Arthur Browne - One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York

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. Battles 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 treatmentand occasionally paying dearly for his good faithhe persevered to prevail over some of New Yorks most closely guarded racial barriers.

The moral bearing that propelled Battles 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 Hughess papers at Yale Universitys Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Battles 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 Cherots copy of the revised manuscript, I set out to bring Battle to life in contexts that stretched from the postCivil 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 countrys social, cultural, political, economic, sporting, and military evolutions. As but two examples, Gilbert Osofskys 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 Andersons 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 Battles reminiscences. Then there was the New York Age, whose crusading zeal and depth of coverage place the weekly in the ranks of Americas finest newspapers. Although little remembered even in New York, the Ages seven decades of journalism are foundational to understanding black America from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.

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

Battles 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 Universitys 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 masters thesis. Typescripts of the speeches and the thesis reside at the Schomburg Center and are the collective basis for a narrative that intertwines with Battles.

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.

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 Americas 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 Battles 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 hours subway ride, but she insists on the trip because she keeps the house just so. Home had been Florences domain from the start. Forty-five years of marriageBattle smiles to think of her, 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.