One Righteous Man

TONY RISES ON a morning in the summer of 1950 and finds what he needs: T-shirt, shorts, and canvas sneakers, to be complemented by a baseball bat, fishing pole, or homemade frog spear. Leaky comes to Tony’s side. He’s a mix, resembling a Labrador. He earned his name in the failures of paper training.

The white clapboard cottage is located in New York’s first African American vacation community. Known as Greenwood Forest Farms, the enclave comprises several dozen getaways. Prominent blacks purchased the land in 1919, laced it with winding roads, and subdivided it into lots. There’s a clubhouse and a lake.

Tony gets going while the going is good, to play before his grandfather can shed the bed covers and run down a list of chores. There were kids to find and, maybe, a catfish to catch or a bullfrog with meaty legs to impale on nails tied to a broomstick, for Florence to fry in an iron skillet.

He is especially hurried because Langston Hughes is sleeping in a guestroom. Hughes and his grandfather are going to spend the day talking, and Hughes is going to write things down. Hughes has come to the townhouse several times to talk and write. Once, Hughes brought a tape recorder with spinning reels that stood tall on the table. His grandfather spoke into a microphone. That is at least interesting. To hear them talk, watch the tape rewind, and hear them talk again is something new. Otherwise, Tony dislikes having Hughes around. The presence of literary greatness is nothing compared with a youngster’s summer joys, and he senses, correctly, that Hughes has little patience for a boy with a dog who would intrude on his time.

Hughes is here at the cottage in fulfillment of a commitment rather than in pursuit of the writing of the great poems, novels, librettos, and essays that have been his life’s work and will be his legacy. Yes, he sees in Battle’s scrapbooks and he hears in Battle’s tales that Battle’s life is Harlem’s story, and he knows that Harlem’s story is a centerpiece of the rise and persecution of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. But, as compelling as Battle’s story is, his biography offers Hughes little hope of producing the next great American work of literature whose characters would be black folks and whose pages would pulse with universal humanity. In truth, Hughes had agreed to work with Battle primarily because he had needed a $1,500 check to pay the bills. He has spent the money, yet he has barely started coming to terms with his employer’s memories.

When he was younger, Hughes had traveled the world, happy to go it alone in odd jobs, happy to collect a check here and there for writing that seemed effortless, for language that sounded in the blues and rose from the African American soul. If the uplift and adulation of the Harlem Renaissance had meant having but two nickels to rub together in the 1920s, so be it. Patrons provided support. Publishers were interested. There was always a way.

Later, when Stalin’s Soviet Union invited twenty-two African Americans to travel to Moscow for what turned out to be a comically ill-conceived plan for a movie about black Americans, Hughes turned the project into an often-solitary round-the-world trip. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, he sent dispatches from the front as a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. But, with Hollywood closed to black writers, Hughes has scrambled with hit-and-miss projects.

At one point, in desperation, he conceived of a plan to write about whites under a pseudonym. In the depths, he wrote that he would “withdraw from the business of authoring and try to take up something less reducing to the body and racking to the soul,” adding, “I’ll just let ART be a sideline like it used to be in the days when I was a busboy and was at least sure of my meals.”¹

From the same wellspring of despair, he wrote “Genius Child,” a poem whose central line was: “Nobody loves a genius child.” And whose concluding line was “Kill him—and let his soul run wild.”

Now, owing Battle his labor and out of excuses for avoiding the project, Hughes submits to the confines of the white-clapboard shanty, rising early and working late, letting Battle talk, and questioning him to elicit facts. Tony runs in and out. Florence serves the two men meals. She is more distant than gracious. Her husband is pouring his heart into a book and a movie that will tell his life story, and she worries that the renowned writer at his side will break it.

Battle dressed in freshly ironed clothing. Florence wanted to be sure he looked his best. She had helped him score well on the exam, and now she stood with Jesse, grown tall at five years old, and sent Battle forth from the apartment with their love.

On the way to the train, he moved among whites who called him an invader and in front of buildings whose owners had covenanted to bar African Americans. Hostility screamed from the Harlem Home News: “Heart of Harlem Now to Be Invaded by Negroes.”

When a building a short distance from Battle’s address rented to blacks, the front page blared: “Black Invaders Capture White Flat in 121st St.”²

Downtown, the police department’s domed headquarters was designed to convey the majesty of the law. Battle strode into a marble-clad reception hall. Forty-four recruits awaited swearing in by Commissioner Waldo. He told the group that “he was glad to have a representative of the black race on the force.”³ Later, the commissioner spoke to Battle more ominously. “You will have some difficulties but I know you will overcome them,” Waldo said, implicitly acknowledging that, on the streets and in the stationhouses, Battle would be beyond official protection.⁴

Difficulties. Daunting though the word was, Battle granted Waldo good faith. Putting pencil to lined paper, he noted that Waldo was a North Carolinian transplanted from Beaufort and wrote with characteristic charity, “He was a high class wealthy man who was of sterling character without racial bias.”⁵

The department assigned Badge No. 782 to Battle. As he put it, he had become a bluecoat while he was still a redcap. He had a resignation to submit, and he headed uptown. He arrived to find the street in front of Grand Central in full bustle, whites in fine clothing and black men hopping to in hats crowned with red felt. His colleagues of six years had not yet gotten the word. Through all the months of study, he had kept his counsel, and Battle wanted to speak first to Chief Williams, but on this day of all days, the Chief was off on personal business. Battle diverted to give notice to the stationmaster. Uncertain how this first white man to hear the news would respond, Battle was heartened to receive congratulations.

Still, he was compelled to admit that he had no idea how the venture would work out. Rather than quit outright, he asked for a six-month leave, just long enough to cover the probationary period during which the department could wash out any rookie. The stationmaster granted Battle an indefinite leave with an invitation to return at any time.

Word leaped along the platforms, and Battle walked out into a throng. “All the boys, all the Red Caps, stopped carrying the bags,” he remembered. “Things were all tied up for a while, to see this first black policeman in Greater New York.”

Then Battle headed home to Florence. Again, the news traveled faster than he did. “When I reached my apartment that evening a large group of friends had gathered. And every night thereafter for weeks, people, even complete strangers, kept dropping in to offer congratulations. I received more invitations to address clubs and church groups than I could fill in a year.”

Battle and Florence confronted how life had changed. For starters, they would have less money. Battle had earned as much as $300 a month in tips as a redcap; a rookie police officer’s salary was $66 a month. To survive, the Battles would draw on money he had banked for just this purpose. Then, too, a police officer worked long hours for days on end. Florence, at the age of twenty-two, would have to care for Jesse largely on her own.

While the police department’s terms and conditions were onerous, they applied equally to everyone who joined the ranks. Battle was as prepared as a man could be to take them on, along with a burden unknown to anyone else on the force: that of upholding the black man’s honor. Under the benighted standard of the time, he would be judged a credit to his race or he would confirm that African Americans did not have what it took to succeed.

The following morning Battle reported to the police training school. He felt fairly treated among the probationers, but he discovered that the white establishment was hardly approving of his appointment. The New York Times captured the sentiment in a condescendingly racist editorial. Conceding that some African Americans “have the requisite size, strength and courage, and some of them have the intelligence necessary” for police service, the paper predicted that “where a white policeman would be resisted once in making arrests, the black policeman would be resisted four or five times.”

Still, the Times concluded, “New York has in its population enough Negroes to give them a right to claim this sort of ‘recognition.’”⁶

The training course extended for thirty days. Battle practiced shooting a gun, drilled on rules and regulations, and met all the physical demands. Along the way, he bought a uniform for twenty-eight dollars at a shop called H. Levy & Son, surprising the proprietor by paying with a fifty-dollar bill rather than on credit, because, Battle told Hughes, “I always tried to pay my way ahead, not behind.”

When schooling was completed, the department scattered the new men among the city’s eighty stationhouses. Battle’s destination was the Twenty-Eighth Precinct on West Sixty-Eighth Street, quarters of the head crackers who patrolled his old neighborhood, San Juan Hill, well known to him as the fortress where cops had forced black men to run a gauntlet of clubs in the siege of 1905. If the higher-ups were out to do Battle in, they chose well. The New York Police Department had no tougher place.

JESSE SLEPT IN the shadows of the small apartment while Florence prepared breakfast. The air of a summer of rains and high heat was heavy, even this early. Battle got “tubbed and scrubbed,” and then he put on the uniform that designated authority to enforce the law.

In summer, the department discarded its tailed and high-buttoned coat for a blue blouse cut from light fabric. The year-round constants were trousers seamed with white cord, a belted holster with revolver, and a gray helmet whose shell offered some protection from bricks tossed off tenement roofs, known then as Irish confetti.

Battle kissed his son and his wife, and then he went toward his just due with the confidence that had carried him from childhood, with faith in the goodness of human nature, and undaunted by the difficulties that rose with the sun.

From a distance, Battle saw the crowd in front of the stationhouse on the morning when the gawking began. “There’s the nigger,” some shouted as he drew close. He heard white voices say, “Why, he looks just like Jack Johnson,” and, “He’s a burly bastard,” while some African Americans called out, “Ain’t he a fine looking man?”

Battle betrayed no sign that anything unusual was taking place. He needed to appear ordinary so that, in time, he might be accepted as one more cop. The stationhouse door was thickly hewn, as if designed to repulse attack. Inside, an elevated platform—the desk—dominated the central room. From behind its ramparts, a lieutenant oversaw the execution of the laws, as well as compliance with the orders that governed a police officer’s life.

The lieutenant pointed Battle to a room where officers congregated before starting patrol. It was here or in a space nearby that blacks had been made to run the gauntlet. Battle offered a greeting that said he expected inclusion: “Good morning.”

The group responded with coordinated silence. Soon, a sergeant announced assignments. He gave Battle a post in a well-to-do neighborhood along Riverside Drive between West Seventy-Ninth and West Eighty-Sixth Streets. Then Battle joined a march outside. A superior officer inspected uniforms and equipment. Some in the crowd again referred to him as a “nigger.” When the order came to disperse, he set off, trailed by spectators.

The silence of Battle’s fellow cops was more than a statement of racial scorn. It was also a weapon. Every man among them had been schooled in policing by his elders. How to make an arrest, how to wield a nightstick, how to avoid the attention of internal affairs “shoo-flies”—stationhouse and street-corner tutorials were critical to survival.

The black man’s failure deeply wished for, Battle would have no help as he broke in under a scorching sun. His beat followed Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson River and passing beneath elegant manses and apartment buildings. Across eight long hours, without a moment for lunch, Battle showed only toleration to the unbelieving who flocked to see a black police officer. Friends from the Marshall Hotel, the musical comedy team of Dan Avery and Charles Hart, “drove by in a red roadster to see if all was well with me,” as Battle remembered. Finally, hungry, wet with perspiration, and exhausted, he gave his memo book to a sergeant for signature at 4 p.m. and headed home.

“There he is,” a voice cried, as Battle came up out of the subway in Harlem. Fellow blacks swarmed him. He found the apartment filled with friends who wished him well as he ate the dinner he had been waiting for. When finally they were gone, he recounted the day for Florence and Jesse, and, using her nickname of endearment, Florence told her husband, “Jesse, I am proud of you.”

THE NEXT DAY and the day after that and the day after that, Battle returned to the silence and the staring. His primary duty involved directing horse-drawn vehicles and early automobiles, while standing on display as if he were a circus performer.

“Everybody came by, and when the street cars would pass, the motormen and conductors would clang the bells, and the conductor would say, ‘Look over there at New York’s first colored policeman.’ When the sightseeing buses would come along, they would announce loudly to the people, ‘Here’s New York’s first colored policeman,’” he remembered.

“Then the colored fellows that drove these open barouches for people on sightseeing tours would bring the people down from the cabarets in different parts of the city, particularly from Harlem and Baron Wilkins’ night club, and charge them a dollar each to take them to see this colored policeman.”⁷

Battle made his first arrest after a white man failed to stop his horse and wagon in front of a school, as Battle had commanded, and then refused to accept a summons from a black officer, questioning even that Battle was truly a cop. He arrested his first black person at about 2 a.m. one Sunday morning in Central Park.

“I saw what appeared to be a beautiful brown-skin girl in furs and a picture hat. Because it was unusual in that section for women to be out alone at that time of night, I approached and asked her destination,” Battle remembered. “A masculine voice answered, ‘Just walking.’ It was a man in female garb, painted and powdered. Although he begged me not to do so, my duty required that I take him to the station.”

Battle felt well treated by the whites he encountered and made interesting friends, among them Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement, and Charles Thorley, proprietor of the House of Flowers, who had given Chief Williams a start as his doorman.

“Many a dawn,” Battle said, he saw Thorley “galloping by on his saddle horses in the park. He used two horses, changing mounts for the second part of his morning ride. After he got to know me, he always spoke and sometimes stopped for a chat.”

Blessed with a sharp eye, Battle took detailed note of his surroundings. And, despite all the difficulties, he found much to appreciate. Years later, Hughes would tell the story this way:

Diamond Jim Brady, at the height of his fame and very much sought after by women, lived in an elaborate house on the north side of 86th Street opposite Central Park. William Randolph Hearst lived at the end of this street facing the Drive. On 72nd Street near Columbus Avenue, adjoining the Dakota Apartments, the Straus family had a large place. At that time many apartment houses in the area, including the Dakota, would not rent to Jewish people, so some of their financiers built the Majestic Hotel which was not restricted, and accommodated large families.

A number of fine houses in the neighborhood were occupied by beautiful young women kept at that time by wealthy men. Most of them lived alone with their maids. And one of the most attractive brownstones facing Central Park was occupied by a Negro woman, the famed Hannah Elias, who had been given a fortune by an aged wealthy paramour. She lived quietly with several servants, including a Japanese butler. I seldom saw her, but when I did she bowed pleasantly.

At the foot of 79th Street, many U.S. Naval vessels docked. Attracted by seamen, this area was a Mecca for dozens of effeminate young men who congregated to welcome the sailors as they came ashore. Some of these effeminate young fellows were professionals, but others were from families of means seeking companions among the seamen. Ladies of the evening, too, gathered here whenever the boats came in.

Everybody liked me. I made wonderful friends. There was a family called the Daltons that lived at the Hotel Majestic on 72d Street, lovely people, very wealthy people. They had a private stable between 67th Street and 68th Street, and their chauffeurs and footmen lived there over the stable. Whenever Madame, the old lady would come out, she would always want to say hello to me, just as though I were a personal friend of theirs.

The children, of course—I didn’t get the right treatment from them all the time, and I didn’t mind it. Particularly I shall never forget a bunch of white kids, one time, in one particular neighborhood over on the East Side. I’d been over to one of the hospitals on the East Side, on some official business in a police uniform. These kids cried, “There goes the nigger cop, there goes the nigger cop!”

I looked at them and smiled and kept on going. I didn’t remonstrate with them, because they didn’t know any better. That’s all they could think about.

Battle’s work chart scheduled his first reserve duty for midnight to 8 a.m. on the Thursday after he started patrol. Finishing a four-to-twelve night shift, he was to sleep in the stationhouse with a platoon on call in the event of an emergency. A dormitory was outfitted with a couple dozen bunks and was draped in the odors of overworked men, discarded shoes, soiled linens, and tobacco smoke.

Fetid air and all, the officers of the Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse resolved that this was a whites-only domain. Cops carried a cot upstairs to a room on the second floor, where the precinct stored the American flag, and left the mattress and springs under Old Glory as the black man’s accommodations.

Without complaint, Battle went up to the flag loft. Several times, a captain named Thomas Palmer asked Battle how he was faring with fellow officers. Just fine, Battle reported. “I don’t expect the men to talk to me and take me in their arms as a brother,” he told the captain.

Inevitably, newspaper reporters caught wind that Battle was subjected to silence and isolation. They sought him out, but he held firm to voicing no unhappiness. Interviewed by the Times three weeks after he arrived at the stationhouse, Battle made sure to state that no officer had uttered offensive epithets, and he responded, “I have nothing to say about that, Sir,” when asked about his fellow officers’ refusal to speak with him.

As if to make a much larger point, he shared with the reporter the Battle family lore that had been handed down through bondage and that represented a claim to fully earned United States citizenship: the story of his great-grandfather, a slave, fighting beside a young master in the American Revolution.

“He is a good sensible negro, and his conduct is above reproach,” Palmer told the Times, adding, “He seems to know what he bargained for in taking a place on the force.”⁸

While that was surely true, alone in the flag loft, Battle would still consider the chasm between the ideals of the banner unfurled overhead and the abuse to which he was being subjected:

Sometimes, lying on my cot on the top floor in the silence, I would wonder how it was that many of the patrolmen in my precinct who did not yet speak English well, had no such difficulties in getting on the police force as I, a Negro American, had experienced.

Some of them had arrived so recently in America that they spoke as though they had marbles in their mouths. Some of them again knew so little about New York City that they could not give an inquiring stranger any helpful directions. Yet, these brand new Americans could become policemen without going through the trials and tribulations to which I, a native born American, had been subject in achieving my appointment.

My name had been passed over repeatedly. All sorts of discouragements had been placed in my path. And now, after a long wait and a lot of stalling, I had finally been given a trial appointment to their ranks and these men would not speak to me. Native-born and foreign-born whites on the police force all united in looking past me as though I were not a human being. In the loft in the dark, with the Stars and Stripes, I wondered! Why?

True to form, Battle made a blessing of exile. Privacy afforded him the opportunity for self-education. He read, concentrating on police training manuals to start preparing for the promotion exam for sergeant. These men who would not speak with him today as an equal would answer to him tomorrow as a superior. Far from the others, he recited the police department’s rules and regulations, and then he relied once more on Florence to test his knowledge.

“When I went home after a night of study, at breakfast my wife would check me to see what progress I had made,” he recalled, adding, “Alone in the loft I could kneel quietly at prayer before going to sleep, talking with God for strength to carry on.”

On the street, Battle met the demands of pounding a beat, 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., 4 to midnight, midnight to 8, and sometimes 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps with eight hours off between shifts, perhaps with twenty-four. He offered collegiality but was rejected time and again. “Bright and sunny this morning, isn’t it?” he would say on relieving a man on post. There was never a reply.

After midnight, the precinct deployed men in pairs, one posted for two hours at the center of a fixed intersection, one to patrol the neighborhood for two hours and then to switch labors. The man in the intersection was prohibited from approaching the curb.

Battle strove for perfection, even offering help to any white officer who appeared to need assistance, because, he said, “I knew I was on trial, and through me, my race.” But scrutiny, ostracism, study, and the standard rigors of policing combined to produce fatigue. After three months on the job, while still on probation, Battle slipped.

“One rainy night, soaked to the skin, having been out of doors during my entire tour of duty, I went home for a brief rest before reporting for reserve. There was no one at home, so I fell asleep in a chair and failed to awaken in time to report at midnight. A complaint was sent in and I had to stand trial at headquarters.”

Well aware that the department needed scant excuse to cut him, Battle threw himself on the mercy of the tribunal and was fined two day’s pay. His staying power now clear, Battle faced still harder tests as the crucial six-month deadline neared. Death threats arrived in the mail. He hid them from Florence. Then, he found a note pinned over his bed. It was pierced to resemble a bullet hole, and the block-lettered words read: “Nigger, if you don’t quit, this is what will happen to you.”⁹

Battle told Hughes that he had shrugged off the warning as the work of a coward, “turned back the covers on my bunk, knelt down praying for God’s care and turned in for a good night’s sleep.” Hughes was properly astonished. Facing Battle across the corner of Battle’s townhouse desk, one pencil behind his ear, another in his hand scribbling notes on paper held by a clipboard, the tape recorder microphone standing between them with his secretary Nate White at the controls, Hughes exclaimed: “Wheeeeee-ooooooo-eeee! You mean right in the stationhouse this happened?”

Next, Battle’s enemies wielded a weapon that had been lethal, often literally, to a black man: the specter of sex with a white woman.

The site of the entrapment was Manhattan Square Park, a bower located on the land today occupied by the Museum of Natural History. Battle was alone on foot patrol. The time was after 2 a.m. A voice called demurely. A well-dressed white woman was sitting on a bench almost entirely obscured from view. Battle approached, but he quickly knew better than to linger.

“When I asked her what she wanted, she began to make coy advances, telling me that she had for some time been attracted to me,” he remembered. “I would not allow her near me, and I told her if she didn’t get out of the park at that hour of the morning I would arrest her. She left. Some time later, I learned she was quite friendly with other policemen.”

Then, ten days before his probationary period was to expire, Battle confronted a trumped-up accusation of malingering. The night watchman of the Ansonia Hotel reported that he had seen “that black cop, Battle,” in shirtsleeves, asleep in a restroom.

Hurriedly, the department filed charges and summoned Battle before a second disciplinary tribunal. He would get no slack on a finding of guilt. Recognizing that it would be his word of denial—the word of a black—against the word of a white, he turned for help to the one person who could support his innocence. His future came down to the honor of a white sergeant. For once, he was treated fairly. The sergeant certified that he had given Battle a twenty-minute relief break.

ON DECEMBER 27, 1911, Battle rose from probationary recruit to full-fledged police officer. The newspapers took stock of the historic event, with the Times reporting: “Six months ago men thought that Battle would be hazed into resigning, or at least into asking for transfer. Now they know he isn’t that sort and he has made himself respected.” But, the paper also stated: “The ‘silence’ that began when Battle entered the Precinct last July is as deep as ever today, not because Battle is a Negro—although that was the reason at first—but because every white policeman is now afraid of what would be said to and about him if he made any attempt to bring the ‘silence’ to an end.”

The New York Sun offered an unnamed officer’s words about Battle as typical:

He has never said anything uncivil and he does more than his share of the work. For instance, one day there was a mess of a grocery cart and an automobile on Central Park West. There were three prisoners and all I could tend to under the circumstances were two. Along comes Battle on his way to the stationhouse. Says he: “Want me to take one of them in?” Breakin’ my rule about not speakin’ to him I says: “I certainly would be obliged.” So he takes the prisoner to the house as cheerful as you please; and if you know how the ordinary policeman hates to do anybody else’s work, you know what that means. But as for sayin’ “Howdydo” to Battle in the station house—not me.

The Sun reported that, at the moment, Battle was reading a work by Winston Churchill, had just finished Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and that he also favored best-selling author Marie Corelli, whose Thelma was a love story set in Norway. The paper noted that Battle had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but that he felt it was more important to understand American history about which, the Sun concluded, “his memory is accurate.”¹⁰

Never was Battle more alone, and never was he more open to scrutiny by internal affairs shoo-flies who lurked in the dark than when standing fixed post from midnight to morning. Even Inspector Max Schmittberger—the feared Schmittberger—came by personally to check. Once as corrupt as a cop could be, Schmittberger had confessed his crimes before a state senate investigating committee, emerged a hero, and become the scourge of rule breakers. Battle withstood his spying, as well as the unforgiving gaze of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, whose windows overlooked Riverside Drive and Eighty-Sixth Street. “We used to look up at Mr. Hearst—he would come and look down on the policemen, and we were afraid not to be there,” Battle remembered.¹¹

Decades later, putting pencil to paper in the great old townhouse, he revealed the depths of the torment that dogged him:

With my fellow officers it was a sin to be a Negro, hence the fight of survival and achievement was on. It seemed that all was against me, including God, in whom I had and have a great deal of faith and to whom I prayed fervently and religiously.

The weather was as much as five below or it seemed to me to be even more. I received supervision early and often, but I prayed and carried on, was never given any of the preferred assignments and didn’t ask for them.

I had prescribed my medicine and I took it like a brave soldier. Through these my hardest years I went with the prayers of my faithful and devoted mother and wife. Without these I could not have made it alone.¹²

On Sunday afternoons, Battle became a regular at meetings of the Equity Congress in the largest hall of J. C. Thomas’s funeral home. There he associated with the leading figures of the Harlem that was coming to life, activists like Reverdy Ransom, Timothy Thomas Fortune, J. Frank Wheaton, and, when he was not on a stage tour, Bert Williams.¹³

They kept abreast of Battle’s progress, while trying to recruit young black men to join him on the force, as well as to find anyone brave enough to try for the fire department. The Equity Congress was also fully engaged in a drive to establish a New York National Guard unit for blacks. This was a long-held dream of men who believed that, by serving in the US military, blacks would prove that they had equal right to the full benefits of American citizenship. As early as 1898, in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, Fortune and Reverend Alexander Walters had pressed New York’s governor for permission to raise a regiment. Now, in 1911, Equity Congress members pursued two strategies for creating a unit open to blacks.

They enlisted an assemblyman who represented the changing Harlem to introduce and, hopefully, push through authorizing legislation; and they named lawyer Charles W. Fillmore to lead what was known as a provisional regiment, an unofficial company of volunteers who would apply for mustering into service. Fillmore was a rare example of an African American who had led black troops, the Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry Battalion. Now he took lonely command of a unit that lacked for everything—including men. The Equity Congress began calling on African Americans to enlist as a way of proving loyalty to a country that would surely respond with respect. The renowned dancer and entertainer Bert Williams gave star power to the recruitment drive.

By Lincoln’s birthday the following year, Fillmore had a large enough troop to parade in whipping snow from Columbus Circle to the Great Emancipator’s monument in Union Square for a wreath laying. The display was meant to demonstrate that New York’s African Americans were ready to uphold the tradition of the four black regiments that had emerged from Union troops to become the Buffalo Soldiers and that had fought with distinction in the Spanish-American War.

Battle could do little more than wish his friends well. Although many police officers were tied to Tammany Hall, the department barred cops from engaging in political advocacy. There was little doubt that Battle would suffer severe repercussions if he stepped to the fore in seeking a regiment. More, he had his hands full coping both with the rough edges of life in Harlem and on the police force.

On the streets, there was constant danger of racial violence. In one episode in the fall of 1911, a black man accidentally bumped into a white man, provoking whites to pursue him in growing numbers. The black man fired a revolver without hitting anyone and attempted to run.

After running the man to ground, whites kicked their quarry in the head and face until two cops with guns drawn fought through the melee to save him.¹⁴

At work, the muscle of onetime bullyboy Battle proved indispensable. The law was ruggedly enforced. A bit of clubbing or a liberal pummeling saved the trouble of a court appearance and was surely more effective as a deterring punishment. As Battle explained: “I gradually but regrettably came to believe, along with the other officers, that there was as much law at the end of a nightstick as there was on the statute books.”

A man who knew how to handle himself was much valued in the NYPD, all the more so if he also had the courage of his physique. Battle was bigger, stronger, and more athletic than any man in the precinct, and he had honed his fighting skills in the recreational boxing ring. Yet he took what his fellow cops dished out with outward stoicism, never so much as raising his voice or responding with profanity.

And then one day Battle had had enough. As he approached the stationhouse on West Sixty-Eighth Street, white cops who were hanging about uttered the word “nigger” within his hearing one too many times. His patience now gone, Battle delivered a challenge: if they wanted to fight, he would take them on, one or all.

“Any of you men, any man here, or any series of you here, that has anything against me, leave your guns, your billies and your blackjacks upstairs,” Battle declared. “I’m going down to the cellar, and I won’t have anything but my fists. Come down one by one. If you’re not able to go back up, after a certain length of time send another one down. Anything that you have against me, take it out on my black behind.”

Battle descended the stairs in front of every available eye, ready for anyone who had the bravery to follow him. None did, and Battle took significant ground in establishing that his stationhouse mates would afford him a minimum of dignity.

Similarly, Battle combined size and strength with courage to command respect in the line of duty. Given the opportunity, he also evened the score of black and white cracked skulls. As transcribed and polished by Hughes, Battle recalled:

One night when I was sleeping in the flag loft, about two a.m., the call came to go post haste to the aid of the patrolmen of the San Juan Hill district. Since it took some time to hitch up the horse-drawn patrol wagons, (“Black Marias” as they were called) we started out from West 68th Street on foot on the double.

As we passed the firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue, one of the firemen yelled, “There go the reserves—Battle in the lead.” I outran the others. We beat the patrol wagons to the scene of the riots. This was my first emergency call, and I was anxious for action.

When we got to the scene of the fighting in the streets, fists were flying, derbies were being smashed, and missiles flying from roof-tops. One man had already been killed and a number injured. The area was in turmoil. Our superior officers immediately gave orders to use our nightsticks to clear the streets, so we swung into the fray.

I was, of course, the only Negro, among the police, therefore doubly open to attack from the angered whites in the mob. The Negro rioters were in the minority. Nevertheless, my fellow policemen managed to club down two or three Negroes for every white. Therefore, to even things up, I began to club down the whites.

When things had finally quieted, I was assigned to the corner of West 62nd and Amsterdam, with orders to allow no one to loiter on the sidewalks. Just before daybreak four young white hoodlums stopped at the corner and refused to move.

“Get along,” I said.

They didn’t budge. When I repeated my order to move on, one of them made a racially profane insulting remark to me. I placed them under arrest. They resisted, so physically I was forced to tackle all four. I subdued them before assistance arrived. When help from other officers did come, I refused it and held all four of my prisoners myself until the Black Maria took them away, which gave saloon commentators material for conversation for the rest of the week. This conflict established my ability to hold my own in the district and from then on I was respected.

One night I was assigned to do a special post in Hell’s Kitchen where people often seemed to enjoy fighting. But the saloonkeepers and businessmen did not enjoy having their establishments broken up. Just before midnight I was standing in front of a saloon at 52nd Street and 10th Avenue when one of the habitués came out and said to me, “Officer, this is a bad place to stand. You know ‘Paddy, the Priest’ was killed right on this spot.” “Paddy, the Priest” had been a well-known gangster. I replied, “That is just why I am standing here, sir, so if anything happens, I will be in the right place.”

Hardly five minutes passed before a free-for-all broke out in a bar just down the block toward 9th Avenue. I went in with my nightstick swinging. In a short time order was restored. Peace reigned and nobody lifted a hand against me, so I was not compelled to make any arrests. By this time I had become well known in the area. Sometimes I needed only to walk into a bar and the fighting would stop.

Jimmy Garvey had joined the force after Battle, so he had not participated in the conspiracy of silence. Still, it took spine for a lone Irish Catholic to stand apart from peers who were so closely knit by nationality and faith that it was accepted practice for a man to skip out while on duty to attend mass. Garvey spoke openly to Battle, man-to-man in a budding friendship, as he proved himself to be a young cop’s cop, eager for any duty.

Abraham Stewart was a sergeant who happened to be Jewish. He asked Battle’s permission to share the flag loft in order to better prepare for the lieutenant’s exam. “I know it’ll be quiet, where you are,” Stewart explained.

“You don’t have to ask me, you’re a sergeant, but I’m glad to have you, anyway,” Battle responded. “Each time that we afterwards found ourselves together we talked. He was a friendly fellow and sometimes we checked each other in our studies. Stewart made the top of the list in the lieutenants’ tests.”

With the exception of Garvey and Stewart, the wall of silence remained largely intact when Battle was detailed to election night duty in a precinct headquartered on Manhattan’s East Side. After trying to pass the night reading in a chair rather than enter a second-floor bunkroom, he climbed the stairs in the grip of exhaustion. The room was dark. No one could see who he was. He crawled into an empty bunk and heard the conversation turn “to that colored cop.”

“Battle’s OK,” a cop from his precinct answered, further surprising Battle.

He lay without speaking while the officer noted that Battle had never complained and always did more than his share of the work. The officer also said that some of the precinct’s cops were starting to regret his silencing.

“I thought, these boys haven’t got such a bad heart after all; they’re just a little weak-kneed, that’s all,” Battle concluded with great generosity.

FLORENCE BROUGHT HAPPY NEWS. Once more, she was pregnant. Almost four years after tiny Florence D’Angeles fell prey to cholera infantum, Battle looked forward to welcoming a new life into the family. He was twenty-nine, Florence was as yet only twenty-three, Jesse was six.

The baby was due by Christmas. Florence’s oldest sister, Elizabeth, came from Virginia to help care for the infant. The holiday passed. Then, finally, while Battle was on duty and with Dr. Roberts at her side, Florence gave birth at home on January 17, 1913, to Charline Elizabeth Battle. Christened at Mother AME Zion Church, she was Battle’s pride from the start.

“My daughter, Charline Elizabeth, was such a pretty born child that I bought for her a special rubber-tired baby carriage with an elegant hood,” he wrote. “In this I used to push her all over Harlem, accepting for myself compliments paid the child’s beauty.”

AROUND THIS TIME, a young man by the name of Robert Holmes stepped forward to follow Battle onto the police force. Square-shouldered, stocky, and athletic, Holmes lived with his parents, Henry and Ella, a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. Like Battle, he was a member of the black Elks.

Henry and Ella had brought their son north from South Carolina around the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁵ Settling in Harlem with hope, they had taken their places among the whites whose tolerance was growing thin. Now, Henry was forty-four years old and afflicted with deteriorating lungs. Ella, who was forty, was losing her eyesight while eking out a living as a laundress. Fearing for his parents’ futures, Holmes was drawn to the police department’s pay and benefits.¹⁶ After the Delehanty Institute denied his admission, he studied for the test by correspondence course. Battle happily helped Holmes master the rules, laws, and procedures he would face on the exam. In shared purpose, they became friends, each understanding that this was the way it had to be, one becoming two, two becoming four, accepting the indignities that had to be accepted until they were large enough in number to refuse to accept any more.

Holmes came through with flying colors. So, on August 25, 1913, Battle celebrated Holmes’s appointment as the department’s second black officer. He was proud to have opened the door and was buoyed in knowing that more young black men appeared to be coming behind him. They sought him out, and he gave all the guidance he could. Then, abruptly, Commissioner Waldo propelled Battle to a new milestone.

To root out the corruption that came with excessive familiarity between cops and the public, Waldo ordered every patrolman, sergeant, and lieutenant transferred from three Manhattan precincts, and he replaced them with freshly promoted superior officers and five hundred newly sworn cops. The West Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse was among those cleaned out. Waldo dispatched Battle to Harlem.

The shift marked the department’s first venture into assigning a black officer to patrol a community with a substantial black population. Waldo’s motivations are hidden to history, but there is one indication that African American leaders pressured City Hall to establish a black police presence in Harlem. In a memoir, the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen recounted lobbying the mayor and police commissioner to assign Battle to the community. Cullen was the founder of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and the adoptive father of Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance wunderkind poet like Hughes. The Reverend Cullen recalled that the Reverend Charles Martin, a prominent fellow black church leader, and John B. Nail, the respected black saloonkeeper, joined in the cause. Misspelling Battle’s name, Cullen stated: “We succeeded in having the first colored policeman, who was Policeman Samuel Battles, appointed to Harlem.”¹⁷

Battle bid farewell to Abraham Stewart, who had shared the flag loft, and to Jimmy Garvey, who had paid no heed to the conspiracy of silence. Garvey was newly married and was ever more known as a cop who went the extra mile.¹⁸ Battle wished his friend well and promised to stay in touch. His last duty on West Sixty-Eighth Street was to square Holmes away on a lonely inaugural assignment. “Holmes was given my squad and post,” Battle wrote. “I gave him my bed and mattress and he occupied the flag loft as I did.”¹⁹

The stationhouse covering Harlem was at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks from Battle’s apartment. To many longtime white residents he was an “invader,” but, with the influx of blacks growing by the day, Battle’s fellow officers discovered that he was useful.

“They needed me as much as I needed them and sometimes more because some of them were on posts where there were all Negroes,” he remembered. “Then, too, this story had gone out that, ‘He’s a decent fellow,’ and they began to treat me nicely and spoke to me and asked me to join their organizations and things of that kind.”

No more an on-duty pariah, Battle took obvious satisfaction both at being treated more like a peer and at watching Holmes surmount isolation in grand style. They shared pride and amazement at an episode in which officers fired their pistols in the cavalier way of the time. Battle remembered for Hughes:

Holmes first came to the attention of the press on election morning, November 1913. Before dawn that day a herd of short-horn Oregon steers escaped from the New York Stock Company’s yards on the North River. Eight of them tore through 59th Street, scattering in different directions as far as Fifth Avenue.

They terrorized the town on both sides of Central Park. A policeman on 59th Street tried to flag some of the steers down. Failing, he and several other cops commandeered two taxies and with drawn revolvers tried to overtake them individually, shooting as they came in range.

What sounded like a gangster’s ballet along Fifth Avenue aroused the guests in both the Gotham and the St. Regis Hotels. A waiter at the St. Regis rushed out and was shot in the ankle. A night watchman removing a red lantern from the pavement in 55th Street was hit between the eyes and killed. One steer tried to enter Whitelaw Reid’s house, and was shot a few doors away in front of the home of Cardinal Farley.

Meanwhile, along Central Park West, one of the wildest of the animals trampled Patrolman Kiernan, overturned a delivery wagon, and caused panic among early-rising women and children on the streets. Officer Holmes, reporting for eight a.m. duty in the sector, immediately went in fleet-footed pursuit of the beast. He lit in the park.

As the steer turned its head to look at him, Holmes grabbed the animal’s nostrils with his right hand, shutting off its wind. Then with a ju-jitsu twist of one of the horns, he threw the beast to the ground and he held him until his feet were tied. This was the only animal returned to the stockyards intact.

The apartment that had brought Battle’s old friend Chief Williams from Grand Central to Harlem had grown small. He and Lucy had added a fourth child, and after pumping iron, their oldest son, Wesley, had become a broad-backed, barrel-chested, thick-armed fifteen-year-old. The family needed more room. The chief told Battle that he was moving to the rural expanses of the Bronx, to Williamsbridge, where there was enough wildlife and wooded territory to allow for hunting. Although remote, the area was convenient for the Chief because the New York Central had a rail line to Grand Central. The Battles bid the Williamses farewell.

The chief and his family again rented space in an overwhelmingly white community, and Wesley again took a desk among white children in a public school. Fewer than a dozen African American families lived in the neighborhood. Monthly, they gathered in a clubhouse to discuss how to help their children advance in life. They drummed in that young blacks had only three paths to success: as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or in other professions; as entrepreneurs with independent capital; or in civil service positions. The chief made sure that, just a few years from manhood, Wesley heard the message in the hope that he would act accordingly. But, headstrong and fixated on bodybuilding, Wesley had his own ideas.

WOODROW WILSON WAS inaugurated the twenty-eighth president of the United States on March 4, 1913, with black Americans looking forward to his administration. He was an unlikely vessel for hope. Wilson’s heritage was in Virginia. As president of Princeton University, he had discouraged black applicants. As a historian, he had depicted the Ku Klux Klan as an understandable post–Civil War attempt at white self-defense.

W. E. B. Du Bois and Reverend Alexander Walters had met with the candidate during the campaign. After Walters explained that shifting fifty thousand black votes away from the Republicans—the party of Lincoln—to Democrat Wilson could be decisive, Wilson gave Walters a written vow that he had an “earnest wish to see justice done in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling.” Du Bois then gave Wilson a wholehearted endorsement, helping him to secure unprecedented backing among black voters.

Disappointment came swiftly. While the Equity Congress pressed to open New York’s civil service to blacks, Wilson permitted the start of Jim Crow segregation in the federal workforce. Still worse, he spurned pleas to condemn lynching. With Southern Democrats flying the banner of states’ rights, Wilson dismissed the killing tide as a matter to be dealt with locally, not federally.

Meanwhile, in Harlem, white residents continued to struggle desperately to bar blacks through restrictive covenants. As the Age described the documents: “The property owners bind themselves not to allow any part of their premises to be occupied in whole or in part by any Negro, mulatto, quadroon or octoroon of either sex either as a tenant, guest, boarder, or occupant in any other capacity, way or manner. Tenants of each house or flat may not employ more than ‘one male and one female Negro or two Negresses, mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons to perform the duties ordinarily performed by a household servant.’”²⁰

The Equity Congress voted to explore whether such a covenant was legal under the law of the day. No one was sure, and frustration was all the more intense because the group had made little progress on its founding goals. It had hoped to open the police department to African Americans—and so far, the black ranks had grown to only two members. Similarly, it had hoped to open the fire department, but no volunteers had stepped forward for the mission. Everyone recognized that firefighters would be even more hostile than cops, because firefighters shared living and eating quarters for days on end. About the only bright spot for the Equity Congress was passage of legislation authorizing a black National Guard regiment.

After two years of lobbying, the group held what the Age described as “a big jollification meeting.”²¹ Charles Fillmore, the once lonely colonel of the provisional regiment, had by now enlisted one thousand men into his unofficial brigade. Many were eager to join a fully sanctioned National Guard unit. They never got the chance. The regiment’s champions learned that there was a far distance between authorizing a unit and activating a unit. The governor withheld the activation order in accord with prevailing belief that blacks neither merited the honor of military service nor could be trusted to bear arms.²²

AS 1913 CLOSED, Battle shepherded a third young African American onto the force. The department assigned Jasper Rhodes to the West Forty-Seventh Street stationhouse in the heart of the wild Tenderloin. “As the first Negro there, he was given a rough road to go for a while,” Battle recalled. “Jasper would fight at the drop of a hat, so he soon gained a certain respect after his initial hazing was over.”

Battle, Holmes, and Rhodes concentrated both on exceeding all the demands of the job and on asserting simple social equality. Battle became the anchor on the department’s tug-of-war team and, with Rhodes, he attended the police summer camp in Brooklyn. Twice, Battle won “the fat man’s race,” a hundred-yard dash for men over 225 pounds and, he remembered, “Jasper always won the white cops’ money at dice.”

Clearly, Battle had the most desirable posting. Not only was he respected by Harlem’s growing African American population, his fellow officers increasingly appreciated the value of his dark skin.

“I recall one Negro girl refusing to be arrested by Patrolman Anton Strausner, crying, ‘I don’t want no white police to arrest me. Send for Battle to arrest me.’ She appealed to a passerby, ‘Don’t let this white man arrest me,’” Battle remembered.

About that time I arrived and Strausner turned her over to me. It was a good thing for a hostile crowd had gathered.

So bitter was Harlem’s resentment at having no officers of their own color in the area that, before my transfer there, there had been instances of Negroes taking a prisoner away from a white policeman. When I was sent to Harlem, I inherited not only the ordinary problems that the guardians of the law have everywhere, but the added problems of a racial situation made acute by the American color line. But to Harlemites, even one Negro patrolman seemed better than none.

BRIGHT AS HE WAS, the Chief’s son, Wesley, left school at the age of sixteen after finishing the eighth grade. Hours spent sculpting his every muscle group had proven more attractive than homework and had delayed the young man’s progress. Years later Wesley would joke: “I was so large that the custodian of the school went to my principal in my last term and said that if I was not graduated he was going to quit his job. He said he was sick and tired of raising my desk and chair so that my legs would fit under the desk. So the principal must have felt that his custodian was more necessary than I to the school. That is how I was graduated.”

Still, Wesley remembered his teachers as “true friends” who had “endeavored to guide me correctly,” most of all warning “that a criminal record would bar me from a civil service position and to a Negro that is a calamity.” Wesley would place one teacher in particular among the people “who played a most important part in my life and fortified me for the battle that was to come.” This Mr. Freund “patiently counseled me at a very critical and emotional period of my life,” he would recall.

Finished with education and starting what was to become a life’s relationship with sixteen-year-old Margaret Ford, Wesley needed a job. Since he was too young to hope for appointment to a government post, New York offered only two options: he could seek the menial employment of a boy or he could sign up for dangerous labor with an employer none too concerned about race or age. Choosing the latter, Wesley knocked boldly on the door of a construction company that was digging a subway tunnel under the East River from the foot of Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Flynn and O’Rourke relied on the sweat of newly arrived European immigrants and African Americans. Mary White Ovington wrote: “New York demands strong, unskilled laborers. To some she pays a large wage, and Negroes have gone in numbers into the excavations under the rivers, though a lingering death may prove the end of their two and a half or perhaps six or seven dollar a day job.”²³

Wesley’s physique was ideal for working with heavy loads and heavy machinery. A foreman put him on a gang in a dark, dank shaft that smelled of grease, stone dust, and the residue of explosives. Near the Manhattan shore, the tunnel bored through bedrock. Dynamiters set off charges drilled into a stone face. Then, sand hogs, as tunnel workers are still known today, hauled away the chunked rock. Tradition, superstition, or wise practice forbade whistling or singing for fear that musical vibrations could dislodge stone overhead. To minimize the peril, scalers—Wesley among them—poked the newly exposed tunnel top with twenty-foot-long steel rods to break free unstable portions. It took speed to dodge the collapsing rock—more speed than some men proved to have. In that era, roughly forty workers died every year in all forms of accidents while building or tunneling for the subways.²⁴

Closer to the Brooklyn shore, the tunnel dome consisted of the riverbed’s sandy bottom. Here, construction engineers filled the shaft with compressed air to hold the silt in place and keep river water from draining through. Too little pressure and the sand would collapse; too much pressure and the air would rupture the sand upward, in both cases flooding the tunnel.²⁵ When such a blowout had occurred in an earlier tunnel, a sandhog named Richard Creegan attempted to plug the fissure with a straw bale that was on hand for such an emergency. The air pressure sucked Creegan up into the hole, shot him through the riverbed and the river, and jettisoned him into the air. Amazingly, Creegan survived. Not so three men who were sucked into a blowout in Wesley’s tunnel.²⁶

Two weeks after Wesley started work, a New York State Labor Department doctor visited the site. A foreman ordered Wesley to the surface with the warning that the doctor likely wanted to verify that he was of age to work in the tunnel. On the way up, Wesley prepared to lie.

“Don’t you know that you cannot work in the tunnel unless you are twenty-one years of age?” the doctor asked. “Now I am going to repeat the question. How old are you.”

Soon enough, the grueling work in miserable conditions convinced him to study for a civil service exam. Meanwhile, Chief Williams pressed his independent-minded son to leave the high risk of injury or death he faced every day. Finally, after Wesley turned seventeen, the Chief pulled strings to secure a redcap’s job at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s magnificent new terminal across town from Grand Central. There, Wesley found toting luggage “equivalent to a four year college course in humanities.” Off hours, he and Margaret fell into young love.

For reasons obscure to Americans, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife. In short order, Europe cascaded into World War I. None of it seemed the business of the United States, and no group felt more remote from the fighting than African Americans. Only in hindsight, is it clear that the war shaped their destiny and American race relations.

The hostilities curbed the European immigration that had provided inexpensive labor to America’s expanding industries. Needing bodies at the right price, northern manufacturers trolled the South with the promise of jobs that paid more than plantation labor. The pull proved irresistible and the Great Migration from the South that would eventually number more than six million American blacks gained steam.

New York’s black leaders used the war to renew the push for a military regiment. General Nelson Miles, who had served in the Civil, Indian, and Spanish-American wars, offered discouraging counsel to a meeting of the Equity Congress. Calling the conflict “as little called for as any that has ever occurred on the face of the globe,” he said African Americans would be foolhardy to participate in a fight that “bid fair to be the most destructive war ever waged.”

Miles advised blacks to consider giving up on America entirely, saying “perhaps the intelligence acquired in the past few years by your race may be utilized as a great civilizing force for the great black belt of Africa with its 100,000,000 of inhabitants.”²⁷

The outcome was even more frustrating when a delegation of black leaders won a White House audience with Wilson in hope of holding the president to his campaign pledges. In a heated dialogue, William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, told Wilson: “Two years ago, you were thought to be a second Abraham Lincoln. Mr. President, we are here to renew our protest against the segregation of colored employees in the department of our national government.”

Wilson tellingly said: “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.”²⁸

Here was the president of the United States saying that black citizens should gratefully accept the lesser stations to which they had been consigned rather than risk the undeterred retributions of white society. Here was the personification of the American promise, a man who had postured as a champion of “cordial” justice, sending a message to Battle that his courage in seeking equal opportunity had been misplaced.

Then, as 1915 dawned, a sensational movie devoted the power of the flickering image to glorifying white-on-black vigilantism. Directed by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation employed compelling new techniques of cinematography to—purportedly—portray Southern history from the Civil War through Reconstruction. Its very essence, Battle knew, was a grotesque lie.

Where Thomas had been forced to buy his freedom, where Thomas and Anne had instilled faith and the work ethic in their children, where Battle had left his parents in a South ruled by Jim Crow, where Anne still suffered the indignities of a lesser citizenship, The Birth of a Nation presented the region as dominated by drunken and vengeful blacks, a species whose men lusted for the sexual conquest of white women. The heroes who rode to the rescue were the white-hooded horsemen of the Ku Klux Klan.

Battle watched as The Birth of a Nation enjoyed a forty-four-week run on Forty-Second Street and, like African Americans at large, he could only lose hope after Wilson issued a legendary presidential stamp of approval following a White House screening. The movie was “like writing history with lightning,” Wilson is reported to have pronounced.

Shortly, violence against blacks began to rise. Editing an NAACP journal called the Crisis, Du Bois amassed a count, titled “The Lynching Industry,” of extrajudicial killings that had taken place from 1885 through 1914. His tabulations totaled 2,732 murders, with 69 blacks and 5 whites slain in 1914 alone. In 1915, the annual death toll climbed to 94: 80 blacks, 14 whites. Of the blacks, 71 were hanged, 5 were burned at the stake, 3 were shot, and 1 was drowned.²⁹

Never a day passed when Battle was not aware that the broad spectrum of white society deemed him inferior. In one episode, orders came down that he and Jasper Rhodes were to report for special training: they had been designated to march—the first blacks ever—in the police department’s annual parade.

Appreciating the honor, they reported to a National Guard armory. A captain named Jake Brown called attention. Battle and Rhodes fell into line. Brown’s eyes stopped on the two dark-skinned men. He ordered them to stand aside.

“Why are you sending us back?” Rhodes challenged. “Because we are colored?”

On the verge of an insubordination charge, Battle and Rhodes accepted dismissal. Battle long bore a resentful grudge.

“This affected me so deeply that many years later when I was finally invited to participate in the parade, I refused,” he remembered. “However, I have since forgiven Captain Brown, and have participated in a number of parades, including the St. Patrick’s Day from which, in the old days, Negroes were also barred.”

AS WINTER GAVE way to spring in 1915, Florence once more discovered that she was pregnant, and fatherhood again steered Battle’s course.

The family’s cramped quarters had little enough room for Jesse and Charline; squeezing in a third child was out of the question. Battle needed space, but space was at an increasing premium in the burgeoning new Harlem, the bastion from which whites had fled and the Mecca to which blacks were flocking in ever-larger numbers. Much as he loved “the familiar feeling of being back home in the Negro section of a Southern town, hearing again the accents of my childhood,” it was time to move elsewhere.

He had followed Chief Williams to Harlem, and now, with far-reaching consequences for both families, as well as for New York, he followed the Chief to the Bronx. Renting the top floor of a house owned by a hospitable German woman recalled only as Mrs. Wagner, Battle and Florence joined Williamsbridge’s small African American community and renewed neighborhood ties with the Chief, Lucy, and their children.

Wesley was now an imposing eighteen-year-old. Thickly muscled, he had gained a reputation for feats of strength, including a 3,600-pound hip lift, 625-pound one-armed dead lift, and 345-pound overhead press.³⁰ By taking the civil service test, he had moved on from working as a redcap to a position with the US Post Office. Mail delivery was then changing from horse-drawn wagons to motorized vehicles. Wesley had trained as a driver. Wearing a double-breasted utility coat and a brimmed cap, he negotiated the crowded streets in a rattling, numbered truck with a cargo bed, wooden spoke wheels, and a wooden sign reading “2190 United States Mail.”³¹

With the confidence that came with a steady paycheck, Wesley had proposed to Margaret and they had set a date for the fall. Battle offered the young man hearty congratulations and advice. As Arthur Schomburg had done for him, Battle stressed to Wesley the importance of self-education. Wesley followed his counsel. Over the coming decades he would build a fifteen-hundred-book library, and his readings would extend to German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche and American psychologist and philosopher William James.

On November 9, 1915, Battle and Florence, round with full-term pregnancy, gathered with a small congregation to celebrate the marriage of Wesley Augustus Williams and Margaret Russell Ford. Wesley’s sister and brother, Gertrude and Charles, stood witness.³² The next day, Florence went into labor. Battle was on duty, and Dr. Roberts was miles away in Harlem. She called down to Mrs. Wagner, a woman given to baking pies for Jesse, who was about to turn ten, and for Charline, who was almost three. Mrs. Wagner helped deliver a boy, Carroll Henry, “giving him a slap on the behind and a little gin in his mouth to start him out in life.”

The Williams family celebrated the two happy occasions with the Battles; the mothers of the clubhouse group supported Florence through recovery and Carroll Henry was baptized at Mother AME Zion Church. Then life returned to order, Battle at work most of the time, Florence at home nurturing three children, while coping with the fear that shadows the wife of every police officer: Would he come home safely?

THE PERILS WERE real and could be all the more threatening when inflamed by the passions of race. In the summer of 1916, Battle confronted death in the form of an angry white mob.

New York’s brute character extended to labor-management relations, and nowhere was the clash between worker and boss harsher than on the city’s streetcar lines. A struggle erupted over pay and working conditions, with the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway and Motor Coach Employees seeking terms that the rail companies deemed to be radical, such as a maximum ten-hour workday.³³

Strikes began in July and built into September. The line operators readily found strikebreakers among unskilled, unemployed men, while the union fought to enforce its shutdown with violence. Mayor Mitchell deployed two thousand cops to ride the streetcars in hope of maintaining service. Often the cars, and the officers, were bombarded by rocks, bolts, and construction debris.³⁴ At the corner of Madison Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street, strikers set upon a streetcar carrying Battle. Rocks crashed through the windows.

Drawing his gun, he leaped from the car. Battle chased two of the attackers, firing, he said, into the air. (Two wounded rioters later alleged that he shot them, but nothing came of the charge.) Battle’s quarry darted up a stoop and into a building at the corner of Park Avenue. Battle followed and took the men into custody. Outside, strike sympathizers seethed with hostility.

Gun in hand atop the stoop, Battle called back, “The first person that tries to stop me, I’ll blow your brains out.”

No one dared mount the steps. When police reserves arrived, Battle took his prisoners to the stationhouse and would eventually win convictions in court. He looked back on the incident with pride, saying, “In my first real test alone with a crowd of angry whites, I had triumphed as an officer of the law,” but at the time he brought home to Florence the dangers that the family shared because of their skin color.

OTHER THREATS WERE nondiscriminatory and grew out of the day’s precarious balancing of life and death. In the hot summer of 1916, an invisible killer stalked New York, hunting children like Jesse, Charline, and Carroll the most mercilessly.

Before the turn of the century, New York City’s Department of Health revolutionized public health with the realization that poor sanitation bred disease. Drives against fetid water, refuse, and animal excrement helped to eradicate cholera and typhoid at a time when medical science was embarked on combating the germs that carried illnesses. It was an era of important breakthroughs and of at least one tragic consequence.

As sanitation improved, infants and children lost exposure to some microbes critical to developing immunities. Notably, they grew up lacking contact with the poliomyelitis virus. The hidden effect emerged when New York became the epicenter of America’s first large-scale polio epidemic.

The city announced the outbreak on June 17, 1916. Health authorities were mystified by the spread of an illness that primarily afflicted children and progressed from fever to crippling paralysis or death. As the toll rose to 8,900 cases, including 2,400 deaths, the health department quarantined stricken children. Those who could not be isolated in crowded tenements were forcibly taken from their families. The city placed placards on the homes of the sick, published names and addresses in the newspapers, and posted warning signs in neighborhoods with multiple cases. A typical one read: “Infantile paralysis is very prevalent in this part of the city. On some streets many children are ill. This is one of the streets. Keep Off This Street.”³⁵

Battle and Florence plunged into praying against a day that Jesse, Charline, or Carroll might show the feared symptoms. Like hundreds of thousands of parents, they grasped for strategies to keep their children safely isolated, while also accepting that Battle’s duties would place him inescapably at the center of frightening throngs.

Many a cop grew fearful after word spread that Jimmy Garvey, the friend who broke the conspiracy of silence against Battle, had brought the disease home to his year-old daughter Helen. Battle could offer only commiseration. Much later in life, Garvey’s wife Pauline would point to a steel brace that supported Helen’s leg from heel to thigh and say bitterly: “It was in 1916 during the epidemic, while he was still a patrolman. Jim carried a man to an ambulance in his arms and he came home without changing his uniform. The baby ran out and hugged him. Two days later she was stricken.”³⁶

The scourge passed with the cooler weather of October. The Battles survived the threat unscathed, but it was clear that service on the NYPD demanded an awful lot—and perhaps all.

THAT JUNE, BATTLE passed the milestone of five years on the force. By longevity, he was now eligible to take the promotion exam for sergeant. He applied for test preparation at the Delehanty Institute, and proprietor Michael J. Delehanty slammed the door just as forcefully as before. At the same time, Battle and the Equity Congress crossed a second five-year mark. Their drive to create an African American regiment had gotten nowhere in all that time. Now, though, the drums of war grew louder, even as Wilson ran for reelection with a campaign that boasted he had kept America out of the conflict. Battle, J. Frank Wheaton, Bert Williams, and the rest of the Equity Congress decided the time had arrived to lobby Governor Charles Whitman to activate the black unit that had been authorized by the legislature. Battle’s friends expected him to stay on the sidelines because of the department’s prohibition on political advocacy. But at a bitter time in a bitter season, ignoring the ban at risk of his career, Battle wrote to Whitman urging the unit’s activation and waited tensely for a reply or retribution.

DURING THE WAIT, there was a lynching in Waco, Texas, that stands as a savage milestone in white-on-black violence. The Fryer family tilled a farm. Jesse Washington was a hired hand. He was black. At seventeen years of age, he had a volatile temper, could neither read nor write, and was, perhaps, mentally retarded. According to a chronicling by Du Bois, who accepted the likelihood that Washington was guilty, the hulking young man raped and murdered Mrs. Fryer while her husband and two children labored in a distant field.

The authorities brought Washington immediately to trial in a courtroom that was built to accommodate five hundred spectators but was crammed by as many as two thousand people. The proceedings lasted just a few hours before the jury returned a guilty verdict. An investigator sent to the scene by Du Bois reported what happened next:

The mob ripped the boy’s clothes off, cut them in bits and even cut the boy. Someone cut his ear off; someone else unsexed him. . . . While a fire was being prepared of boxes, the naked boy was stabbed and the chain put over the tree. He tried to get away, but could not. He reached up to grab the chain and they cut off his fingers. The big man struck the boy on the back of the neck with a knife just as they were pulling him up on the tree. . . . He was lowered into the fire several times by means of the chain around his neck.

Du Bois left nothing of “The Waco Horror” to the imagination by publishing graphic photographs of the lynching, including a picture of Washington’s charred and dismembered body hanging by a chain from a tree.³⁷

THE MEN WHO hoped to serve in the military admired Battle’s courage in writing to the governor. They were relieved when the letter passed without harm, and they were forever grateful when Whitman signed a regimental establishing order on June 16, 1916.³⁸ They would one day refer to Battle as “godfather” of the regiment.

While the timing was right, cause and effect were, at best, attenuated. Instead, the regiment had an unlikely champion. William Hayward was a white Nebraskan whose father had represented that state in the US Senate. He was trained as a lawyer, served as a captain in the Spanish-American War, and appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post as the handsome, rock-jawed image of the ideal soldier. After his service, Hayward’s career took him to working as Whitman’s gubernatorial counsel.

Military command was an important credential for social or political advancement, but openings for officers were few. Hayward saw his opportunity in leading the black regiment. Although lacking cachet, the position was his to seize. More, Hayward had come home from the Cuban expedition with a deep respect for the soldiering of his black comrades. Whitman named him colonel of the regiment, with one condition: that Hayward bar blacks from the ranks of superior officers.³⁹

Battle, Wheaton, and Bert Williams celebrated a great victory—a largely unqualified one because Hayward disregarded Whitman’s restriction. While he built a command structure of socially prominent whites for this new Fifteenth Regiment, he gave the rank of captain to Charles W. Fillmore, the rare black commanding officer who had built the provisional unit from nothing, and bestowed the same standing on the extraordinary figure of Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall.

Born into a well-to-do Washington, DC, family, Marshall had attended Phillips Andover Preparatory School in Massachusetts before joining the handful of African Americans who had been admitted over the years to Harvard. He graduated from Harvard Law School and served as counsel to a US Senate investigation that introduced Marshall both to the honor of black soldiers and to racially driven injustice at the highest levels of American government. In the worst racial blot on his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt had ordered 167 African American soldiers discharged without honor and without hearing after a shooting spree outside Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas. Marshall took the case apart, but realized in the end that Washington would hold the troops guilty no matter how devastatingly he undermined the evidence against them. After three years, he helped win reinstatement of only fourteen men, and the so-called Brownsville Raid entered white America’s consciousness as proof that blacks could not be trusted as soldiers in arms.

Marshall came to New York, married into a prominent black family, and fell in with a small fraternity of black lawyers. After a German U-boat sank the ocean liner Lusitania, killing 1,198, including 128 Americans, he wrote to President Wilson “offering my services in the recruiting of a volunteer Negro regiment of infantry,” he recalled in a memoir, adding, “This I believe constituted the first offer of services in the World War of any colored citizen in the United States.” He would tell young men who jeered at volunteering that “any man who was not willing to fight for his country was not worthy to be one of its citizens.”⁴⁰

Within six weeks of Whitman’s activation, the regiment had drawn more than five hundred recruits. But manpower was not matched by money or equipment. As he tried to bring cohesion to the raw corps, Hayward raised funds among well-off whites and found unconventional routes of supply. He leased a vacant Harlem cigar store to serve as a headquarters and took occupancy of a dance hall on the second story of a building a block away that became known as the “armory.”

Enlistees assembled for drills in front of the nearby Lafayette Theatre. Battle stopped by to cheer the men as they marched in raggedy uniforms, if they had uniforms, and bore broomsticks in the absence of rifles. The unit was a source of pride to many in Harlem and was cause for ridicule to others. The Age predicted that “the Fifteenth will be the crack regiment of New York,” while another newspaper story recounted that onlookers laughed at “these darkies playing soldiers.”⁴¹

Opinion was also sharply divided on the question of whether black men should risk life and limb by joining the military at a time when Jim Crow America appeared to be marching toward an unfathomable war. “The Germans ain’t done nothing to me. And if they have, I forgive ’em,” James Weldon Johnson heard a man say in a Harlem barbershop.⁴²

While Bahamian-born Bert Williams was excluded from formal service because he was not an American citizen, he backed the regiment with celebrity. Another of Battle’s friends from the bar of the Marshall Hotel gave the regiment additional star power. James Reese Europe was a leading black band director. Trained as a classical violinist, he made his way from Washington, DC, to New York in hope of earning a living as a performer. At the Marshall, he met a wealthy white man seeking a quartet to play the jazzier rhythms associated with black musicians at a social event. Europe got the gig—he is believed to have coined the word—and came into high demand at white society functions. He took over the band that played for Vernon and Irene Castle, white dancers who were wildly popular for introducing whites to then-black dances like the fox-trot.

On September 19, 1916, at the age of thirty-five, at a time when he had a dozen tuxedo-clad bands playing New York venues, Europe joined the Fifteenth Regiment. He was inspired in part by Vernon Castle, who was English and who had abandoned his career to join the Royal Air Corps. More fundamentally, Europe had fought to improve the lot of black performers, and he believed deeply that Harlem needed strong institutions to help shape the lives of the poorly educated African Americans who were flocking there.⁴³

Hayward was delighted to have Europe’s company as well as that of Europe’s protégé Noble Sissle, a young bandleader and baritone. Cleverly, Hayward gave Europe free rein to assemble a regimental band that could play Sousa marches with the best and leap into ragtime at the drop of a baton. The ranks grew as Wilson campaigned for reelection as the war-avoiding president, won the White House, and promptly led the United States into a declaration of war on April 6, 1917. By then, the regimental roster included men from every walk of life, from poet to criminal, from farmer to Negro League baseball star. One showed up on Battle’s doorstep.

Needham Roberts was born in 1898 to a North Carolina family that was intertwined enough with the sprawl of Battle’s kin for Battle to count Roberts as a cousin. His parents, Norman and Emma, had migrated north to Trenton, New Jersey, where Norman earned a living as a porter in a bank and served as pastor of an AME Zion church. Needham dropped out of a segregated high school to work as a hotel bellhop and drugstore clerk. In 1916, he tried twice to enlist in the navy but was rejected for being underage. After the United States declared war, he ran away to New York with money his father had given him to pay the poll tax and headed to the regiment’s recruiting office in the old cigar store. “Readily they signed me up,” he remembered, adding, “In a few hours afterwards I was in the New York National Guard.”⁴⁴

ON THE SUNNY morning of Sunday, May 13, 1917, the Fifteenth’s ragtag troops set off for formal training. They assembled near Grand Central Station and marched behind the rousing play of Europe’s band. He greeted spectators with a brassy “Onward Christian Soldiers.” At the New York Central freight yard abutting San Juan Hill, the men boarded trains for a trip up the Hudson River to Camp Peekskill. There, intense drilling produced a regiment that capably assembled and disassembled weapons and qualified in deliberate and rapid fire. They returned to New York on Memorial Day as a disciplined unit.⁴⁵

Six days later, America suffered an eruption of white-on-black violence whose fury was unprecedented, even in the era of lynching. The forces of racism and economics flowing from the northward migration of blacks came virulently together in East St. Louis, Illinois, to produce a massacre that Marcus Garvey summarized with the words: “The mob and the entire white population of East St. Louis had a Roman holiday. They feasted on the blood of the Negro.”⁴⁶

Located across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, East St. Louis was an industrial and meatpacking city of seventy-five thousand people. The accelerating exodus of blacks from the South brought some five thousand African Americans there between the start of 1916 and the summer of 1917. Most came seeking factory jobs in answer to advertisements. Many wound up living in riverbank shanties and signed on as strikebreakers. Whites resented being displaced, and their anger grew deadly on trumpeted reports of African American criminality.

On July 1, white men drove through a neighborhood called Black Valley, shooting into houses. Blacks carrying weapons came out into the street. When another carload of whites approached, the blacks opened fire, killing two of the men in the vehicle. They were police officers. Whites by the thousands rampaged the next day. Often encouraged by police and National Guard troops, they shot, stabbed, beat, burned, and hanged blacks over three days. Thousands of African Americans fled as rioters doused shacks with gasoline and set them ablaze. The official death toll was thirty-nine but scores more are believed to have been murdered, their bodies burned or thrown into the river.⁴⁷

While Battle was struggling one man at a time to integrate the police force, and while so many of his friends were pleading to place their lives at risk in service of their country, America’s racial hostility had produced mass bloodshed. Then, just as the violence subsided in East St. Louis, a New York police officer assigned to the West Sixty-Eighth Street station encountered two dozen men from the Fifteenth on a San Juan Hill corner. The officer, a white man named Hansen, ordered the troops to move. As they started to disperse, Private Lawrence Joaquin objected, saying that Hansen failed to respect the uniform of a US military man. Hansen arrested Joaquin, only to have a crowd of African Americans attempt to free the soldier. Hansen backed Joaquin into a hallway, fending off the prisoner’s would-be saviors with his nightstick. Neighborhood whites swarmed into the conflict. Soon, the Times reported, police reinforcements found “two-thousand persons gathered around the corner and most of them fighting, with knives and clubs swinging and bricks flying through the air.”⁴⁸

Frederick Randolph Moore of the Age and the Reverend George Sims, the pastor of Union Baptist Church, who had married Battle and Florence, protested. “So far as we can ascertain, the men of the Fifteenth were entirely within their rights in standing on the corner. They were in uniform, were perfectly quiet and orderly, and were not interfering with traffic,” Moore said, adding, “The Fifteenth is a picked regiment, composed of the very best, self-respecting, law-abiding negroes in New York. There never has been any complaint against the men of the regiment before and if they are being unjustly treated because of their race we propose to find out about it.”⁴⁹

A FEW WEEKS LATER, Battle witnessed a parade of, by, and for African Americans, a parade unlike any he or America had ever seen. Six thousand—some said ten thousand—black men, women, and children walked silently down Fifth Avenue on the steamy Saturday afternoon of July 28, 1917. Led by youngsters dressed in white, they moved to the cadence of muffled drums and carried banners that had been inspired by the killings in East St. Louis, the lynching in Waco, and other white-on-black violence.

One banner read, “We Are Maligned and Murdered Where we Work.” Another asked, “Mother, Do Lynchers Go to Heaven?” A third was addressed to Woodrow Wilson: “Give Me a Chance to Live, Mr. President. Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” Black Boy Scouts distributed leaflets that explained “Why We March.” They answered most pithily: “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis, by arousing the conscience of the country, and to bring the murderers of our brothers and sisters, and innocent children to justice.”

Where Battle had been barred from the department’s annual celebratory march, he now stood sentinel at the Silent Protest Parade, America’s first mass civil rights demonstration.

THE HOT SUMMER moved on, long days of police work giving way to equally long nights of foot patrol. At 11:45 p.m. on August 6, 1917, Battle got ready to stand post from midnight to morning at the corner of West 139th Street and Lenox Avenue. He was due there in fifteen minutes to relieve Robert Holmes, who was finishing night duty. Holmes had transferred into the precinct. It felt good to have him there, and Battle looked forward to chatting with Holmes as they changed the guard.

Just then the noise of a burglar opening a window awakened Garfield Rose in a first-floor apartment. Rose rushed to the window and struggled with the intruder. The burglar fired four shots and fled. Holmes ran toward the gunfire and gave chase on Lenox Avenue. The man darted into a building, snuffed a gaslight, and waited in the dark. Holmes dashed in and was felled by two shots to the head.

Battle was left to look at Holmes’s blood on the floor, red blood like that of any man, yet not the blood of a man who could walk in the police department parade or earn a choice assignment as reward for exemplary performance. To New York, Holmes had not been a policeman, but a Negro policeman.

News traveled from building to building, apartment to apartment, that Holmes had been killed. Thousands rushed into the street. A superior officer brought the fact of their son’s death to Henry and Ella, whose declining health led the newspapers to describe Henry as elderly at the age of forty-nine and Ella as now blind. The police commissioner—Arthur Woods had assumed the office—said: “In Patrolman Holmes’ death the force loses a faithful and courageous officer, who died as he had lived—a fearless and loyal servant of the public, doing his best to the last to protect the lives of others placed in his charge.” And then, cognizant of Holmes’s race, Woods added: “His work was successful in a neighborhood where there were a great many colored people and he had never had any complaint for his work with white people.”

The department accorded Holmes a full-dress funeral. He was buried in Queens and was followed to the cemetery by Henry, who died of pneumonia and pleurisy in March 1918, and by Ella, who succumbed to postoperative shock when treated for a uterine tumor in September of that year.

“The bullet that killed Holmes made another wound which took their lives within fourteen months,” Battle remembered.⁵⁰

ON AUGUST 26, 1917, Florence gave birth to the last of the Battle children. They named the boy Theodore in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. Battle wrote to the hero he had seen at Yale and had met at Grand Central, and he “received a very pleasant letter in reply.”

WHILE THE ARMY scattered the men of the Fifteenth to guard New York State posts against sabotage, orders came down dispatching a storied unit composed largely of Irish Americans, including the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, to a training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, last stop before France.

The city scheduled a parade to send the contingent off as part of a Rainbow Division melding troops from twenty-six states. Hayward asked permission for the Fifteenth to march in recognition that they, too, were about to join the fight. Permission was denied. Black was not a color of the rainbow, he was told.⁵¹ Raising a hand before his men, Hayward pledged: “Even if they won’t let us parade with them in going away, that we will have a parade when we come home that will be the greatest parade . . . that New York has ever seen.”

He had the Fifteenth swear in unison “that whichever may be in survival as commanding officer of this regiment when we get back to New York, that we see to it that the glory and the honor of the Negro race in America may be served by having our welcome home parade celebrated.” One witness recalled, “And to that pledge and prophecy, all present clasped hands—and said:—‘Amen!’”⁵²

THE REGIMENT’S HOPES dimmed with fresh racial violence, this time disastrously involving black troops who were successors to the Buffalo Soldiers. The War Department deployed members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry to Camp Logan outside Houston. Anticipating the arrival of African American servicemen, a newspaper advertisement warned Houstonians to “Remember Brownsville,” site of the trumped-up shooting that lived on as a rallying cry against arming blacks.

The soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth were experienced men and accustomed to respect. They refused to sit in the blacks-only section of movie theaters or to ride at the back of streetcars. Whites chafed at their seeming insolence. Then, on August 23, a black soldier named Edwards happened upon a group of white police officers manhandling a black woman. When Edwards tried to intervene, the police pistol-whipped and arrested him. A short time later, a black MP, Corporal Charles Baltimore, protested Edwards’s treatment at the stationhouse. He was assaulted and fled under gunfire. A rumor spread that the police had killed Baltimore. Soldiers broke into the weapons storage and, with one yelling, “To hell with going to France, get to work right here,” more than one hundred troops did battle with white cops and armed white civilians. The death toll was sixteen whites, including five police officers, and four blacks. With rapid efficiency and Woodrow Wilson’s approval, the army soon hanged nineteen soldiers.

The Houston riot “left a bitter taste in the mouth,” Battle remembered. For the men of the Fifteenth, it also raised fears that the War Department would sideline the unit entirely. But, under Hayward’s pressure, the War Department put the regiment on notice of a deployment to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The mayor there told the Times: “I am sorry to learn that the fifteenth Regiment has been ordered here, for, with their northern ideas about racial equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here they will not be treated as anything except Negroes.”⁵³

On arriving, Hayward appealed to the regiment not to meet “the white citizens of Spartanburg on the undignified plane of prejudice and brutality,” and he urged that “if violence occurs, if blows are struck, that all of the violence and all of the blows are on one side and that side is not our side.”⁵⁴

Napoleon Marshall complied when he was ordered off a trolley after paying his fare. When two whites threw a company member into a gutter, the Fifteenth stood down while white soldiers from New York, in a rare show of solidarity, pummeled the assailants. Noble Sissle took a kicking from the manager of a hotel who had knocked his hat off. When white soldiers in the lobby rose up to retaliate, James Reese Europe issued a booming order for calm.⁵⁵

Finally, because of Hayward’s relentless persistence, the order arrived: the two thousand men of the Fifteenth would sail for France. On November 8, the regiment assembled on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for its only farewell parade. Battle’s kin, the Reverend Norman Roberts and his wife, Emma, came for last moments with their son Needham, a runaway transformed into disciplined soldier. And there was Napoleon Marshall’s wife, Harriet Gibbs, the first black graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, preparing to part from a man who, well past draft age, was going to make a point. And there were all the others who esteemed Battle as the unit’s godfather.

James Reese Europe conducted his band of renowned musicians in a program that included “Auld Lang Syne,” “Religioso March,” “a kind of half-syncopated arrangement of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” “Come Ye Disconsolate,” and, finally, George M. Cohan’s swinging, patriotic anthem “Over There.”⁵⁶

WITH THE REGIMENT’S departure, Battle raised his aspirations yet again. He had subscribed to the Equity Congress’s three goals: establishing a black regiment, breaking the color line of the New York Police Department, and integrating the New York Fire Department. The first two were now achieved. Accomplishing the third would require finding the ideal man to seek admission to a firehouse. Battle focused on Chief Williams’s son, Wesley.

Approaching the age of twenty-one, Wesley was the father of two sons. He supported Margaret and the boys—James, who was approaching two, and Charles, who was a newborn—on the steady, if modest, salary of a postal truck driver. While the job could carry a black man through a career and into a pension, its opportunities for advancement were slim and its duties were purely humdrum. By all rights, an adventurous young guy like Wesley would find greater fulfillment as a firefighter; and the fire department would be lucky to attract a job candidate who had Wesley’s combination of brains, strength, and athleticism. But he would have to force open a barred door and then conquer brutal resistance. Battle judged Wesley to possess the emotional resilience to weather the unceasing hostility of white men in close quarters. Just as important, he also had no doubt that Wesley could whip just about anyone if necessary. Finally, the Chief’s powerful friends could be invaluable.

Battle broached the idea of joining the fire department with Wesley. Fully aware of the difficulties that had beset Battle, Wesley bought in. His great-grandmother had come through slavery and his grandparents had escaped from bondage. Now, Wesley could endure the worst that white firefighters dished out in order to prove that a black man could excel in the job. Because Wesley knew that he would excel. So did the Chief and Margaret, who was as frightened as Florence had been in Battle’s early days.

THE NEWSPAPERS OF May 1918 brought Battle up short. Almost six months had passed with scant news of the Fifteenth, but now a headline declared:

Two N.Y. Negroes

Whip 24 Germans

Win War Crosses

City’s Colored Men in First

Fight, Decorated for

Gallantry

Then, with mounting joy, Battle read a war correspondent’s astonishing words: “Our own ‘cullud folks’—negro infantrymen mainly from the State and City of New York—have met the Germans and worsted them.” And there, just below, was a tale of “dusky warriors” and “the glorious exploit of Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts.”⁵⁷

All across the United States, Battle’s cousin Roberts and Johnson, a redcap from Albany, were a heroic sensation. Honored as few blacks had ever been honored, they delighted Battle and his colleagues at the Equity Congress for proving in extraordinary measure the American fiber of the black soldier. The path from the Sheep Meadow to valor had been long and hard.

At the beginning of 1918, the Fifteenth had landed in Brest and boarded boxcars for transport to Saint-Nazaire, where the troops were pressed into laying railroad tracks and building docks, a hospital, and a dam. The Saint-Nazaire camp was “a racial war zone” in the description of Gail Buckley, whose American Patriots is an impressively researched history of African Americans in the US military. Interviewed by Buckley, one aged veteran recounted that white Marines “began killing black soldiers one by one,” prompting blacks to retaliate by killing whites.⁵⁸

The men pressed Hayward for a transfer into combat. Hayward appealed to General “Black Jack” Pershing without success, but a desperate French army offered to take the troops to the front under its command. With Pershing’s approval, the Fifteenth then became the first American regiment to serve entirely beneath a foreign flag. The French dubbed the men les enfants perdu, the forgotten orphans.

Redesignated as the 369th Infantry, the regiment went to the front as the first of the thirty-seven thousand American black troops who were allowed into combat, while more than four times as many were limited to logistical duties.⁵⁹ The men plunged into the horrors of trench warfare amid exhausted Frenchmen and heavy German attack. The trenches were muddy and ran with blood. Beyond barbed wire, rotting corpses littered no man’s land. Artillery shells, laden with explosives and shrapnel or poison gas, dropped random death to earth.

Spread on a four-kilometer line that ran from the ruins of Ville-sur-Tourbe to the Aisne River, the orphans took to the fight—with the exception of Jim Europe’s band. On orders, he led a goodwill tour that introduced the demoralized French to swing music unlike any they had ever heard. Every performance was a rousing success. In Aix-les-Bains, the audience “rose en masse” with word that the band was heading to the front and carried the men to a troop train.

The regiment built forward ambuscades to guard against nighttime stealth attacks. Post 29 was isolated near a bridge over the Aisne. There, Battle read in the newspaper, Needham Roberts peered into the blackness after two-thirty in the morning. His partner on guard, five-foot, four-inch Henry Johnson, was about forty feet away. Roberts heard a sound, perhaps the click of wire cutters. When Roberts and Johnson heard the sound again, they fired an illuminating rocket and shouted “Corporal of the Guard” in alert.

A raiding party opened fire and hurled hand grenades. Roberts and Johnson were wounded and knocked down. Propped against a door of the dugout, Roberts threw grenades toward where the Germans had been. Johnson got to his feet. A German loomed out of the darkness. Johnson fired, taking the man down but emptying his magazine. A second German rushed forward with a pistol. Johnson cracked the man’s skull with the butt of his rifle.

Two of the enemy had hold of Roberts and were dragging him off. Johnson fell under gunfire, struggled to his feet, unsheathed a bolo knife, and plunged the eight-inch blade into the skull of a German who had Roberts by the shoulders. He turned the knife on the second of Robert’s captors. The attacker who had fallen under the blow of Johnson’s rifle butt fired a Luger. Wounded again, Johnson disemboweled the man. As American sentries arrived, Johnson threw grenades after retreating Germans. Then he slumped, wounded in both legs and both feet.⁶⁰

Major Arthur Little, a white veteran who had enlisted in the Fifteenth because no white regiment would take him at the age of forty-three, tracked the German retreat “by pools of blood” and enough abandoned equipment to indicate that the raiding party had included as many as twenty-four men. That morning, three New York war correspondents happened to visit the regiment and sent home the story read by Battle and all of America.

And, eight years after starting the fight to create an African American National Guard regiment, the Equity Congress sent a dispatch to the “Officers and Men of the 15th Regiment of New York; with the American Expeditionary Forces in France.” It read: “Colored people of New York and America in general, join the Equity Congress (your association) in congratulating you upon your splendid victory; especially Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts.”

The war to end all wars was over for Johnson and Roberts. They were hospitalized for long recuperations, while the report of their exploits prompted the French, for the first time, to award the Croix de Guerre to Americans. In recognition of Johnson’s hand-to-hand fight, they bestowed on him the still-higher honor of the Croix de Guerre avec Palme. Both men sailed from France without the slightest official American recognition, not even a Purple Heart.

ANTICIPATING MIGHTY RESISTANCE, Battle strategized with Wesley and Chief Williams to maximize Wesley’s chances of winning appointment to the fire department. Wesley would have to pass a written examination and a medical evaluation. Additionally, the department required applicants to undergo a physical test that assessed strength and speed and to submit written attestations of good character. With no shot at enrolling in the Delehanty Institute, Wesley embarked on intense self-study. Publications available for review at the municipal reference library covered subjects including fire department duties and rules, technical descriptions of steam pumpers, fire prevention techniques, the safety obligations of theaters, and the structure of city government—plus memory and arithmetic drills.

After Wesley registered for the civil service exam, his honey-colored skin was a notice to the department that its twenty-seven hundred applicants included a black man. Called for the physical test, Wesley assembled with several hundred of the men against whom he was competing. There was a distance run. Wesley far outpaced his heat with one of the fastest times ever recorded by the department. Loaded down with gear and weights, he raced up and down ladders and climbed over and under obstacles with similar ease. He proved to be the sole applicant—and only the second in the department’s history—to achieve a 100 percent score. Then, he was almost as proficient on the written exam.

The marks ranked Wesley in the thirteenth spot on the hiring list, guaranteeing that the commissioner would reach his name. Battle celebrated with Wesley and the Chief and insisted that Wesley undergo a physical by a white doctor to be ready with indisputable evidence of good health. The doctor pronounced him in excellent condition.

The Chief, meanwhile, secured letters of recommendation from some of the prominent men with whom he had become friendly as head of the redcaps. To Battle’s delight, Teddy Roosevelt gave Wesley an endorsement. The chief also stopped by to see Charles Thorley in the hope that the politically connected proprietor of the House of Flowers would back Wesley if need be. Thorley committed to providing whatever help he could.

It was widely believed that the fire department had never admitted a black man. In fact, in 1898, William Nicholson of Brooklyn had passed all the tests required for appointment, but he was relegated to working as a groom for wagon horses. In 1914, John Woodson, a former mail messenger, quietly joined the department and kept a low profile in a Brooklyn firehouse. Neither Battle nor Wesley nor anyone in the Equity Congress knew of Woodson, nor was he aware of them.

Now, word spread that an African American would be assigned to a firehouse. Woodson got the news when the black-oriented Chicago Defender published a story. He wrote to Wesley with advice that was remarkably similar to Battle’s: “Do your work and do it as near perfect as you can” and “do everything the commanding officers tell you to do, no matter what it might be, do it.” Woodson also counseled: “If they speak of our race before you, in your presence, as niggers, pay no attention—go and do something or take a newspaper and read.”

While Battle and Wesley accepted Woodson’s words as wise counsel, they also took for granted that Wesley would need more than forbearance: they expected that he would have to use his fists. Wesley had learned self-defense at the Colored Men’s Branch of the YMCA under the training regimen of wrestler and judo black belt C. A. Ramsey. He and Battle would also run through boxing workouts there. They were in excellent company because two of the greatest heavyweights of the day trained at the Y. Sam Langford had come up through the ranks known as the “Boston Tar Baby,” had lost to Jack Johnson early in his career, and had spent years seeking a rematch that was never to come. Jeremiah “Joe” Jeanette had fought Johnson seven times before Johnson claimed the world title and then was denied a further bout. Both fighters had held the colored world championship. They happily ran Wesley through sandbag and punching bag drills and sparred with him.

“Look, you better stay in shape, Sonny,” they warned, “’cause when you get downtown with them Irishmen—you are going to have to defend yourself.”

IN FRANCE, THE regiment fought on through the bloody concluding thrusts of the war and was the first to reach the Rhine. Never having fought under the American flag, the men who had been ridiculed as “darkies playing soldiers” were now the renowned “Hellfighters of Harlem.” They had spent 191 days at the front, longer than any other company, had never surrendered a foot of ground, and had never lost a man to capture. Two hundred had given their lives in combat and eight hundred had been wounded.⁶¹

A little more than a month after the armistice, on December 13, 1918, the French pinned the Croix de Guerre on the regimental colors of the 369th in recognition of the unit’s courage and sacrifices. The men then returned to the indignities that came with serving under American command. At the port of Brest, a military policeman clubbed a private for the affront of interrupting the MP’s conversation to ask for directions to a latrine. Orders barred MPs from saluting officers of the 369th, white or black, because, Major Little was told, the “niggers” were “feeling their oats.”

WESLEY’S APPOINTMENT TO the New York City Fire Department came through on January 10, 1919. He was assigned to Engine Company 55 in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood renowned as Hell’s Hundred Acres. The buildings were of two kinds: tenements whose wooden construction was akin to kindling, and factory lofts filled with flammable materials and supported by cast-iron columns that were prone to melting and collapse in a fire. By New York Central and subway, the firehouse was two hours from Williamsbridge. The long commute seemed the department’s way of telling Wesley that he was not wanted. Firefighters tended to work close to home, and dozens of firehouses were closer to Williamsbridge.

Concerned that the brass had begun a campaign of harassment, Chief Williams took advantage of Thorley’s Tammany Hall connections to get word to the fire commissioner that Wesley was in the department to stay. The commissioner responded that the door was open, but once through, Wesley would be on his own. With that sure understanding and with last words of love and support from his parents, Margaret, and Battle, Wesley set off to face what came. He could see his destination from far down the street. Opened in 1899, the firehouse was among dozens that had been ornately designed in a burst of construction. Its three stories had a brick and limestone façade and a copper-tiled mansard roof. A tower rose an additional eight feet and was fitted with hooks that allowed for hanging hoses down through the firehouse to dry after use. A single arched doorway that had been built to accommodate horse-drawn equipment dominated the front and was topped by a carved stone banner, “55 ENGINE 55.”

The company’s sixteen men anticipated Wesley’s arrival. Some were on the street. He greeted them. They said nothing. He walked into a long, rectangular, vaulted chamber and reported for duty to a captain named Doyle. The entire company had been alerted to watch. Doyle ostentatiously stormed into retirement. The men expressed their feelings with mute hard glares. Wesley asked about equipment and accommodations. Responding to the most limited extent possible, the men pointed him to a second-floor bunkroom. They had removed a bed from the standard arrangement and had set it aside by the toilet. This was where he would sleep during a workweek that entailed staying on duty for five straight days, with four hours of free time each day. Wesley took the bunk without complaint.

Deprived as Battle had been of man-to-man workplace instruction, Wesley absorbed rules and routines by observation, as a campaign of harassment unfolded. When he went upstairs to the second floor, the men went downstairs, and vice versa. After his first meal at the company’s communal table, a firefighter broke the plate and drinking glass that Wesley had used, setting a standard practice of throwing out any kitchen utensil that touched a black man’s lips. A lieutenant assigned Wesley to stationhouse cleanup, as was customary for a rookie. The work included emptying spittoons—and, for Wesley, extended to finding them filled with urine. Every firefighter filed for reassignment, most writing on transfer requests that they refused to work with “a nigger.” The commissioner barred transfers for a year.⁶²

Depending how close a firefighter lived to the station, he could go home once, twice, or three times a day to eat and relax on his four hours of free time. Not Wesley. He could barely get to Williamsbridge and back in four hours. So he stayed confined to a building that was only twenty-four feet wide and one hundred feet from front to back. He felt that he had been sentenced to prison.

THE FIFTEENTH, NOW redesignated as the 369th Regiment, sailed into New York Harbor in February 1919. Battle met changed men. In the beginning, they had been given to excessively saluting superiors; now they were confident figures who looked others in the eye. Many showed the toll of the war in uneven gaits and the wheeze of damaged lungs. Napoleon Marshall, age forty-three when he landed in France, was upright and mobile only with the help of “a special steel corsage to support my back.” Despite the severity of his injuries, the military classified Marshall as only 29 percent disabled, less than the 30 percent needed to qualify for benefits. Still, he was as ebullient as ever. He wrote:

Even after all I have suffered from my adventure in patriotism—for adventure it was, since I was beyond the age of conscription—I have never had any misgivings or felt any remorse, finding cheer and comfort always in the immortal lines of the beloved Edward Everett Hale:

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

Who never to himself has said,

This is my own, my native land?⁶³

Hayward had promised the regiment “the greatest parade . . . that New York has ever seen.” They would not be invited to the Victory Parade in July, but New York on February 17, 1919, scheduled a celebration in honor of the only American regiment to bear a state’s name. That Monday morning, as “godfather” to the regiment, Battle joined the line of march. Led by the music of James Reese Europe’s band, with Noble Sissle out front as drum major, the returned heroes stepped off in solid, square phalanxes, thirty-five feet on a side. Battle strode with Needham Roberts beside a car bearing a flower-draped Henry Johnson, for whom walking had become a struggle.⁶⁴ One shinbone had been replaced by a steel tube; most of the bones in one foot had been lost, so that Johnson moved “in a manner that might be described as ‘slap-foot.’” His discharge papers would state that Johnson had been “severely” wounded, but they would also rate that he had zero percent disability, disqualifying him, too, for benefits.⁶⁵

The formation stepped up Fifth Avenue from Twenty-Third Street, in front of a reviewing stand on which sat dignitaries including Governor Al Smith, former governor Whitman, William Randolph Hearst, and Secretary of State Francis Hugo. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, white and black, cheered along the seven-mile route that culminated in tumultuous Harlem. In the outpouring, it was possible to believe that heroic service had finally won full United States citizenship for blacks, as had been hoped for in the story of Battle’s ancestor in the American Revolution, as Frederick Douglass had envisioned in the Civil War, as African Americans had dreamed in the Spanish-American War, and as Battle and the Equity Congress had sought in fighting for a regiment whose accomplishments had far exceeded expectations.

THE GREAT MIGRATION had accelerated through the war years, so that, by the armistice, an ascendant black majority dominated Harlem. At the same time, the proud bearing of the regimental marchers exemplified a sense that the United States had reached a racial milestone with the rise of the New Negro, a people prepared to demand the equal treatment that had always been owed. Du Bois trumpeted the spirit in “Returning Soldiers,” an essay in the Crisis that concluded:

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.⁶⁶

The rallying optimism of the moment proved ephemeral. In 1918, the war’s last year, the country recorded seventy-eight black lynchings, including those of a husband and wife, Haynes and Mary Turner. A white mob in Georgia shot Haynes dead in random retaliation for the murder of a white man. After Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested her husband’s murder, a mob hung her by the ankles, doused her with gasoline, and set her ablaze. A man cut open her belly. Turner’s near-term baby fell to the ground, uttered a cry, and was stomped to death.

Bitterly, Battle noted that the story of the Turner murders appeared in the newspapers on the same day as the first reports that Johnson and Roberts had killed twenty-four Germans. He followed closely as one abomination after another plunged America into the country’s worst period of racial violence, culminating in the Red Summer of 1919.

On April 13 in Carswell Grove, Georgia, Joe Ruffin, a black farmer, attempted to bail out a friend who was handcuffed in the back of a police car. The ensuing events climaxed when a white mob set a church ablaze and threw two of Ruffin’s sons into the fire. On May 10 in Charleston, South Carolina, white sailors erupted into rioting when they concluded that a black bootlegger had cheated them out of money. A mob beat four blacks with clubs, iron pipe, and hammers, one fatally. On June 9 in Ellisville, Mississippi, a white woman reported that a black man named John Hatfield had raped her. After a posse shot Hatfield, as many as ten thousand people watched a lynching party hang Hatfield, cut off his fingers, and burn his body.

The bloody tide had profound impacts. Du Bois’s militant march toward democracy became for African Americans a girding in an immediate fight to survive. The more powerfully that blacks claimed equality, it seemed to Battle, the more virulently that whites fought back.

SOMEONE STOLE WESLEY’S BADGE. Someone sliced his rubber coat into ribbons. He found his boots filled with excrement. Then came the alarm for Wesley’s first big fire. Whipping on his gear, he clambered aboard a rig. The cellar of a building on the Bowery had gone up in flames. Announcing that he wanted to see just how brave Wesley was, a lieutenant ordered Wesley to take the hose and lead a crew into the smoky darkness. Wesley grabbed the nozzle and led a line of men who were to pull the hose and watch his back. The lieutenant was at his shoulder. Suddenly, fireballs rolled overhead. Standing his ground, Wesley trained water on the ceiling until the flames had died. Only then did he discover that the lieutenant and crew had abandoned him.

The episode established that Wesley had the courage to do the job, while also warning that he could not have faith in his fellows. Worse, he heard “veiled threats that they would throw me off the roof at some fire or push me into a burning cellar if I did not resign.” Wesley spoke with the company’s new captain, John J. Brennan, a man who had committed to treat Wesley fairly, while leaving him to overcome man-to-man bigotry. With Brennan’s permission, Wesley faced the entire company with a threat of his own: “I announced at roll call what I had heard and if that was attempted I would try to grab the nearest man to me and we would both go down. So that kept everyone far away from me on the roofs.”

Wesley detected a slight change in attitude even as the company kept its distance. “White men respect courage,” he would say years later, echoing a thought often stated by Battle. A sign of the shift emerged when a lieutenant told Wesley that the men would speak with him if he agreed to sleep in the basement.

A firefighter named John O’Toole became an arch-antagonist. The brother of a fire captain, O’Toole had transferred into the department after working as a cop. He would boast in front of Wesley about having beaten blacks while serving as a cop. O’Toole’s brother, the captain, visited the firehouse for the express purpose of making his feelings clear. With Wesley listening, he said that “the fire department was a white man’s job and not meant for niggers,” and he told Brennan: “What are you doing with that nigger? Why, I would work him so hard that he would quit in two weeks. Why, if he was in my company he would never last. I would keep him going night and day. He would have to quit.”

Wesley stared at O’Toole and thought, “A hundred men like him could not make me quit.”

THE RED SUMMER continued to peak. On July 18 in Washington, DC, a nineteen-year-old white woman married to a Naval Aviation Corps employee reported that two black men had tried to steal her umbrella. Rumors transformed the incident into a serious assault. White mobs began a four-day antiblack rampage that provoked black warfare in response. The dean of Howard University saw a mob hoist a black man “as one would a beef for slaughter” and shoot him. On July 27 in Chicago, black teenagers drifted on a raft toward a whites-only Lake Michigan beach. A white man threw rocks, striking one teen in the head and causing him to drown. After police refused to arrest the alleged rock thrower, a black mob converged on the beach. A black man shot at police. A black police officer returned fire, killing the shooter. Wild stories led to four days of white–black warfare. Men, women, and children—white and black—were hunted, beaten, stabbed, and shot. Buildings were burned. Streetcars were pulled from the tracks. Trapped in his apartment, a black cop held off a mob with an automatic rifle. The toll: 38 dead and 537 injured.

The trajectory of the violence troubled Battle. It had moved north, first to Washington, then to Chicago, a fully northern city. Could New York be next? In Harlem, the police department was the target of intensifying anger. Often harsh, if not brutal, the department had long since expended good will, and now many saw police as working against, not for, blacks. Battle suffered guilt by association. He was a cop, and cops had stood by while white mobs rampaged. He was a cop, and cops had freely swept up blacks in the disturbances. He was a cop, and cops had refused to arrest even the white man who threw the fatal rock in Chicago. More than ever, Battle felt the sting of a perception that would haunt many black cops for decades—that of being viewed as on the other side.

“This was one of the problems inherited by the Negro policeman in New York City at that time,” he remembered. “His duty was to uphold the law—but Negro citizens looked at the law across a bitter color bar.”

In September, New York reached the brink of a riot, with Battle singlehandedly at the center of the action. The events started innocently enough with a man’s straw hat, a style that was fashionable in summer but became the object of youthful sport as the season faded. He remembered:

There was a custom then all over Manhattan of bashing the straw hats of men bold enough or forgetful enough to wear such headgear after September 15th when the season for straws ended. Crowds of young men would pounce upon a straw-hat wearer, snatch the hat from his head and send it rolling down the street, or bash it over his ears.

This custom was tolerated and generally considered amusing—to everyone except the owner of the hat. The law did not take such a pastime seriously. For example, The Evening World reported humorously on an irate citizen who had brought a teenager before the Men’s Night Court. The citizen stated, “Your Honor, I was sitting in Seward Park when a gang came up laughing at my hat. The defendant took it from my head and smashed it.” The court declared, “Straw hats have been called in. You’re late, step down.” And the case was dismissed.

After midnight on September 15, Corporal Amanda Hayes changed into street clothes in the locker room of the Harlem stationhouse. He left the building for the walk to a subway entrance with a straw hat atop his head and a revolver in his holster. The night was warm; people seeking relief from the heat filled the sidewalks. A group of young blacks found amusement lying in wait for men who, that very morning, had passed the straw-hat deadline. Along came Hayes, looking very much the ordinary white civilian.

In high spirits, the teenagers reached for Hayes’s hat. Hayes identified himself as a cop. Backed against a building, he ordered the teenagers to move away. They complied. Hayes then chased the purported ringleader into a billiard parlor and placed him under arrest. When Hayes returned to the sidewalk, prisoner in tow, the teens set upon him again. They broke his hat and freed their friend.

“In a twinkling,” the New York Times reported, “Hayes was the center of a mob, battling for his life. He was felled by a blow that broke his jaw and continued to be the target for kicks and blows.”⁶⁷ Struggling to his feet, Hayes fired his gun, mortally wounding a black man named Ephram Gethers.

On duty not far away, Battle raced toward the gunfire. By the time he reached the scene, Hayes was amid a kicking throng. Liberally wielding his nightstick—“striking right and left,” in the description of the New York Globe—Battle pushed through the mob to stand over the helpless Hayes with his gun drawn.

“This man is a policeman,” he shouted, waving the club to widen the circle of attackers.

As Gethers’s life ebbed, hundreds of people flocked angrily to the street on hearing that a white cop had killed a black man. Police reserves poured from the stationhouse. They found Battle standing his ground as Hayes’s protector. Showered by bottles and chairs thrown from above, they launched into a club-swinging drive to restore order. Reinforcements from other precincts sealed the area through the night and the coming day. They all heard the story: the black cop had saved the white cop from rioting blacks.

Finally, in those moments of danger and bravery, Battle had done enough to win the gratitude of the department’s white rank-and-file. They gave him in return a toehold on equal footing. Some knew that Battle hoped to become a sergeant but had been denied admission to the Delehanty Institute. A test preparation course was getting underway. The class voted unanimously to grant him entry—for the first time conceding that a black man, this black man, was fit to command whites.

CHAPTER TWO

STRUGGLE