in similar physical condition would be passed without question.”
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There was no rush of volunteers. The police department went on as the keeper of an unequal peace and as Tammany Hall’s arm of extortion.
FLORENCE’S FIGURE GREW
round as fall moved into winter. When finally the time arrived, Dr. Roberts delivered the baby at home, in those four rooms with the distinguishing brass bed. The date was January 23, 1906. The infant was a boy in whom Battle vested his own life’s dream, while accepting that, practically speaking, he could not hand down to his son the name Samuel.
He remembered: “Jesse Earl was our first born. We started to name him Samuel Jesse Battle, Jr. But in that day and time, following the era of the ‘coon’ songs, colored people were becoming very sensitive about names like Rufus and Sambo. Some of our friends persuaded us that Sam was too closely related to Sambo, so we named our son Jesse Earl instead. I had wanted Jesse Earl to be a lawyer—to fulfill a secret ambition of my own.”
Around this time, Florence chose the name Jesse as term of endearment for her husband as well. The nickname stuck and would often be used by Battle’s closest family and friends for the rest of his life. To them, he would not be Samuel, but Jesse. Battle and Florence had Jesse Earl baptized, and then the redcaps came to a christening party. There were prayers for the baby’s spiritual well-being—and, no doubt, for more. There were likely prayers that he would survive to grow up. Infant mortality was epidemic. With sixteen of every one hundred babies dying before the age of one—and with the mortality rate for black infants almost double that for whites—everyone knew mothers and fathers who had lost children. By comparison, the death rate today is more than thirty times lower: five of every thousand infants fail to pass the one-year mark.
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After the baptism, the Battles settled into roles they would follow across their six-decade marriage: Florence tended to home and family; Samuel devoted exuberant energy to his work and the social life that flourished around him. He thrived amid Grand Central’s pomp and glamour by studying up on the celebrities whose bags he toted. He became as knowledgeable about opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink as he was about actress Lillian Russell. He read the writing of Richard Harding Davis, who passed through the terminal as he went about becoming America’s first celebrity war correspondent. He greeted John D. Rockefeller.
Battle told Hughes, who wrote:
The famous
20th Century Limited
, the New York Central’s eighteen-hour train to and from Chicago, arrived at 9:30 a.m. For every hour it was late, passengers were refunded a dollar of their fare. Many of my customers, when the train was late, would simply hand me their refund slip and tell me to keep the money. Red Caps were never sorry to see the
Century
come in behind time, least of all myself. We were probably the only ones happy when it came in late.
Sometimes Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge or Broadway Jones, one of the most popular entertainers of his time, would get off this famous train. I was always particularly glad to see Williams and Walker, the Negro musical comedy stars, or Charles Avery and Dan Hart, the popular comedians, step off the
Century
. They were my friends.
Sometimes, after carrying their bags, I would join them later for a meal at the Hotel Palm on the corner of 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue, the heart of New York’s Negro high life. In front of the Palm or Marshall’s, one might see the young writer, James Weldon Johnson, or his musical brother, Rosamond, or the poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, talking with the composer, Will Vodery. I knew many of the Negro show people of the day and appeared in one Broadway show myself.
When the musical comedy
Honeymoon Express
, starring Blanche Ring who sang “Rings on My Fingers, Bells on My Toes” and Irene and Vernon Castle, exotic dancers, was staged, the producers wanted two stalwart Red Caps for the finale. John Mason and I were chosen, both of us being over six feet and about the same shade of brown. As the final curtain fell we were shown putting the luggage of the cast aboard the “Honeymoon Express” to the rhythm of the finale.
. . .
Enrico Caruso was a genial person, liberal with money and very good-hearted. He sometimes gave me passes to the Metropolitan Opera where I heard my first operas. Because of my admiration for him, I learned to like Italian food and frequently dined at the restaurant that bore his name at Spring and Lafayette Streets. Caruso traveled with quite a retinue. His arrivals and departures were a major event, with crowds of voluble Italians, including some of New York’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens, always on hand to see him arrive and depart.
Celebrities who did not tip well were known to all the old-timers among the Red Caps. When such persons entered the station, the senior Red Caps were very hard to find, leaving the younger men to carry their bags. Red Caps often rendered service for nothing to the aged, the infirm, the bewildered, or very poor with no thought of remuneration. In fact, we frequently helped stranded travelers from our own pockets, if the need presented itself. It was only the rich and famous upon whom we looked quietly from behind a remote pillar when they were known to be tight with their purse strings. With people in trouble we sympathized.
. . .
Because of the admiration and high regard in which he was held by Negro veterans of the Spanish-American War and because he had entertained Booker T. Washington at the White House when he was President, Negro citizens had a great deal of affection for Theodore Roosevelt.
One day the Red Caps learned that, having just returned from a hunting trip to Africa, “Teddy” would be boarding the Merchants Limited at Five o’clock for Boston. Quickly a committee was formed. I was chosen as the spokesman for all the Red Caps to express to Mr. Roosevelt our felicitations on his safe return and our gratitude for his interest in American Negro citizens. As he arrived on the platform accompanied by a group of prominent men, a corps of Red Caps stood at attention outside his car. When he approached, I stepped forward.
“What is it, young man?” Roosevelt asked.
I replied with the good wishes of my fellow station workers and gave him our thanks for his interest in the needs of the Negro people. He thanked me, and shook my hand and that of every Red Cap in the group with a firm grasp, squinting his eyes into that characteristic sharp gaze that seemed to look right through a man.
Chief Williams accompanied workplace camaraderie with a family man’s advice. He told Battle that San Juan Hill was no place to raise a child—that Florence and Jesse would be much better off where Williams had taken up residence, north in an area called Harlem.
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It was worth a look, so, with Jesse swaddled in arms, Battle and Florence paid a call on the Chief, his wife, Lucy, and their growing family. The Williamses now had three children. Wesley was nine, Gertrude was six, and Leroy was three. Their apartment was more spacious than those generally available to blacks downtown. The building and those around it were better kept as well. But decent housing came with a drawback. Virtually everyone in the neighborhood was white, and most wanted nothing to do with African Americans. Taking up residence would demand fortitude of Battle, Florence, and, eventually, Jesse, but no more than was already shown by the Chief, Lucy, and their Wesley.
Old enough to feel the sting of racism as nakedly as children can express it, Wesley intrepidly took a desk in a public school whose teachers were white and whose students were white, except for a few highly visible children. He knew much that his classmates would never know because great-grandmother Sarah Powell and grandfather James Wesley would tell of things that were closed to white children. Wesley listened raptly when Sarah Powell told of being kidnapped from West Africa and when James Wesley remembered escaping from slavery able to read and write. Taking to heart that his forebears had prevailed over badness that he could only imagine, Wesley excelled at reading and writing, outran and outplayed his classmates, and learned more about them than they would ever learn of him.
After touring Harlem and finding a landlord willing to rent to African Americans, Battle and Florence settled on a twenty-three-dollar-a-month apartment on West 134th Street, about a block from the Williams family. The first African Americans to live in the building, they became some of the founding citizens of the community that would grow into the capital of black America.
UNIQUE FORCES
of economics and race were coming to bear in the transition of Harlem from a white population to the first place in US history to offer quality housing for the black masses. Seven miles distant from city hall, the area was at one time a rural paradise, complete with farms and marshland that sloped to the Hudson River. The community’s character changed with the city’s relentless expansion up the spine of Manhattan. By the 1870s, it had grown into an early New York suburb, home to upper-middle-class and wealthier families.
Those families lost their isolation when three elevated train lines reached the area between 1878 and 1881. The next decade brought construction of well-appointed apartment buildings. Many were equipped with elevators; many offered servants’ quarters. Townhouses proliferated. Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the Broadway musical composer of the same name, opened the Harlem Opera House. Milwaukee beer baron Fred Pabst established the country’s largest restaurant, the fourteen-hundred-seat Pabst Harlem, on West 125th Street.
Then success fell prey to mania.
As the century turned, the city fathers announced a plan to extend a subway tunnel from Lower Manhattan to Harlem, where the line would run under Lenox Avenue. This territory became a roaring frontier. Residential buildings went up on every available square inch of land, and speculators borrowed extravagant sums to trade in properties.
John M. Royall, who would emerge as a prominent black real estate man, recalled the frenzy: “The great subway proposition . . . filled the people’s minds and permeated the air. Real-estate operations and speculators conjured with imaginings of becoming millionaires bought freely in the west Harlem district, in and about the proposed subway stations. Men bought property on thirty- and sixty-day contracts, and sold their contracts, not their property for they never owned it, and made substantial profits.”
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When subway construction fell behind schedule, too many property owners owed too much money and had too many vacant apartments. They became desperate to rent. Into the breach stepped Philip A. Payton Jr., a graduate of Livingston College who found work in New York as a handyman, barber, and janitor in a real estate office before striking out on his own at the age of twenty-four to buy, sell, and broker properties. He advertised: “Management of Colored Tenements a Specialty.”
Recognizing that fellow blacks would flock to Harlem’s decent housing, Payton offered to deliver tenants to landlords in a scheme that was simple, if cynical: he would fill apartments at rents that landlords were accustomed to charging white tenants while collecting from black tenants the higher rents they were used to paying. Landlords took what they could get, while Payton made as much as a 10 percent premium. The formula led him to establish the Afro-American Realty Company, propelling the movement that Battle had joined early on by following the Chief and taking an apartment on the very block where Payton had gone into business. The advantages were plain. “It is no longer necessary for our people to live in small, dingy, stuffy tenements,” proclaimed an advertisement in the
Age
, adding, “we have flats of four and five rooms and bath rooms in which there is plenty of God’s air and sunshine.” And Ovington noted, “Here are homes where it is possible, with sufficient money, to live in privacy, and with the comforts of steam heat and a private bath.”
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