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

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  The Heart of One Righteous Man

  ONE

  Quest

  TWO

  Struggle

  THREE

  Betrayed

  FOUR

  Command

  FIVE

  Respect

  SIX

  Forgotten

  APPRECIATIONS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  THE HEART OF ONE RIGHTEOUS MAN

  AN EARLY READER of this portrait of Samuel Jesse Battle harkened back to the Old Testament, verse three of Psalm 106: “Blessed are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times!” The connection was fitting. Battle’s enormous courage, seemingly limitless charity, and unfailing insistence on dignity far exceeded his human flaws. He would not be told no when no was unjust. Expecting equal treatment—and occasionally paying dearly for his good faith—he persevered to prevail over some of New York’s most closely guarded racial barriers.

  The moral bearing that propelled Battle’s victories shines most vividly through his own words. In 1949, he hired Langston Hughes to write his autobiography, spent hours speaking with the renowned Harlem Renaissance poet, and provided him with handwritten recollections. The result was a never-published, eighty-thousand-word book titled Battle of Harlem. One copy of the manuscript resides among Hughes’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Battle’s grandson Tony Cherot has custody of a second copy. The two are not identical. After publishers showed no interest, Battle worked with a new partner in hope of making the book more marketable. He also secured a foreword by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

  All to no avail.

  Relying on Cherot’s copy of the revised manuscript, I set out to bring Battle to life in contexts that stretched from the post–Civil War South through turn-of-the-century New York, through his fight to join the New York Police Department, through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, through the glorious rise and tragic fall of Harlem, through the Great Depression and two world wars. From his rambunctious boyhood in 1880s rural North Carolina to his death in Harlem in 1966, Battle was so engaged in his times that his journey illuminates the sagas of the United States and its largest city as oppressively experienced by African American citizens.

  To the extent that I have succeeded in capturing the man and his eras, I owe a debt of gratitude to scholars and authors who documented the country’s social, cultural, political, economic, sporting, and military evolutions. As but two examples, Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto was invaluable to understanding how the forces of racial hatred and money shaped the capital of black America, while Jervis Anderson’s This Was Harlem tells of the people who, against all odds, built a vibrant society there. True to form, the New York Public Library and its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture came through as repositories of documents, histories, biographies, journals, and out-of-print memoirs that bolstered Battle’s reminiscences. Then there was the New York Age, whose crusading zeal and depth of coverage place the weekly in the ranks of America’s finest newspapers. Although little remembered even in New York, the Age’s seven decades of journalism are foundational to understanding black America from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.

  Arnold Rampersad’s monumental two-volume The Life of Langston Hughes indispensably illuminated the man, the artist, and his times. Similarly, Cherot’s boyhood memories serve as the basis for descriptions of Battle’s life in retirement, including his relationship with Hughes.

  Battle’s own words remain the heart of the matter. They are the wellspring of countless facts, because he turned out to have possessed an astonishingly good memory. As captured by Hughes, his voice breathes personal vitality into passages ranging from brief quotations to sections several hundred words long. I have drawn the vast majority of these materials from the revised Battle of Harlem manuscript (editing lightly for sense or brevity) and present them without endnote references.

  Battle memorialized his life in two additional places: in a 1960 interview with Columbia University’s Oral History Collection and in the written notes he prepared for Hughes. I marked excerpts of these with references to endnotes.

  Words left behind by the remarkable Wesley Augustus Williams are similarly treated. Inspired by Battle, Williams waged the struggle to integrate the New York City Fire Department. In retirement, he recounted his experiences in numerous speeches and in an extended interview given to the author of a master’s thesis. Typescripts of the speeches and the thesis reside at the Schomburg Center and are the collective basis for a narrative that intertwines with Battle’s.

  Reared to be a God-fearing Christian, Battle lived by a simple moral code. He applied the Golden Rule to others and demanded it in return, with equally unflagging bravery and optimism, even under the hardest circumstances. This is one more way of expressing the thought called from the psalm by my early reader, my friend, the estimable Vince Cosgrove. For Battle was indeed a man who observed justice and who demonstrated the power that can beat in the heart of one righteous man.

  CHAPTER ONE

  QUEST

  The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

  —THE REVEREND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 1967

  WHEN HE SPOKE OF ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, Samuel Jesse Battle often told a story about a glass of water. It was a glass of ice water, poured by the First Lady of the United States. The year was 1943. America was at war against a regime built on racial and religious supremacy, yet America enforced white superiority at home. And here was Mrs. Roosevelt, in Harlem, capital of black America, on stage in a jammed assembly hall. The air grew stifling. A heavyset woman of great dignity was speaking. The heat appeared to be getting the better of her. Mrs. Roosevelt walked to a pitcher of cold water, brought a glassful to the podium, and returned to her seat, her courtesy toward a woman who was “as black as a shoe” indelibly impressing Battle as a symbol of hope.

  Now he gathers that memory and many others because one of America’s best writers is coming so that they can tell the story of how the son of freed slaves had triumphed in New York, triumphed over New York. He remembers the tour guides who brought people to gawk at the “colored policeman” as if he were a zoo animal. He remembers the death threats and the swinging nightsticks. He remembers the hot night he saved a fallen white officer from a black mob.

  After two world wars and the Great Depression, the twentieth century is at its halfway mark. So many of those who had been there are gone. So much is being forgotten. That will change with this book. He walks down the back stairway of the great old townhouse, carrying a pad of paper on which he has outlined the story in penciled longhand.

  Samuel Battle’s step is firm. He is six feet two and 260 pounds, fuller in girth than when he had been in boxing trim but still powerful at the age of sixty-six. No wrinkles etch his deep brown skin; no gray flecks appear in his closely cropped hair. Somewhere along the way he has acquired reading glasses. But nothing else has gone wrong. He proudly attributes his physical condition to clean, moral living.

  Florence is in the kitchen with fresh produce. She shops downtown because the markets in Harlem have few fruits and vegetables. It is an hour’s subway ride, but she insists on the trip because she keeps the house just so. Home had been Florence’s domain from the start. Forty-five years of marriage—Battle smiles to think of he
r, a sixteen-year-old girl, taking in marriage a young man making his way as a redcap luggage porter at the old Grand Central Depot. He would tell all about the tough, good days of 1905.

  Battle studies his wife, noting the personal qualities that are important to the story. She is fair-skinned. She is particular about her appearance, especially her choice of clothing. Her hair is long, black, and straight. She wears this telltale of Cherokee blood in a bun. At the moment, she is getting things right for the famous Langston Hughes, and she is none too pleased by the sound of thumping feet. It’s the boy, Tony, their grandson, running, always running. Florence calls up the stairs. The house is not a playground, she says. Take your energy outside, she says.

  Battle slips into his study. The walls are crowded with bookshelves. Most of the volumes are histories; in fiction, Hawthorne is still a favorite. Not bad for someone who finished only elementary school, Battle thinks. He places the pad on a desk, the paper listing his milestones: first black cop, first black sergeant, first black lieutenant in the New York Police Department.

  To get the story right, he would have to tell about all the hard fights, and about all the entertainers, clergymen, journalists, doctors, boxers, athletes, artists, gangsters, and politicians he had known. Many of them had been “firsts” in the way that he had been first. Through the long era when segregation was not only legal but the norm, when no US president would support even antilynching legislation, when white domination was enforced with unrelenting violence, Battle had lived on the frontier of the American black experience. The men and women of his memory had also blazed trails. Collectively, they had formed the backbone of an American civil rights movement well before America discovered that America had a civil rights movement, well before America recognized that extraordinary men and women were indomitably at work bending the long, moral arc.

  Wild and wooly New York would also be a big part of the story. Battle thinks that Hughes will be just the man to tell about the bare-knuckled city because Hughes had known Harlem in its finest glory and because Hughes too had been a path breaker. He seemed to have written about everything there was to write about, but nothing more so than about the lives of black Americans. So, for the considerable sum of $1,500, Battle has hired the poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist to tell the story he wants told.

  Young voices bring Battle back from rummaging through history to thinking about the future that was upstairs in his grandchildren: nine-year-old Tony, full name Thornton Cherot, and his sister Yvonne, who was twelve. As he treasured his own country boyhood in the South, he especially values Tony’s exuberance on West 138th, a street where kids can play. And Tony plays and plays and plays, stickball, stoopball, catch, and any other game conjured by the imaginations on the block. All the scamps come to the townhouse because Tony and Yvonne have a television that shows Howdy Doody in fuzzy black-and-white.

  On Friday nights, Tony watches the prize fights with Battle, who instructs the boy in the finer points of boxing and is ready anytime to talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ box scores. The Dodgers are Tony’s team—not the Giants, not the Yankees—because the Dodgers have Jackie Robinson. In front of America, Robinson is answering with grace and superior play the fans and players who would keep him off the field.

  Better than anyone, Battle understands, and he wants Tony to understand, too. That’s one more reason why he wants his story told. One day, Battle feels proud to know, Tony would look back in awe that his grandfather had made him witness to the creation of the autobiography of Samuel J. Battle as told to Langston Hughes.

  It is a short walk for Hughes from his apartment on West 127th to the townhouse on West 138th. Dressed with rumpled style, in a fashion that is casual but hardly careless, his slacks, shirt, and jacket bespeaking both informality and thought, as he comes up the front steps Hughes looks the part of a writer or intellectual. He greets Battle and Florence with easy-smiling courtesy. Battle hands Hughes the lined pad. The heading reads, “My Loving Christian Parents,” and the words “God blessed me from birth.”1 Then Battle and Hughes set to work; one reminiscing, the other drawing out the story of how Battle and his contemporaries bent the arc of the universe toward justice.

  YOUNG SAM BATTLE had always dreamed of New York. Visions of the big city gripped his mind as he crossed from boyhood into adolescence. He would imagine mighty buildings while he scrubbed the pine board floors of his family’s home. He would look at the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad that came through town, New Bern, North Carolina, and try to see the faraway trains that carried crowds of people on tracks overhead. He would pass among the frame houses allotted to blacks, and he would ache for more than a life that led to a cemetery for dark-skinned people.

  Two shining figures had brought the yearning. William and Killis Delamar visited from the North—and not just from the North, but from big, cosmopolitan Brooklyn, which was just across the river from even bigger New York. They traveled down the coast by steamship and train to renew family ties. Battle knew them as his mother Anne’s brothers, although William and Killis were likely her cousins. Their arrival in New Bern generated excitement. As of yet, in the 1890s, relatively few Southern blacks had joined America’s Great Migration, and a still smaller number had made as good as the Delamars had. They operated horse-drawn trucking businesses, and they seemed to Battle to have conquered the world. He would remember them as proud, good-looking men, who owned “several enormous vans and a number of big beautiful horses” and served “the best families in Brooklyn.” He found William’s cutaway coat particularly impressive.

  Over Anne’s heaping meals, the Delamars told of wonders that were a ship’s sail away. They had seen the Brooklyn Bridge and skyscrapers with elevators and streets with electric lights. To Battle, New York became “the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world,” as poet and novelist Paul Dunbar would describe the magnetism that drew Southern blacks to the city.2 A half-century later, Battle would tell Hughes, “When I first saw those wonderful relatives of my mother’s, I began to long for the day when I might go north to call on them, and to live as they did.”

  He was, perhaps, fourteen years old. He had left school in the eighth grade rather than take a whipping from a teacher for beating up a classmate. He was so “given to fighting” that neighborhood boys called him “Bully,” while prominent black men knew him as a thief for filching their money. Shining shoes and working in the fields were his main sources of legitimate income. And, hard as it would be to bid farewell to his father, Thomas, and his mother, Anne, he was determined to leave the teeming, love-filled little house at 8 Primrose Street, the home of his birth on January 16, 1883, for the North.

  OLD AUNT SUSAN had predicted that the baby would arrive by Christmas, like a laughing and crying doll for thirteen-year-old Nannie, and then the weeks had passed. When finally nature took course, Old Aunt Susan laid the baby, round and brown and wet with the residue of birth, at his mother’s side. He was his father’s twenty-second child and his mother’s eleventh. Word spread that he weighed sixteen-and-a-half pounds. The neighbors were sure that they had witnessed the biggest infant ever delivered thereabouts, and Battle carried the fact through life as inspiration. “As a result, I guess I’ve always wanted to be large, and I have been large,” he told an interviewer, looking back after almost seven decades.3

  By the time Battle reached school age, Anne had given birth to four more children, nursing the babies along with the infants of others.

  “I have seen her with a white child at one breast and a black child at the other,” he told Hughes. “White people called her ‘Sis Annie.’ Whenever anyone in the community was sick, hot broth and kindnesses went from her to them.”

  He recorded that his mother “had no unpleasant memories of slavery so she never spoke with bitterness of the past.” He was sure that she was “the best cook in all the world.” He loved the feel of her silken hair and “would sit and feast my eyes and soul on her angel face.”<
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  Endearingly, Battle would tell Hughes and Hughes would channel Battle’s memories to write that Anne began the day with hymns:

  Rock of ages, cleft for me

  Let me hide myself in thee.

  Sometimes with the neighbors joining in from yard to yard—for mother was always up at dawn drinking her cup of black coffee, feeding her children, then early to her washing, boiling the clothes in a big three-pronged iron pot over a wood fire. By sun-up the wash was ready for the line and as she hung the clothes out to dry she sang:

  Swing low, sweet chariot.

  Coming for to carry me home!

  I can see her now, white clothes billowing in the wind as her song rose in the morning air.

  My mother received all the children of my father’s former marriages as her own. All of these children loved my mother and thought of her as an angel. She cooked and washed for all of us, dosed young and old with castor oil and asafetida when we were ill, gave us sassafras tea to thin our blood in the spring, made biscuits for everybody on Sunday mornings, and prayed for each of us every night by name—Tom and James, Nannie and William, Abigail, John Edward, Mary Elizabeth, Sophia, Lillian, Louise and me. Her prayers are with me, still in my heart.

  For so many children there was almost continuous washing and ironing. The big wooden washtubs with staved handles served for both babies and clothes, and the iron pot in the back yard was almost always steaming. All day long my mother was busy; she made her own soap and potash, tended the garden, cleaned and cooked. When I could, I would help her. I did not mind chopping wood for mother’s wash pot or for the big fireplaces which we had throughout the house, masoned by my father. In those fireplaces on autumn nights we youngsters roasted chestnuts or sweet potatoes while some studied by firelight. In the winter in the kitchen we held molasses taffy pulls.

  Battle referred to Thomas as “the old man,” no doubt because Thomas was approaching sixty and Anne was nearing forty as Battle reached school age. Thomas never drank or used foul language, although “on very special occasions he might inhale a cigar.” He would also engage in child-pleasing play.