One Righteous Man

TONY HEARS HIS grandparents talking about Langston Hughes. He will be coming to the cottage again for a couple of weeks. A year has gone by since he last came to Greenwood Forest Farms, and Battle and Florence are frustrated that Hughes has made far less progress on the book than he should have. Florence is especially impatient. The one-time Southern girl who left school well before the age of sixteen had devoted her life to home and family rather than to literary pursuits. Baking pies was her province, not reading poetry. She shrugs at Hughes’s stature. Worse, she takes his elusiveness as a sign that he has little respect for her husband’s heroics. She regards the celebrity unforgivingly. Hughes is universally remembered as genial and fastidious, but Florence’s hostility emerges in complaints that he is an awful houseguest who, undeservedly, expects her to serve him.

“Grandmother accused Langston of being lazy,” Tony recalls. “She didn’t like to take care of him. Clean your own dishes. Help out in the kitchen. He was above that kind of stuff.”

To keep the peace, Battle arranges for Hughes to stay in Mrs. Taylor’s guesthouse across the road from the cottage. He needs the time with Hughes because he has had infuriating difficulty focusing the writer to work on their project. An editor at Simon and Schuster has expressed “our keen—and unanimous—interest in such a book.” Even more exciting, Battle has signed a deal with a screenwriter to develop a movie about his life. Still, he has gotten Hughes’s attention only in fits and starts. What Battle does not know is that many others are similarly frustrated.

Four years earlier, in 1947, Hughes had scored success with Street Scenes, an opera about life in a Manhattan tenement produced in collaboration with Elmer Rice and Kurt Weill. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson pronounced that Hughes’s lyrics “communicate in simple and honest rhymes the homely familiarities of New York people and the warmth and beauty of humanity.” Hughes’s share of the proceeds, the largest sums he had ever earned, engendered hope that he had finally attained financial security.

Chasing ever harder after income, he collected in a book the most popular feature of a longtime column he had written for the Chicago Defender—imaginary conversations with a regular guy named Simple. He accepted a visiting creative writing professorship at Atlanta University and taught children from kindergarten through high school at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago. With a one-thousand-dollar advance, he took on writing Just Around the Corner, a musical play about the Depression.

While the assignment should have been enough for any man, Hughes also agreed to collaborate with a young American musician on an opera commissioned by the American Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Federation of Music Clubs, as well as to write two musical shows planned for Broadway. Despite everything, his income plummeted in the years following 1947, which is why he added Battle’s life to a list of projects that was already too long and dispiriting. “I am a literary sharecropper,” he complained to his good friend the novelist Arna Bontemps.¹

Arnold Rampersad, author of the masterful The Life of Langston Hughes, explained, “Often subsisting in a dreary kind of neo-slavery, black sharecroppers toiled on land not their own. In the old days, Hughes had lived like a valiant runaway slave, owning nothing, wanting little besides freedom. Now, slavery apparently over, he had forty acres—but he was the mule.”

Sorrowfully, Rampersad added, Hughes recognizes that “in many ways he was not working as a serious artist,” a truth reinforced by publication of two landmarks of African American literature, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.² Instead of writing a similarly towering work, Hughes is consumed by the musicals, most of which come to naught, and by Battle’s book, which he now finds a bore. Hounded by all of his collaborators and sponsors, Hughes works to pull together a manuscript, often monitored by Florence, whose disdain is surely as evident to Hughes as it is to Tony.

THE LESSON FOR Battle after the straw-hat eruption, as well as for Wesley Williams, was that the white man was never more prepared to open a door for a black man than if that particular black man had put his life on the line to save a white man. So be it. Battle studied at the Delehanty Institute with a new stature that extended high up the departmental ranks. At least one commander thought that this big, strong Negro could be of use.

Captain Cornelius Willemse, chief of the homicide squad, summoned Battle to headquarters. Willemse had joined the police force in 1899, learned the ropes in the San Juan Hill stationhouse, and participated in the antiblack police riot of 1900. “How those nightsticks worked—mine included!” Willemse recalled in a memoir.³

Now, he told Battle that he was looking for a man to go undercover as a prisoner in the municipal jail with the mission of wheedling a confession out of a black inmate accused of murder. Willemse promised Battle that the reward for putting his life on the line, locked in a cell with a hulking murderer, would be promotion to detective. Battle accepted the assignment. Leaving Florence with the four children, and having no idea when he might return, he marched into court in the guise of a criminal arrested for larceny. The magistrate ordered Battle held pending trial. Shackled, he trudged with accused killers, robbers, and rapists to an elevated passageway that connected the courthouse with the jail. It was known as the Bridge of Sighs.

As originally constructed in the first half of the nineteenth century, the jail was said to resemble the burial place of an Egyptian pharaoh and became known as the Tombs. The name stuck even as the structure was torn down and replaced. The incarnation in Battle’s day had four tiers with stone floors. A long, rectangular area separated the cells from the outside wall. Light entered through high windows. Inmates doubled up in cages that were six feet wide and seven-and-a-half feet long.

Battle squeezed into an iron-bound space that was barely large enough for one person, let alone for the oversized Battle plus a violent man who was described by Willemse as a giant “far bigger and more powerful” than even Battle was. With a clang of the door, Battle began the work of gaining his cellmate’s trust. The typical day moved from a cellblock breakfast of hominy, bread, and coffee, to a morning spent in the clamorous open area, to a cellblock lunch of lentil soup, mutton stew, and bread, to milling in the open area, to a dinner of corned beef hash and coleslaw before the cell door locked again for the night at five.⁴

This was to be Battle’s life for the duration—although the duration proved not to last long. Willemse had recruited Battle because he needed a black police officer, but, with so few African Americans in the department, Battle was well known to blacks, both the law abiding and the law breakers. After a second day behind bars, someone recognized him. The accused murderer turned on Battle. Battle squared off, ready to fight. Up and down the tiers, inmates cried for combat. The warden called Willemse.

“Somebody’s recognized Battle,” he said. “The whole prison is howling and yelling. There’s hell to pay here.”

Racing to the scene, Willemse found Battle still in the cell. He was “unthinking of his danger but hopping mad that his trick had been discovered.” Willemse wrote, adding, “He was so nervy that his enraged cell-mate hadn’t attempted an attack.”⁵

With yet another exploit to his credit, Battle could only wait for the department to award the detective’s shield that Willemse had promised.

AS BATTLE HAD found a productive refuge in the stationhouse flag loft, Wesley took occupancy of the hose tower. The company was happy to see him climb alone to the rooftop. With Captain Brennan’s encouragement, he equipped the space with barbells for working out and a chair and table for reading. His selections included manuals filled with the information he would need to pass the fire lieutenant’s test as soon as he had racked up the required experience on the job. He had a lot to learn. The exam topics covered the operation and maintenance of every variety of departmental truck and equipment, along with proper procedures for fighting fires, ranging from tenement blazes to conflagrations in varnish factories.⁶ Company members scoffed at Wesley’s ambition, with one saying that he “would be an officer over white men when black crows turn white.” But Brennan encouraged Wesley to stick to his studies and to ignore his tormentors.

Wesley swallowed the indignities until someone went one step too far. Then he would challenge a white man’s superiority by provoking the man into trying to settle the score physically. The company had rules of combat: two firefighters with a serious beef went to the basement; the one who came up was deemed to have prevailed. When men wanted to fight, Wesley accommodated them, each time descending first and then climbing the stairs in triumph, leaving a vanquished man to wash his bloodied face at a sink.

“I could not have stayed on the job if I lost,” he would remember. “There was no Human Rights Commission, and you couldn’t go complaining to a civil rights group. They would have thought I was a weakling and trampled me. In those days you stood up alone and put knuckle to jaw.”⁷

At the six-month mark, Wesley moved up from probationary firefighter to full-fledged member of the department. Around that time, encountering a house fire while off duty in Williamsbridge, he led a woman and six children to safety. The department withheld official recognition. Then, Wesley happened by a fire while walking with a white firefighter assigned to another company in the neighborhood that today is trendy SoHo. Rushing in together, the two men guided trapped people to safety. The department recognized the heroism of Wesley’s partner in the rescue, but Wesley’s valor was chalked up to routine action. It was the same when Wesley rescued a woman and two children from a serious blaze while on duty.

Brennan, though, kept his commitment to fairness. After the company got a first gasoline-powered rig, he asked Wesley to adjust its placement in the firehouse. Wesley drew on his experience driving a postal truck—experience unmatched by anyone in the company—to flawlessly execute a tight maneuver on a narrow, crowded street. Brennan ordered that from then on Wesley, instead of the company’s senior man, would drive to fires. Someone took revenge by placing Wesley’s helmet on the floor so that the truck crushed it.

The rig had no cab. The driver sat prominently in view on a high, exposed seat in front of a steam kettle that powered a water pump.⁸ Wesley could not be missed as he raced to alarms. His visible place of honor infuriated many fellow officers. Once, a chief protested Wesley’s arrival at a three-alarm fire by refusing to issue orders to the company, sidelining the men as others fought the blaze.

As Battle had predicted, Wesley had moved up on the merits. Many years later, when Wesley and Brennan were retired, Wesley would look back fondly on the decency shown by this one white man who “was the strongest influence in my rising to the rank of battalion chief” and who had “instructed and guided me as if I were his own son.”

TWO HIGHER POWERS took command of Battle’s future: the Democratic Party’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine and a ruthless police commissioner named Richard E. Enright.

Tammany Hall’s roots trace to colonial America. After ratification of the US Constitution, New York upholsterer William Mooney organized a citizens’ group around the theme of patriotic democracy. He called it the Society of St. Tammany, Tammany being the name of a mythical chief of the Lenni-Lenape Delaware Indian tribe. Tammany was celebrated for purportedly discovering corn, beans, and tobacco and for inventing the canoe.

A growing membership transformed Mooney’s nonpartisan society into a political force. Espousing a philosophy that stood for the common man over the privileged, the organization eventually took control of the Democratic Party, along with governmental power and spoils. Tammany leaders awarded patronage jobs and moneymaking opportunities to members who contributed to the society’s success. They also engaged in excesses—a dip into the treasury here, a fraud on the taxpayers there—that pushed Tammany toward the infamous corruption of William Marcy “Boss” Tweed.

Tweed stole power by directing underlings to falsify vote counts when necessary, and he stole money through kickbacks on contracts: Vendors sold goods or services to the city government only if they inflated bills by as much as 65 percent and surrendered the overpayments to Tweed’s ring. Estimates of the thefts ranged from $30 million to $75 million in the dollars of those days, with the cost of building a courthouse notoriously topping out at four times the price of the House of Parliament in London.

Eventually, the law caught up to Tweed. Once accustomed to sporting “a diamond like a planet in his shirt front,” he died in the Ludlow Street Jail.⁹ Tammany Hall wobbled for a few years after Tweed’s downfall, but his successors soon restored its power, along with less blatantly rapacious plunder—at the center of which was the police department.

In 1870, Tweed had shrewdly engineered revisions to the city charter that placed the force under a four-member board of police commissioners. The panel was charged with setting policy and naming a superintendent, or police chief, to carry it out. On paper, the structure promised deliberative, independent policing. In fact, the arrangement empowered Tammany to approve or veto potential board members, dictate to superintendents, and introduce to stationhouses the favors and repayments, refusals, and retributions that were the currency of politics. The man who wanted a cop’s steady pay, an easier assignment, or a promotion—or a break when he got into trouble—was well advised to be on excellent terms with his Tammany district leader.

The system produced William “Big Bill” Devery, who remains, more than a century later, the most flamboyant rogue in New York Police Department history.

A son of Irish immigrants, Devery was born in 1857 in a room over a saloon on the East Side, a grimy neighborhood seemingly populated in equal proportions by cripples and criminals. His uncle owned the saloon, as well as additional bars that catered to burglars, roughhousers, and thugs. Devery grew up running errands among the drinking spots, and then he followed a natural trajectory onto the force.¹⁰ All around him, Irishmen and their boys found opportunity in policing, one bringing the next onboard until the group had hold of a good, secure workplace.

Just as important, Devery was raised in a household that swore allegiance to the Democratic machine. “I carried my father’s dinner pail when he was laying the bricks of Tammany Hall,” Devery would one day say, apparently remembering construction of the organization’s headquarters.¹¹

Fully at home, Devery won promotion to sergeant in 1884 and to captain in 1891. Quite likely, he paid his way up the ladder. In 1892, the Mail and Express reported that Tammany had set an informal rate schedule: $300 to join the force; $1,400 to rise to sergeant; and $14,000 to make captain, the last being a truly astonishing figure. Factoring in inflation, it is equivalent in twenty-first-century dollars to $350,000.

The sum is best seen as an investment that paid handsome returns. Graft was rampant. The higher a man rose in the ranks, the more money he could collect, and cash was plentiful because New York was bedeviled by commerce in sex, gambling, and alcohol.

To Devery, the vices were simply part of the human condition, none of the business of preachers and none of the business of police—except in taking a cut of the proceeds. This he accomplished with unprecedented efficiency after gaining the rank of captain at the youthful age of thirty-five.

The department posted Captain Devery at a stationhouse that served the Lower East Side, the world’s most densely populated area, nine square blocks teeming with poverty-stricken Jewish immigrants, mostly from Russia and Poland. They crowded into squalid tenements, labored in garment sweatshops, kept faith in rudimentary synagogues, and patronized twenty-five brothels.

Devery’s officers met a thick-necked bull of a man. He was five feet ten, had a fifty-inch waist, wore size seventeen shoes, and sported a moustache to do a walrus proud. As legendarily recounted, he laid down the law: “They tell me there’s a lot of graftin’ going on in this precinct. They tell me you fellows are the fiercest ever on graft. Now, that’s goin’ to stop. If there’s any graftin’ to be done, I’ll do it.”

The bill for a brothel was a $500 “new captain” initiation fee, plus $50 a month. The proprietors of gambling halls paid similar fees, some to offer wagering on horse racing, others to take bets on the numbers. Saloon owners made payments for the privilege of serving patrons at all hours, most importantly on Sunday, the lone day of rest for six-day-a-week workingmen.¹²

With money pouring in, Devery gave percentages to his police superiors and to Tammany Hall. The system of payments and protection applied in every precinct so that the vice laws became meaningless. Finally, the ruling-class Protestant elite recoiled. Asserting moral superiority, they held Catholic and Jewish immigrants responsible for debauching the city and set out to restore virtue, both for its own sake and as a means of regaining political prominence over the masses who powered the Democratic machine.

Devery bore the brunt of the reformers’ assaults. Five years apart, two state legislative committees revealed him to be a lynchpin of organized graft. Two grand juries indicted him on criminal charges, once for neglect of duty, once for bribery. Through it all, Devery made a comic opera of attempts to bring him down. He laughed past legislative interrogations with the answer, “Touchin’ on and appertainin’ to that matter, I disremember.” When juries acquitted him of criminal charges, he lighted enormous celebratory cigars.

By his brazenness, Devery personified the dark side in a fight for New York’s soul. The struggle’s opposing hero was brash young Teddy Roosevelt. After an accumulation of Tammany scandals, the voters installed a Republican mayor, who appointed Roosevelt in 1895 to the board of police commissioners. His colleagues then elected Roosevelt to serve as the board’s president, and he set out not only to reform the force but also to conquer Tammany—and, still more, to improve the morals of New York at large.

The public cheered his swashbuckling—for a time. Huzzahs faded after Roosevelt relentlessly enforced the law that barred alcohol sales on Sundays, when the saloons were filled with good citizens enjoying what little time they had for leisure. Starting his second year in office, he marched to boos in the police department’s annual parade, while Devery was a crowd favorite. Roosevelt grew more determined than ever to fire the Tammany grafter. All his efforts came to naught when President William McKinley appointed Roosevelt assistant US secretary of war, ending his tumultuous twenty-three months as president of the board.

The next mayoral election restored the Democratic machine’s grip on City Hall. Tammany boss Richard Croker took control of the board and engineered Devery’s installation as chief of police, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed position. “Too much praise cannot be given to the police department as presently administered by Chief Devery,” Croker declared as Devery cast aside consistent enforcement of laws and regulations with a showman’s flair.

Nightly, he ran the department from beside a fire hydrant, known as “The Pump” at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street in the Tenderloin. Often he displayed wads of cash. Captains, politicians, and gangsters came by to conduct business, of which there was plenty. As a noted writer for Harper’s Weekly put it in 1898, “New York is wide open once more. Tammany Hall has at last secured its ‘terrible revenge.’”¹³

The New York Times calculated that gambling interests alone were making protection payments totaling $3 million a year—an amount equal to more than $80 million today. Still more astounding, Devery went into the gaming trade directly by joining a syndicate with Frank Farrell, the city’s preeminent professional bookmaker, and “Big Tim” Sullivan, a state senator and Tammany mainstay.

Often drunk, he brought hilarity to punishing cops found guilty of wrongdoing. He fined an officer who had recklessly fired a gun thirty days’ pay for “not hittin’ nothing,” and he docked a second officer two days for kissing a girl in a hallway while on duty. “I would kiss a girl myself; there’s lots of things I’d do and do do but I’ll never get caught,” Devery said. “And so I herewith fine you good and plenty for getting caught.”

Most famously, he explained to a third officer the code he expected cops to uphold: “When you’re caught with the goods on you and you can’t get away with it, you want to stand up with nerve and take your medicine. You don’t know nothin’ then. No matter under what circumstances, a man doesn’t want to know nothin’ when he’s caught with the goods on him.”

Meanwhile, Roosevelt had left Washington to lead the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill and had then been elected New York’s governor. He took a final stab at cutting Tammany and Devery down to size by signing legislation that abolished the Board of Commissioners and gave the mayor power to appoint a single commissioner. To the relief of reformers, Mayor Robert Van Wyck, a Tammany man, named Civil War Medal of Honor winner Michael Murphy as commissioner, and then, to their horror, Murphy gave Devery full command as first deputy commissioner.

Devery’s ride ended after Tammany lost the mayoralty in 1901. No longer a member of the department for the first time in almost a quarter-century, he took to civilian life with a hefty wallet. He bought an interest in a racetrack and joined with gambling syndicate partners Sullivan and Farrell in one of the most consequential New York investments ever made. Together, they purchased and brought to the city a Baltimore baseball team that would become the Yankees. Eventually, he would adopt the interlocking letters N and Y that remain the team’s classic insignia.

LONG INDESTRUCTIBLE ATOP the department, Devery dominated the formative years on the police force of future commissioner Richard E. Enright. After Devery’s ouster, Enright, then a young cop, saw the crowning and overthrow of a succession of commissioners who lacked either the savvy or the political muscle to bring the department to heel. He played a deft insider’s game to win advancement. Promoted to sergeant, he organized a Sergeants Benevolent Association, part labor union, part lobbying firm, part society dedicated to aiding the widows and orphans of deceased members. Enright leveraged the functions to become the one man who spoke for the sergeants, and speak he did, portraying them in flowery orations as noble and graft-free protectors of the public. He furthered his influence by giving the commissioners who came and went a financial incentive to play ball, rewarding one who had promoted ninety-one men to sergeant with a silver loving cup and five hundred pieces of silver tableware.

As Battle weathered the silent treatment and exile to the stationhouse flag loft, Enright moved on to building a Lieutenants Benevolent Association into a still more potent force. His annual dinners in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel drew the rich and powerful, including President William Howard Taft. Among those who sent regrets were Devery, Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain.¹⁴

Enright became a casualty of war when voters threw the bums out. A reform mayor and police commissioner took office in 1914. Committed to tilting at the windmill of a corruption cleanup, the new commissioner established the department’s first internal affairs unit. He called it the Confidential Squad and gave command to a warhorse of a captain known as “Honest Dan” Costigan.

With Sergeant Lewis Valentine at his side, Costigan identified commanders who were in Tammany Hall’s pocket by raiding gambling houses in their precincts. He also seized the records of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, infuriating Enright with an investigation that turned up no wrongdoing. The commissioner then denied Enright a promotion to captain, even though by exam score he was at the top of the list.

Enright would have his revenge. The machine prevailed anew on Election Day 1917, installing as mayor Mike “Red” Hylan, a hotheaded Brooklyn Democrat and former train motorman. Hylan stunned New York by appointing Enright commissioner, elevating him over 122 more-senior officers. With New York’s governor studying whether to remove Enright from office out of that fear he would open the door to police corruption, Devery endorsed the appointment, saying, “It takes a former cop to make the department go. Enright is the boy to do it.”

In short order, Enright disbanded the Confidential Squad, exiled Costigan and Valentine to grueling posts, and closed the department’s honor roll to Valentine’s partner Floyd Horton, who had been killed in the line of duty. When Devery died in 1918, Enright ordered flags lowered to half-staff, assigned the department’s one-hundred-piece band to play on the day of the funeral, and made sure that a handpicked honor guard escorted his role model’s casket from church to burial.¹⁵

Shrewdly, Enright established a closely held unit to handle sensitive investigations and to enforce the law—or not—as he saw fit. He called the squad the Special Service Division. High on its list of responsibilities were prostitution, gambling, and illegal alcohol sales, the vices where crime, money, and political power intersected. No police commissioner could ignore the statutes, but no police commissioner could enforce them with crusading zeal and expect to stay in office for long. Appointment to the unit was by Enright’s invitation. He needed good cops and good superior officers who were more than that. He needed good cops and good superior officers whom he could trust.

And now Captain Cornelius Willemse put in a word for the big Negro, Sam Battle, who’d gone undercover to catch a murderer in the Tombs. Enright ordered Battle to report. No one in the department had ever opened a door for him without a fight, let alone a door to the commissioner’s elite unit, but here Enright was saying that Battle had earned a coveted posting. He took the assignment as confirmation that a black man could endure to win his due. He was glad also to serve again as a beacon for others at a time when the post–World War I determination of the New Negro had produced a small surge in African American recruits.

Edward Jackson secured state legislation that enabled him to join the force after losing an eye on the battlefield. Wesley Redding, son of a high school teacher and a bank worker, emigrated from Atlanta to New York and worked as a Pennsylvania Station railroad cop before joining the department. Emmanuel Kline, son of a freed slave, arrived from South Carolina, studied English at Columbia University and French at the Berlitz School, and served overseas in the 376th Infantry Division. He came home to work as a redcap for Chief Williams at Grand Central and then followed Battle’s path onto the force.

In 1918, the New York Police Department opened its ranks to a handful of women. They were issued badges but did not wear standard uniforms or perform standard patrol. A unit headed by the department’s first female deputy commissioner focused on the “white slave traffic,” abortions, fortune telling, “wayward girls,” and “domestic relations cases.” In 1919, Cora Parchmont, a graduate of the University of Chicago and a former high school teacher, became the first black policewoman. “We will try to keep unfortunate ones from going to prison instead of aiming to imprison them,” Parchmont told the Chicago Defender.

Unfailingly, Battle encouraged his fellow officers and Wesley to believe that they could secure fairer treatment. Now, the significance of Battle’s membership in Enright’s personal fief was profound. Headquarters duty was as distant from their posts as the peak of Everest is from a valley floor. More, they all knew that Battle was going to work for a hard man who played for advantage.

When Battle got the call in 1920, Tammany had shifted to less obvious, more lucrative corruption. Charles Francis Murphy, a former saloon owner, was now boss. He designated trusted deputy Tom Foley to be the machine’s liaison to the underworld, and he relied on Arnold Rothstein, a genius of a gangster who participated in fixing the 1919 World Series, to serve as the primary contact between crime and politics.

Murphy conducted business with legitimate interests in “The Scarlet Room of Mystery,” a private area of Delmonico’s Restaurant, so named by the press due to the color of its plush upholstery. As recalled in M. R. Werner’s history, Tammany Hall, it was “Murphy’s great and lasting contribution to the philosophy of Tammany Hall that he taught the organization that more money can be made by a legal contract than by petty blackmail.”

Enright was of like mind. He came by money with polish. A Wall Street broker bought five thousand shares of stock in a petroleum company with his own funds, sold the stock five days later, and, for reasons never credibly explained, cut a check to Enright for the resulting $12,000 profit. The broker also purchased a Stutz automobile for Enright’s wife. Meanwhile, on an annual salary of $7,000, Enright found the resources to deposit $100,000 into bank accounts.¹⁶

Battle sized up what he was getting into without illusions. As excited as he was, the Special Service Division loomed as treacherous territory. He would roam the city in plainclothes, enforcing the law where he was told to or where he would have to divine the right side of an invisible line between an arrest that brought commendations and an arrest for which there would be hell to pay.

Battle’s commanding officers gave him a desk and put him to work. At home, he told Florence, Wesley, and the Chief that Enright seemed a surprisingly fair-minded man, and he gained confidence that he would be measured by his performance. “I was assigned to cases without discrimination,” he said years later.

Battle discovered great fun in being a cop who went about armed both with a gun and with political power—at times with orders from a mayor given to using the police to torment enemies. In one episode, Hylan mobilized the Special Service Division after learning that the Republican Club in his Brooklyn neighborhood was going to hold a stag party. “I was a Democrat, too, so I had no ardent objections to carrying out his orders,” Battle told Hughes in recalling a raid that is quaint in its moralism, wild and wooly in the ease with which Battle fired his weapon, and wonderfully narrated by the poet:

When I arrived at the Club, the midnight stag party was going full blast. Beer was flowing. Smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The band was blaring. In the terminology of jazz, “the joint was jumping!”

About five hundred men were feasting their eyes on three young ladies advertised as Little Egypt, Baby Doll and Fatima. These artistes were moving to the music with sufficient vigor to almost cause the walls to shake. As the music grew hotter, egged on by the men who threw dollar bills on the stage, the young ladies began to shed their garments, piece by piece.

Each time a female garment fell, the men would cry approval, whistle, catcall and shout lewd remarks. As the music swelled in volume, one young woman threw her brassiere into the crowd and caused a stampede. Nobody got the brassiere. It was torn to ribbons in the melee. Excitement mounted as the same young lady stepped out of her step-ins.

By now, the other dancers were vying with her in divesting themselves of lingerie. Finally all three of the dancers were prancing around the stage in nothing but silk stockings. At that point, I took a pistol from my holster and fired a couple of shots through the window—my signal to the detectives outside. The shots, the broken glass, the pistol flash, and the screams that went up caused pandemonium. But every exit was covered.

Those who jumped out of windows leaped directly into the arms of policemen. Those who ran—ran into a cordon of cops. Those who fainted were carried out headfirst. A few men did faint. The police department was not prepared for so large a catch. Since a single patrol wagon would not hold more than fifteen or twenty men, we had to telephone all the stations in Brooklyn for the loan of their wagons. On the way to the precincts, the Black Marias had to pass Mayor Hylan’s home.

“Every time you go by the Mayor’s house with a load, clang your gongs,” I told the drivers of the patrol wagons. They did—all night long.

BATTLE’S HEADY DAYS of freewheeling police work slipped into eclipse when Florence noticed that three-year-old Teddy had a cough. Parents of today would hear little cause for worry in a three-year-old’s rasping. Not so mothers and fathers in 1920. Teddy’s jeopardy became clear when he gasped for air with a highly pitched sound, the signature of whooping cough.

The New York Health Department recorded 8,873 cases of whooping cough that year, while judging that large numbers escaped official count. The disease proved fatal for one of every fifteen afflicted children. A doctor took charge of Teddy on August 12, recommending the standard practices for helping a gasping child: mustard plasters on chest and back, forehead ice packs, and steam inhalations so primitive as to include traces of benzene or turpentine. After six days, Battle heard a child’s last breath for a second time.¹⁷ Gloom descended on the household. Florence was inconsolable. There was the room in which Teddy had died and there was the bed. Battle thought about taking her away, not for a vacation, but to live somewhere else.

Propelled by the Great Migration, New York’s black population grew by two-thirds between 1910 and 1920, from 91,709 to 152,467 people, with more than half drawn to live in Harlem.¹⁸ In front of Battle’s eyes, critical mass produced a militantly proud, magnificently optimistic culture.

On Sundays, there was religion. People poured from their homes unified in expressing faith, some in storefronts with little more than a preacher, a Bible, and chairs, many in grand houses of worship that had been sold off by whites. Church-going could be an all-day affair. After the readings, preaching, and singing, the churches became social centers. Playing multiple roles, they were both “a stabilizing force” and “an arena for the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.¹⁹

Sunday afternoons were taken up by The Stroll, and so, too, evenings when the weather was right. The place was Seventh Avenue, a boulevard of shops, restaurants, apartment buildings, and nightclubs. Up one sidewalk and then back down the other, people socialized with old friends and new acquaintances. Someone who knew someone always had word about something that had happened back home, and everyone on this “Great Black Way” shared Harlem’s news and gossip.²⁰

Some days the talk was of Paul Robeson. Still years from acclaim as an actor and singer, Robeson at the age of twenty-two was already a Renaissance man. He had attended Rutgers University as the school’s third black student; had won fifteen varsity letters for football, basketball, baseball, and track; had twice been named a football All American; and had graduated as class valedictorian. He passed the time on Seventh Avenue while studying at Columbia University Law School and earning a living teaching Latin and playing professional football.²¹

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, age thirty-three, was building his ill-fated United Negro Improvement Association into the country’s largest black nationalist movement with the message, “We are striking homeward toward Africa to make her the big black Republic.”

Fabulously wealthy A’Lelia Walker, age thirty-five, was running America’s dominant business selling hair-care products to blacks. She had taken over the company on the death of its founder, her mother, Madame C. J. Walker, and she was soon to be renowned as a lavish hostess of the Harlem Renaissance.

Later to achieve a landmark in labor organizing with formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, later to pressure President Harry Truman into integrating the US military, later to conceive of the 1963 March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, age thirty-one, was urging radical socialism as the path to empowerment. He and a partner had founded the Messenger, “The Only Magazine Of Scientific Radicalism In The World Published by Negroes.”

This being the takeoff of the Roaring Twenties, the neighborhood pulsed also with new cultural energy. Women cast off presumed propriety to wear their hair and their skirts shorter, so that, by one telling, a skirt sometimes “almost rivaled the bathing suit.”²² Saloons proliferated. Nightclub owners who had been tops in the Tenderloin found success in the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise, Baron Wilkins’s Exclusive Club, and more. They provided drink and the best of song and dance at a time when a convergence of talent and creativity was remaking American popular music.

Jervis Anderson, author of This Was Harlem, encapsulated the leap forward: “Four musical styles appear to have met in Harlem by 1920 and to have influenced the emergence of jazz in the community: ragtime, stride piano, blues and some of the early Dixieland sounds of New Orleans. But until about 1922 the dominant forces in Harlem music were the blues singers and stride pianists.”²³

In the ferment, an upstart newspaper was giving the venerable New York Age a run for its readers. Where the Age was a sober broadsheet with a national vision, the Amsterdam News told the people of Harlem what the people of Harlem were doing in a tabloidlike voice. The paper bannered headlines like “Murdered Man a Bigamist” and chronicled ordinary events that had a touch of the extraordinary. Readers of a feature called “Items of Social Interest” learned, among endless other things, that Mrs. Harry Reeves, a member of the Citizen’s Christmas Cheer Committee, was hosting a six-course dinner, that friends had thrown a surprise birthday party for Mrs. Laura E. Williams, and that twelve-year-old Clarence Propet had won a piano competition.²⁴

Optimism trumped the social ills brought north by ill-educated Southerners, rent gouging by white landlords, and the low wages and closed doors that were the lot of most African Americans. Journalist George Schuyler recalled the era as a time “when everything was booming and joyful and gay.”²⁵

The buoyancy of 1920 made great things seem possible, and they certainly did seem so to James Weldon Johnson, who wrote in the Age that year: “Have you ever stopped to think what the future of Harlem will be? It will be a city within a city. It will be the greatest Negro city in the world within the greatest city in the world.”²⁶

AROUND THE SAME TIME, nineteen-year-old Langston Hughes succumbed to Harlem’s allure as he stood on the brink of adulthood after a lonely coming-of-age. Born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902, he grew up in predominantly white areas of Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio, knowing both antiblack bigotry and the friendship of whites. His parental bonds were, to put it mildly, frayed.

Early on, Hughes’s father, James Hughes, abandoned his wife, his only child, and the America that denied him opportunity, and moved across the border to establish a successful life in Mexico. He was a man who scorned the poor, especially the black poor, seeming to view them as “lazy, undeserving cowards,” in the judgment of Hughes’s biographer Rampersad. Langston himself would write: “My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.”²⁷

Hughes’s mother, Carrie Langston, was a flighty woman who dreamed of a show business career and who often left her solitary son in the care of a loving neighborhood couple, or with his grandmother, a reserved woman who instilled in Hughes tales of ancestors challenging the white world’s domination. She spoke most stirringly of her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had ridden off from their home in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1859 to join white radical abolitionist John Brown’s assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. For more than a half-century, Hughes’s grandmother wore the bullet-shredded shawl that Lewis Leary had worn at his death, often using the cloth as a nighttime coverlet for her young grandson.²⁸

Shortly after graduating from high school, Hughes read the stories of the French writer Guy de Maupassant and credited them with making him “really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them—even after I was dead.”²⁹

In the summer of 1920, at the age of eighteen, he wrote his first poetic landmark, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, a work that captured the sweep of black history in thirteen lines. Audaciously adopting the personage of his race, he opened:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

Then he told of bathing in the Euphrates River, building a hut near the Congo, looking upon the Nile, and listening to the Mississippi when Abraham Lincoln traveled to New Orleans before concluding:

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Planning to study at Columbia University, Hughes arrived in New York City by ship from Mexico, where in 1921 he had left a father he admitted to hating.

“There is no thrill in all the world like entering, for the first time, New York harbor,—coming in from the flat monotony of the sea to this rise of dreams and beauty,” he wrote four years later. “New York is truly the dream city,—city of the towers near God, city of hopes and visions, of spires seeking in the windy air loveliness and perfection.”³⁰

Hughes headed north to the subway stop at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, the very stop where Battle had protected the white police officer from the angry mob. “I went up the stairs and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again,” he would remember.³¹

In that moment, Hughes had unknowingly reached fertile ground for an unprecedented African American literary movement. Already, Jamaica-born Claude McKay had written poems of powerful emotion, none having more impact than his 1919 Red Summer sonnet, “If We Must Die.” Already, Countee Cullen, an orphaned teenager who had been taken in by the Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, was writing lyrical poems as editor of the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School. His “I Have a Rendezvous With Life” had topped a national competition.

After completing two semesters at Columbia and resolving never to return, Hughes was repeatedly rebuffed in a job search because he was black. Over and over, he heard words to the effect, “But I didn’t advertise for a colored boy.” He wound up as a farm laborer on Staten Island, and then he landed, like Chief Williams and so many other young African Americans, at Charles Thorley’s House of Flowers. There, he delivered orders costing more than a month’s salary to the likes of the actress Marion Davies on her yacht and to the Roosevelts at Oyster Bay. He lasted a month before clashing with Thorley over showing up late one day.

Daring to believe that he could become America’s first self-supporting black writer, Hughes signed on as a crewman on freighters that took him to Africa and Europe. The journeys opened his eyes to the continent of his ancestors and allowed him to vagabond through cities like Paris. On his travels, he wrote poetry that drew notice at home, while new voices of the black urban masses gathered in New York.

Destitute and hoping to work his way home from Genoa, he roamed the wharves at the age of twenty-two and wrote another of his masterpieces. The eighteen lines vibrantly opened with the poem’s title, “I, too, sing America,” and locked in his dream of being read even after death.

JUST THEN, AMERICA was embarked on the mad misadventure of Prohibition and the 1920s were starting to roar. On January 17, 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect, the dry forces set out to prove they could drain even drenched New York through criminal punishments. New Yorkers were of a different mind. They drank as they always drank, only in larger quantities and in clandestine bars that came to be called speakeasies. “Be it known to the trusting and the unsuspecting, New York City is almost wide open today,” the Times reported in a May 1920 story headlined “Making a Joke of Prohibition in New York City.”³²

Congress had expected that local police would help enforce America’s only attempt to use the Constitution to limit rather than to protect personal freedom, but Congress could not require locals like Enright to adopt federal law as a mandate of their own. Judging him to be insufficiently enthusiastic, the “drys” persuaded the rural politicians of New York’s legislature to write a state prohibition statute onto the books.

Enright centralized enforcement in the Special Service Division. Only the division chief would decide which speakeasies to target. Enright promised two benefits: local cops would have fewer opportunities for graft, and the department’s vice squad would apply special expertise to clamping down. Concealed in the strategy was a third goal: with the division firmly in hand, Enright could enforce Prohibition to the extent acceptable in a drinking city—and he could exempt those parties who had the right connections.

Cynicism was well grounded. Aggressive or not, the mission of stanching alcohol sales was doomed, its fate sealed all the tighter as New Yorkers got into a partying mood. There was fun to be had in the brighter time that followed the war, fun to be had as livelier entertainment—these new movies, this new jazz, these new dances—energized popular culture, fun to be had as young women broke the shackles of sexual propriety, fun to be had in a round of cheer, or two or four or six or more.

All you needed was a supply of alcohol and a serving place out of the immediate reach of federal agents or cops. Ranging from the seedy to the elegant, speakeasies grew so common that a New York Sun columnist would eventually write that “the history of the United States could be told in eleven words: Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.”³³

Vast quantities of illicit liquor poured forth, none more plentiful than bootlegged goods financed by Arnold Rothstein. Described by his lawyer as “a man who dwells in doorways, a mouse standing in a doorway waiting for his cheese,” Rothstein smelled plenty. He locked in contracts with distillers in Scotland, transferred the cargo to Irving “Waxey Gordon” Wexler, who controlled smuggling along the New York–New Jersey coast, and passed the alcohol to Lucky Luciano, who built a distribution network for clandestine drinking spots. Together, Rothstein and Luciano grew fabulously wealthy from a criminal enterprise that was unique for seeming a godsend to millions.

Each man’s success was remarkable in its own right. Rothstein pulled his off despite being snared—and dodging jeopardy—in the gambling scheme that fixed the 1919 World Series. Luciano, meanwhile, organized a one-hundred-man army that would morph into a powerful Mafia crime family after Prohibition’s repeal. With Rothstein selecting his wardrobe and instructing him in dinner table etiquette, Luciano enjoyed outlaw celebrity while purchasing ever more influence with ever more money—including cash delivered directly to police headquarters.

Reminiscing with Hughes, Battle cast alcohol enforcement as one more straightforward police duty. If he felt that the entire police department had been sent on a destructive fool’s errand, he chose survival over principle amid the rising corruption. At home, he could talk to Florence, the Chief, and Wesley about cops who were selling protection to bootleggers, cops who were trafficking in seized contraband, cops who were letting cargoes drift ashore on the waterfront, but on the job Battle kept his mouth shut and followed orders. He took no action without express prior approval. Like every cop, he had seen how crossing someone big had very nearly destroyed a man who was as tightly wired at the top of the department as a man could be.

On January 19, 1919, Inspector Dominic Henry led a raid on a West Side apartment in which, he discovered, Rothstein was playing craps. As cops wielded a battering ram, someone inside opened fire with a revolver. The shots wounded two detectives. Nothing came of the bloodshed until newspapers questioned why the police and district attorney had failed to file charges. Finally, a grand jury indicted Rothstein, only to have a judge dismiss the case amid reports that the doorway mouse had bought his way out for $32,000. In the ensuing furor, Henry was charged with perjury, convicted and sentenced to two to five years in Sing Sing prison. He escaped that fate only through the intercession of an appeals court, his near miss hammering home to cops the danger of barging through the wrong door.³⁴

INSPECTOR SAMUEL G. BELTON commanded the Special Service Division. The son of Irish immigrants and a widower, Belton had joined the force in 1891, the era of rampant vice and rampant graft; had made good in the Tenderloin when Devery transacted business at the street-corner Pump; and had bonded with Enright as a trustee of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association. When a coveted lieutenancy opened, Enright’s influence gave Belton command of a fifty-officer squad that enforced public health laws. When Belton was about to be denied promotion to captain with the expiration of a civil service list, Enright secured special authority to boost his friend’s rank. And, finally, Enright identified Belton as the cop he trusted to navigate the shoals of politics and Prohibition.³⁵

To the men of the division, Belton could be both a powerful patron and a protective shield. Wanting both, Battle could only strive to meet his demands. Often, those entailed infiltrating a speakeasy, gambling house, or brothel to observe criminal activity, an especially tough challenge for Battle. Many a white-run joint wanted nothing to do with a black man, and many a black operator knew who Battle was. He hit upon an audacious solution: Battle asked Belton for permission to work with a raw black recruit who would be unknown as a cop and who could be trained to go undercover where Battle couldn’t. The request went up the chain and came down with a positive response.

Battle found an excellent undercover man in twenty-one-year-old Harry F. Agard. Although he was the son of African Americans, Agard could be mistaken for Chinese because his skin tone was golden and his features had an Asian cast. Especially important: Agard had a memory that was almost photographic.

Under Battle’s direction, they embarked on well-chosen investigations, Agard working his way inside a gambling operation or speakeasy and Battle staging a raid when signaled. Belton dispatched them on several occasions to bust fan-tan games in Chinatown, exploiting Agard’s appearance and his initiative in learning rudimentary Chinese phrases. More often, Belton targeted drinking spots here, there, and everywhere in Manhattan.

On West Fifty-Third Street off Broadway, Battle remembered, “there was a certain loft where the best bonded liquors, choice wines and champagnes were sold illegally.” Agard got in and emerged holding a bottle, the proprietor at his shoulder. Battle took the proprietor into custody and found “more than fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of excellent stock.”

“It took several patrol wagons to haul all this liquor to the stationhouse,” he told Hughes, adding, seemingly with a chuckle, “Some of it never got there,” as fellow officers made off with alcohol for their own enrichment. The courts disposed of the rest.

“No warrant, no evidence! Case dismissed,” a magistrate declared over Battle’s protest that he hadn’t needed a warrant under the circumstances. “The place reopened that evening with a champagne party attended by large numbers of Broadway celebrities and politicians,” Battle recalled.

As enforcement of an unpopular law undermined the criminal justice system, the vagaries became more pronounced. Battle won the conviction of Greenwich Village bootleggers after staging a raid that discovered barrels of whiskey and copper stills. But he was thrown out of court after busting a speakeasy on Third Avenue at 125th Street. He set before the judge a healthy sample of the liquor he had seized, along with three .45-caliber handguns. Again, he remembered, “The judge barked, ‘Lack of evidence! Case dismissed.”¹

Then, a spectacular crime gave Battle the opportunity to prove his mettle as a detective. Shortly after ten-thirty on the night of December 18, 1921, three men bearing concealed guns walked through the majestic doors of the Capitol Theatre on Broadway. Built at a cost of more than $65 million (in twenty-first-century dollars) the Capitol had fifty-three hundred plush seats, a wide screen on which to display silent films, a broad stage for song and dance numbers, and a pit for a seventy-member orchestra. The imperious Major Bowes served as impresario. Later to gain fame by staging that era’s American Idol, he drew throngs with movies featuring stars such as soon-to-be “King of Hollywood” Douglas Fairbanks.³⁶

Man’s Home, a drama about a businessman whose wife falls in with bad company, was playing as the gunmen donned masks and made their way to the theater’s business office. “Stick your hands up and be quiet,” the leader ordered as they burst in on three men and one woman.

The robbers bound the men with wire, left the woman untied, closed them in a closet, and escaped down a fire escape and into a cab with $10,000.³⁷ The newspapers played the story big. The detective squad of the West Forty-Seventh Street stationhouse got the case. They had little to go on. Then, through contacts among black New Yorkers, Battle met a source late at night in Central Park. The man named two of the bandits and said the Capitol’s elevator operator, William Singleton, had laid out how they should pull the robbery.

Singleton was African American. Battle tracked him down, took his confession, and hauled him to the stationhouse. Brimming with excitement at having cracked the most publicized crime of the day, he delivered Singleton to the detectives, only to discover that the tough Irishmen had no intention of allowing an African American to outshine them. They spat that the case had been none of Battle’s business and ordered him to get lost. Worse, the white detectives stole his accomplishment with lies. The newspapers reported that Daly, Cordine, Ferguson, Garrity, and Manning had identified Singleton and secured the confession.³⁸ Major Bowes showed his appreciation by giving Battle and Agard lifetime passes to the Capitol’s shows. That was all the reward they got.

DESPITE THE DEPARTMENT’S overt racism, Battle continued to believe that Enright was a man of surprisingly liberal racial views. The commissioner had promoted former Pennsylvania Station railroad cop Wesley Redding to become the department’s first full-fledged black detective. He had also given important recognition to African American officers in general. Then and today, cops formed associations based on ethnicity, religion, and other markers of group identity—Irish cops in one society, Italians in a second, Jews in a third, and so on. Battle’s fellow officers broached forming an organization of their own. Initially, he resisted. The concept of blacks symbolically separating from whites seemed to run counter to his belief in integration. His colleagues told Battle they were seeking only an equal privilege that would allow for mutual assistance. Battle accepted their nomination as the man who would ask Enright for recognition.

Battle presented the petition. Enright said no. Blacks had numerous opportunities to join the many associations that were open to all cops, he said. Battle pressed his point, telling Enright that “like other groups we wanted our own distinctive organization.” Enright reconsidered and gave departmental approval to the Guardians Society. Battle became the first president of an organization still in existence nine decades later, and he credited Enright for playing square.

ATOP ELEVEN STEPS, the front door opened into finer living space than Battle had ever imagined he could provide for Florence, Jesse, Charline, and Carroll. Parlors, studies, bedrooms, dining area, kitchen, baths, and two staircases filled four handsomely appointed stories. There was a full basement and a backyard with a garage that had been built for a carriage. On July 12, 1922, Battle placed the title to the townhouse in Florence’s name, counting himself the beneficiary of the white man’s race foolishness.

The family’s new home was the work of a developer named David King, who had set out in 1890 to build an unparalleled neighborhood. With financing from the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he purchased a Harlem tract between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and commissioned three architects to design 146 row houses. King assigned the block front on the south side of West 138th Street to James Brown Lord, who had drawn notice for the Beaux Arts beauty of a now-landmarked Manhattan courthouse. Lord gave his residences a Georgian look and sheathed their exteriors with red brick and brownstone. The work of designing the north side of West 138th and the south side of West 139th went to Bruce Price, whose portfolio included a Yale University lecture hall. Price used yellow brick, white limestone, and terra-cotta to fashion houses in the Colonial Revival style. The renowned Stanford White, architect of the Washington Square Arch, drew from the Italian Renaissance for homes along the north side of West 139th. He covered them in rusticated sandstone and rose-colored bricks accented by pink mortar.

As beautiful as the row houses were, King found few takers amid a severe economic downturn. Equitable Life foreclosed, and the value of the company’s investment fell further as developers flooded the area with new housing. This was the era when real estate mania swept Harlem in anticipation of subway construction. After the bubble burst, Equitable Life leased the properties to rent-paying businessmen and professionals. The company held to a whites-only policy for almost all of the next two decades. Finally, in 1919, relinquishing hope of a white resurgence, Equitable Life put the row houses up for sale to all comers. From September that year through 1920, blacks took ownership of fifty-four of the residences, with many more buyers soon to come, including Battle, who purchased 255 West 138th.

As Harlem was the place to live for African Americans, the row houses were the place to live in Harlem. Barbers, waiters, dressmakers, and domestics who aspired to upward mobility became neighbors to doctors and lawyers, as well as to a concentration of pathbreaking entertainers and racial “firsts.” The homeowners were seen as strivers, and the blocks took on the name Strivers Row.

Harry and Ethylene Pace were among the first to welcome the Battle family. The Paces lived in an abutting townhouse. A year younger than Battle, Harry Pace was born in Georgia and studied at Atlanta University when Du Bois served there as a professor. He worked for a time as business manager of an ill-fated journal edited by Du Bois, then embarked on ventures in insurance and banking that took him to Memphis. There, Pace met W. C. Handy, the musician now known as “The Father of the Blues.” Pace joined Handy in songwriting under the aegis of the Pace and Handy Music Company.

He saw their future in New York. The recording industry was coming to life in the city, but the phonograph companies were no more open to blacks than any other area of commerce. Handy would remember confronting “the beast of racial prejudice,” while Pace recalled: “I ran up against a color line that was very severe.” Undaunted, he founded a publishing and recording business for African American music. When the Strivers Row townhouses came on the market, Pace purchased 257 West 138th and Handy bought 232 West 139th. Pace set up shop in the basement and recruited twenty-three-year-old Fletcher Henderson to serve as music director of the Pace Phonograph Corporation’s Black Swan record label. Henderson would soon purchase the row house two doors down from Handy’s and go on to lead an orchestra that pioneered the smooth sound of swing. When Battle moved in, Pace had an eight-man orchestra and a sales network in major cities. He advertised with the slogan, “The only genuine colored record. Others are only passing for colored.”³⁹

Around the neighborhood, Battle shared the enthusiasm generated by Pace, Handy, and Henderson as they sold the talents of African Americans. Often, a fourth musical great would come across the street from 236 West 138th to revel in the burgeoning of blacks in entertainment. No one had enjoyed more success than Eubie Blake. The son of former slaves who took to the piano as a child, Blake had teamed up with Noble Sissle to write Shuffle Along, a musical comedy that took Broadway by storm in 1921 with tunes like “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” As Battle moved onto Strivers Row, the show was within a few days of ending a 484-performance run. The chatter was about how Blake was taking Shuffle Along on the road for a tour that eventually extended for two years.

Across the rear drive, Battle met Vertner Tandy, New York’s first licensed black architect and owner of 221 West 139th. Down the sidewalk, at 221 West 138th, he encountered Will Marion Cook, the preeminent black composer and conductor of an earlier generation. Harry Wills, the black heavyweight boxing champion, was around the block at 245 West 139th. Love of boxing drew Battle naturally to Wills. Known as “The Black Panther,” Wills came up from New Orleans to become successor to Sam Langford, the black champion who had helped train Wesley for firehouse combat.

Now, as Battle joined him on Strivers Row, Wills was angling for a bout with reigning world champion Jack Dempsey. On the very day that Battle took the deed to his new home, the newspapers reported that Dempsey had signed a statement of intent that read: “The said Jack Dempsey agrees to box the said Harry Wills for the heavyweight championship of the world.”⁴⁰

Among all his neighbors, Battle had perhaps the most in common with Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright, who lived diagonally across the street at 218 West 138th. Eight years younger than Battle, Wright was born in Atlanta and raised as the stepson of a pioneering black doctor. He was fifteen when white-on-black violence swept the city. With gunfire crackling, his stepfather pressed a rifle into his hands with the order: “Son, you cover the front of the house. I’ll cover the back. If anybody comes through the gate, let ’em have it.”

Schooled at historically black Clark Atlanta University, he set his sights on studying medicine at Harvard. He submitted his academic transcript and letters of recommendation and arrived at the school for an interview, at which time the director of admissions discovered that he was black. Wright refused to leave without the interview he had come for. Finally, exasperated, the biochemist asked, “Mr. Wright, do you have any sporting blood in your veins? Will you agree, if I ask you a few questions here today that I will never be bothered with you again in life?”

Wright underwent a grilling about chemistry, won admission, and graduated fourth in the class of 1915. Setting out to specialize in surgery, he applied for positions at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston City Hospital, and Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital—and was offered only a laboratory job at Mass General, one that would deny him contact with patients. Regretfully, Wright put aside his principle that hospitals should be peopled by doctors and patients of all colors and took a position at historically black Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC. There, he proved wrong the widely held beliefs that African Americans were more susceptible than whites to diphtheria and that the recently discovered Schick test for immunity to the bacterial lung disease was useless on black skin. With the outbreak of World War I, Wright enlisted in the medical corps. His record included a study that taught how best to accomplish small pox immunizations.

Home from the war and married, Wright moved to Strivers Row and opened a practice on Seventh Avenue. His office was a short distance from Harlem Hospital, the community’s sole health-care institution and part of the city’s public hospital system. It may as well have been miles away. The staff was all white, while the patient census was increasingly black. Wright applied for a position. Under community pressure, hospital chief Dr. Cosmo O’Neill appointed Wright as Harlem Hospital’s first black staff physician—but only as clinical assistant visiting surgeon, meaning that he could treat ambulatory patients for a few hours a week without pay or admitting privileges. O’Neill’s attempt to blunt the impact of Wright’s presence was to no avail. His superiors demoted O’Neill from hospital superintendent to monitoring ambulance traffic.

As happened when firefighters refused to work with Wesley, four staff physicians walked out. As happened to both Wesley and Battle, “When I first started no one would talk to me,” Wright recalled years later. He not only held firm, he fought on. When Battle became his neighbor, Wright and the NAACP had organized an investigation that documented patient abuses at the hospital, along with tensions between white doctors and the seven black physicians who had followed Wright onto the staff. He wanted the ranks to grow, but, sharing Battle’s dedication to racial equality, Wright rejected Mayor Hylan’s plan to staff the hospital entirely with African Americans.⁴¹

Composer. Musician. Conductor. Entrepreneur. Architect. Boxer. Surgeon. Cop. An accomplished man among accomplished men, Battle could see futures of greater opportunity for Jesse, Charline, and Carroll. The children enrolled in public schools where stern women taught English, arithmetic, history, geography, science, and every other subject, including Latin. Many were the barriers still before the kids, but Battle could see the barriers breaking. And he could look past the swelling arrivals of poor uneducated Southerners to envision Harlem as the place where the barriers would first fall. He was glad to be raising the children here, to have placed them among tall-standing role models who were to be found nowhere else in such numbers.

Gale-force winds buffeted New Bern. When a chimney flue caught fire, forty-five-mile-per-hour gusts whipped sparks into the air and down onto cedar shingle roofs in the preserve of New Bern’s black citizens, including Anne, who still lived at 8 Primrose Street. A residence on this street caught flame and then a house on that one, and New Bern’s Great Fire of 1922 was underway. Joe Gaskill McDaniel witnessed the inferno through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy.

“Flaming shingles, careening on the breast of the gale, flew through the air for blocks and set widely scattered conflagrations,” McDaniel remembered in 1992, adding, “Pitiful humans screamed everywhere, like trapped animals fleeing from a flaming forest.” Anne joined the escaping throng.

The fire destroyed more than one thousand buildings. Thirty-two hundred people were homeless; nine out of ten were black. Battle’s younger sister Mary Elizabeth, who was now principal of Beaufort, North Carolina’s “Free School” for blacks, took Anne in. Mary Elizabeth was married to Curtis Oden, a shoe cobbler and Beaufort’s first black undertaker.⁴²

Traveling to New Bern, Battle found the family home to be a blackened pile in a blackened field. Only the chimneys remained standing. Those, Thomas had built to last, Battle well knew. All around, he told Hughes, “the pretty little cottages of my youth were no longer standing,” and he added bitterly that “today where I was born there is a pickle factory” because the whites had broken a promise to create a park.

Battle invited Anne to live with him. Anne declined. She preferred the country to Harlem, the South that she knew to the North that she didn’t. So, glad that Anne was in Mary Elizabeth’s good hands, Battle returned alone to the distant universe where he worked as a Prohibition-era vice cop and where he lived side by side with trailblazers who were the pride of his race.

BATTLE RETURNED TO hard times as a New York cop. For months, black Harlem had been inflamed by the death in police custody of a nineteen-year-old transplant from Charleston, South Carolina. The passions that were to be unleashed by Herbert Dent’s fatal encounter with blackjack-wielding detectives were more intense than any previously aimed at Battle and fellow members of the Guardians Society.

The pressures began building before midnight on December 19, 1921. The cops of Battle’s former base, the West 135th Street stationhouse, were changing shifts. A few blocks away his friend Jasper Rhodes was leaving his beat for the night. He spotted two men in the shadows of a doorway.

“You two fellows come out here,” Rhodes ordered. “I want to get a good look at you.”⁴³

One of the men drew a gun and opened fire. Bullets hit Rhodes in the stomach and shoulder. The pair fled. In Harlem Hospital, Rhodes told detectives that darkness had prevented a good look at either man, but he did know that his assailants were black. Rhodes was strong at the age of twenty-nine; doctors predicted a full recovery. Still, they all knew—Florence, Jesse, Charline, and Carroll knew, and Rhodes’s wife, Isadora, knew—that two of New York’s first three black officers now had been shot in the line of duty. Battle was the exception.

Crime was on the rise across New York and nowhere more so than in what the newspapers called the city’s black belt. Over the next six months, young, male African Americans shot five more police officers, three fatally. Luther Boddy was the most notorious of the gunmen.

A swaggering twenty-two-year-old, Boddy had spent time in prison for burglary. Detective sergeants Francis J. M. Buckley and William Miller picked him up for questioning in connection with the Rhodes shooting. Boddy had hidden a gun in his coat sleeve, tied in such a way that the weapon would drop into his armpit if he raised his hands. Two hundred feet from the stationhouse, he fatally shot Buckley and Miller at point blank range.

All of twenty-five days passed between the murders and a jury’s finding of guilt. Central to the trial was the question of why Boddy had shot the two white detectives. He testified that he saw the stationhouse as a torture chamber where, on previous occasions, police had beaten him with blackjacks and rubber hoses in hope of eliciting confessions or of coercing him into informing on others.

“They did not succeed in either,” Boddy’s lawyer told the jury, “but they did create in his mind a horror and fear of the police which meant physical agonies and torture of the human soul.”⁴⁴

Regardless, the jury convicted and the judge swiftly condemned Boddy to death. His fate had been doubly sealed when, in the middle of the trial, a mentally disturbed black man fatally shot a white cop through the head.

Police had arrested Frank Whaley for general disorderliness. They brought him to the stationhouse that covered southern Harlem. He appeared docile. Officer Otto Motz went about business seemingly without cause for wariness. Then, suddenly, Whaley snatched Motz’s gun from his holster and fired.

The murder demanded explanation. A rationale quickly emerged. Calling Whaley a “crazed negro,” the Times attributed his madness to racial rage. He was believed to have acted in “revenge for the arrest of Luther Boddy.”⁴⁵

Next, Officer Patrick McHugh was shot in the head while trying to arrest three armed robbers. Then, a janitor shot a lawyer in a fee dispute and wounded Officer Henry Pohndorf in a running gun battle.

Increasingly convinced that Harlem’s criminal element had declared open season on cops, the men of the West 135th Street stationhouse patrolled on war footing. Detectives worked in three-member teams instead of pairs. Commanders beefed up night rounds under special supervision.⁴⁶ The full roster took up the mission of imposing justice on the perpetrator of the single unsolved shooting, that of Officer Patrick McHugh. Soon, detectives zeroed in on Herbert Dent, and a judge issued an arrest warrant.

Dent had but a few hours to live. The official account of his death appeared in the newspapers of June 28, 1922. Casting one of Battle’s Guardians Society colleagues in a central role, the story was patently incredible: It is two-thirty in the morning. Wesley Redding, the city’s first black detective, is alone in the stationhouse. An informant places Dent in a saloon five blocks away. Redding sets out to capture New York’s most wanted man, an alleged member of Boddy’s robbery gang, without back-up. Redding hauls Dent to the detectives’ room. Still alone, Redding makes the same error that had proven fatal to Motz: He drops his guard, enabling Dent to grab his holstered gun. Fighting furiously, Redding yells for help. Detectives McGrath and Gorman rush into the room and subdue Dent with their blackjacks, saving Redding’s life. A short time later Dent dies at Harlem Hospital. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Norris attributes the death to acute alcoholism. “If he had not been drinking the beating would not have caused his death,” Norris says, and the district attorney closes the case as the unfortunate result of justified police action.⁴⁷

One man would have none of it. New York Age editor Frederick Randolph Moore led the newspaper into challenging every aspect of the official account. Three days after Battle purchased his Strivers Row townhouse, he read that Dent had been an elevator boy and not a member of Boddy’s robbery gang, that a white officer named Scott had actually arrested Dent, and that Dent had never snatched Redding’s gun. Over the next months, Moore’s revelations pointed increasingly toward homicide. People who lived near the stationhouse said they often heard screams as men and women were brutalized inside. A woman said that “moans and groans” and the “sounds of blows” had awakened her on the night Dent died.

Two doctors retained to review Dent’s autopsy found a “cerebral depression,” a break in “one of the principal veins leading to the brain,” and no evidence of alcoholism. Then, a white US Secret Service agent who happened to have been in the stationhouse said that detectives McGrath and Flynn had struck Dent repeatedly with a blackjack and a nightstick to force him to confess. While Dent was prone, the agent said, McGrath broke the nightstick with a swing that hit both Dent and the floor. A black uniformed officer got a fresh baton.

“McGrath and Flynn continued beating this man with their blackjacks,” the agent said. “Flynn broke his blackjack and then picked up the nightstick which the patrolman had brought back to the room, struck the man across the side of the head—and then everything was in silence for a moment.”

“Then they took the bottle and tried to force some whiskey down the colored man’s throat by holding his jaws open,” the agent recounted.

The Age’s revelations infuriated Battle’s neighbors. Awaiting execution at Sing Sing, Boddy took on the quality of a folk hero who had answered the barbarism of white cops on behalf of all blacks. His corpse came home to Harlem in spectacle. Thirty thousand people filed by his casket, and thousands more lined Seventh Avenue to watch his hearse pass the corner where he had gunned down the two detectives.⁴⁸

Battle suffered guilt by his association with the New York Police Department. Where fellow path breakers on Strivers Row basked in unequivocal admiration, he bore the stigma of membership in an institution seen as a muscular representation of white repression. Few were surprised when the district attorney ruled out proceeding against anyone involved in Dent’s death.

BATTLE BID BON voyage to Sam Belton on August 25, 1923. The inspector sailed on the Homeric for a sixteen-week excursion to Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Brussels, and London. Enright had announced that his Special Service Division chief would study “police conditions” on the continent in order to bring innovative crime-fighting strategies home to New York. The commissioner often took months-long cruises to the West Indies, Europe, or South America, sent off in staterooms overflowing with flowers, chocolates, fruits, and cigars. Now, he was similarly rewarding a trusted aide with the help of thievery more damning in its pettiness than the underworld cash flowing through police headquarters.

Enright had founded a charity whose stated purposes were to support the families of slain cops and to tide over officers who had run into financial difficulties. While the public had donated more than $95,000, Enright was on his way to providing all of $3,131 to widows and fatherless children. Instead, he was buying diamond-studded “honorary” deputy commissioner badges for influential New Yorkers. He also helped Belton tour Europe in style with $2,000 in spending money.⁴⁹

Leading the high life, Enright and Chief Inspector William Lahey were among eighty-two thousand spectators who filled the Polo Grounds on September 14 to watch a heavyweight bout. Jack Dempsey had held the color line against Harry Wills and instead was fighting Argentine Luis Firpo, the so-called Wild Bull of the Pampas. According to The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, a posthumously published as-told-to autobiography some authors rely on and others trash as fiction, Luciano held court ringside at row A, seat 1. Having bargained his way out of an arrest for heroin possession, Luciano bought respectability again by distributing tickets to two hundred elite New Yorkers, including James Joseph “Jimmy” Hines, the broad-shouldered, ice-blue-eyed Tammany Hall chief from Manhattan’s West Side. Stars of stage and screen came by to shake Luciano’s hand. So did New York’s top two police officials.

“It was a pretty big thing when Dick Enright, the police commissioner of the whole city, come over to see how I was feelin’,” The Last Testament quotes Luciano as saying. “And right with him was Bill Lahey, his police chief. Why not, they were on our payroll.”

In this telling, Luciano delivered $10,000 a week to headquarters in paper bags. While the figure is beyond confirmation, the coauthors of the well-researched book NYPD: A City and Its Police concluded that “few people have disputed [Luciano’s] assertion that headquarters was for sale.” More, the day before the fight, a court had subpoenaed Enright in a case in which two detectives were alleged to have demanded a $2,500 bribe to overlook a shipment of liquor and admitted they had released the bootlegged goods after being told that it was actually owned by three high police officials.⁵⁰

AMID THESE ROILING TIDES, an inspector named Gaines took command of the Special Service Division in Belton’s absence. He delivered an order directly to Battle. In Harlem, he said, wives had complained that husbands were playing craps in a gambling hall on West 144th Street. The women were black, the men were black, and Battle was the division’s only black. Gaines told him to shut the place down.

This was no two-bit game. This operation was the property of Baron Deware Wilkins. More than a dozen years had passed since Battle had stood beside Wilkins, awaiting Jack Johnson’s arrival at Grand Central after Johnson had defeated Great White Hope Jim Jeffries. Wilkins had been a big man then, and he was bigger now.

As his Little Savoy cabaret passed into history, Wilkins, his brother Leroy, and John W. Connor, who partnered with Wilkins in owning Negro League baseball teams, had opened clubs in Harlem. The musicians who were revolutionizing the American popular idiom followed to a nightspot at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street that would gain fame as Wilkins’s Exclusive Club. There, dressed all in black at the keyboard of an upright, was Jelly Roll Morton, described by cultural writer Stanley Crouch as “the first theoretician of jazz and almost certainly its first great piano player.” There, watching and listening in awe, was young James P. Johnson, soon to be known as a master of stride piano and composer of “Charleston,” the anthem of the Roaring Twenties. And there, maybe, was a child prodigy by the name of George Gershwin. The future composer’s first biographer, David Ewen, describes Gershwin as roller-skating past Wilkins’s club as a boy about six years old. In this account, the strange new sound of jazz mesmerizes young George, whose itinerant family lived for a time in the white quarters of Harlem.⁵¹

As Wilkins knew, running a cabaret in New York City entailed buying the favor of the police and Tammany Hall. At first, the tab was fifty dollars a month, paid through Leroy, who was the front man for the Astoria Café near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 135th Street. Connor handed over seventy-five dollars a month as proprietor of the Royal Café, just down the block. In 1913, after the Manhattan district attorney indicted a Harlem police inspector, the prosecutor questioned Connor and Leroy Wilkins. Asked why he paid the bribes, Leroy “replied that he wanted to run an all-night saloon, and that even if he just wanted to run a straight, legal place the police, he was sure, could easily frame him up and put him out of business. To pay was the easiest way.”⁵²

Cultivating police and politicians was especially necessary for Wilkins because the good citizens of Harlem had mixed feelings about saloons. Straight-laced Frederick Randolph Moore, for one, was appalled by the rise in drinking. He railed in the Age in 1914 that Harlem was “infested” with more than eighty-five establishments that “thrive by selling whiskey principally to members of the race.”

Headlined “Too Many Saloons in Harlem,” Moore’s editorial described the whiskey as “the kind that makes you fight your mother,” complained that the businesses were dominated by white men who opened their “side door entrances” to black women, and reported that the “colored saloonkeeper seems to have a difficult time making a living at best.”⁵³

With rivals for the drinking dollar on every corner, Wilkins factored the purchase of police and politicians into the cost of doing business. The Exclusive Club stayed open to all hours, even as headquarters repeatedly hauled him into court. No matter the evidence, magistrates dismissed the charges or imposed nominal fines. Time and again, Battle and fellow cops watched Wilkins return unscathed to the scene of the party, seemingly untouchable.

Then one of Wilkins’s friends brought two young men into the club. They drank liberally and went on their way. Over the coming weeks, they became familiar faces, stayed late, and took an interest in other pleasures available to the trusted. Finally, Wilkins opened that door. An associate brought the men to an apartment in the Tenderloin, where a madam welcomed them into the company of Linette, Rose, and Rosie. After the third such jaunt, the men came out from undercover as agents of the Manhattan district attorney.

For the only time in his life, Wilkins spent the night in jail. With characteristic panache, he complained only of personal betrayal, saying, “The man who turned me up was a man I would have trusted with $20,000. That is what hurts me.” In fact, he had little to worry about. Time and again, anti-vice crusaders had targeted Wilkins, only to have Tammany magistrates dismiss charges for a supposed lack of evidence. This time, Wilkins dodged jeopardy with the announcement that he would run a simple bar, flamboyantly named the “Get What You Want.”⁵⁴ But retirement was never the plan. The lesson learned was that a man could never have too much protection, so Wilkins began assiduously befriending politicians with well-aimed generosity. Most importantly, he bonded with Tammany Hall’s Jimmy Hines.

BORN ON MANHATTAN’S East Side, Hines was the son of a police and fire department blacksmith. He captained a Tammany district that stretched along the Hudson into West Harlem. Refined manners put him in good stead with the business elite, while a gracious personality earned him the affection of the working class. He arranged for patronage jobs, fixed traffic tickets, made sure no one went hungry, and kicked off summers by hosting as many as twenty-five thousand people to hot dogs, soda, and ice cream in Central Park.

Hines was a rogue, too. He had mutually beneficial relationships with gangsters. They delivered money; he delivered services available only through the good offices of Tammany’s most powerful chief. He had only to make a phone call to secure protection or inflict punishment. Both were crucial to Wilkins’s cabaret ambitions, as well as to his determination never to take a fall again. When Prohibition dawned, they also helped propel his Exclusive Club to the top in the remaking of Harlem as New York’s illicit fun zone.

Rebellion against temperance brought nightclubbing there to exuberant life. Hip and chic whites arrived late at night in limousines to let loose in a dark town pulsing with daring rhythms. Finely dressed and carrying fat wallets, they crowded into hot spots that catered to partiers from a hostile culture and that were off limits to regular folks. Few Harlem residents ever stepped through the doors of the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, Small’s Paradise, or Wilkins’s Exclusive Club and into a universe where blacks entertained laughing, dancing, drinking revelers who had little interest in the afflictions of the lives around them.

To enhance the aura that his club was “exclusive,” Wilkins limited admission to whites and light-skinned blacks, with the exception of darker-toned celebrities. A young woman whose name was Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louisa Virginia Smith was at the center of the action. Ada Smith had grown up in Chicago dreaming of show business, and she had made her way to New York in 1914 to see the legendary Baron Wilkins. She was not yet twenty-one and faked her way inside with two under-aged friends.

“Everything about his bar and back room was bigger and better than anything else in the neighborhood. He drew a crowd we called ‘sporty,’” she remembered, adding, “Evidently I’d caught his eye. He was such a big, fat man that it wasn’t easy for him to move around, but he managed to get over to our table. He said to Gertie and Anita, ‘Whose’s that cute kid?’”

They chatted and Wilkins pointed to Smith’s red hair. “You know what,” he said, “I think I’ll call you Bricktop.”⁵⁵

For the rest of her long life in cabarets, Ada Smith would be known as Bricktop, most famously as barkeep and chanteuse to the Lost Generation writers who congregated in Paris of the 1920s. She was a favorite of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Cole Porter, and, yes, Langston Hughes.

Before those expatriate years, Smith returned to the Exclusive Club in 1922. She found a place where liquor and music flowed freely in a land beyond the law. Much to Wilkins’s anger, two headquarters detectives had staged a raid in March of that year. They arrested “ten white and two girls of color” plus “ten white and one man of color,” accusing some of the women of “vulgar dancing.” As ordained, a magistrate promptly dismissed the charges.⁵⁶ Still, Wilkins said, the police should have known better than to bust in. Next time, if there was a next time, the cops would learn the error of their ways.

The great man took Bricktop on as a singer. Patrons loved her and so did he. When Bricktop said that the club needed a better house band, Wilkins took her advice and imported a five-man combo from Washington, DC. They included a dashing and handsome young piano player; Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington stepped onto the launching pad for his career.

Al Jolson and John Barrymore were regulars, along with playwright Charles MacArthur, who wrote The Front Page with Ben Hecht, and Lucille LeSueur, a chorus girl soon to be known as Joan Crawford. And then there was the “nice quiet Irishman” who would say to Bricktop: “Bricky, come on let’s you and me . . .”

“Oh, no that ain’t the play,” she would answer, knowing better than to get tangled up with Jack “Legs” Diamond, the killer who served as muscle for Arnold Rothstein.

“Sometimes the place would be full of gangsters,” remembered Elmer Snowden, who led Ellington’s combo. When the gangsters came in, he said, Wilkins “would close all the doors.”

Everyone on both sides of the law spent wildly. Ellington recalled a scene that many recounted as a regular part of the fun: “People would come in who would ask for change for a C-note in half dollar pieces. At the end of a song, they would toss the two hundred four-bit pieces up in the air, so that they would fall on the dance floor and make a jingling fanfare for the prosperity of our tomorrow. The singers—four of them including Bricktop—would gather up the money and another hundred-dollar bill would be changed and this action would go jingling deep into the night.”

Wilkins’s world, one commentator wrote, was a place where “one easily forgets that all Harlem is not like it. Harlem, the Harlem of the poor, overcrowded, underfed, with children crippled with rickets and scurvy.”⁵⁷

ENRIGHT’S ORDER to raid Wilkins’s gambling joint set up a clash between two of Harlem’s most prominent residents: Battle, who was both admired for breaking the police color line and tarred as an enforcer of the dominating structure; and Wilkins, who was both romanticized for outplaying the white powers on behalf of the race and as plugged into Harlem as one could be. He gave generously to charitable causes and to the needy, belonged to the same fraternal organizations as Battle, and was celebrated with Connor as owner of the Bacharach Giants, a popular Negro League baseball franchise. Even Frederick Randolph Moore, guardian of Harlem’s rectitude, was a Wilkins fan. Selling alcohol to wealthy whites, promoting African American musical stars, and spreading the wealth close to home were no sins in the Age.

Battle looked for a way out of raiding Wilkins’s joint. There was none. He could only hope that Enright would spurn demands for retaliation, but Battle had no basis for trust. In fact, he had fresh reason for wariness. The newspapers had just told the tale of Albert Pitt, a cop who had conducted a raid that had been fully approved by the commanding officer for Brooklyn and Queens, and still was made to pay. The department transferred Pitt from a post close to his home in the Queens oceanfront community of Rockaway Beach to the Harlem stationhouse, at least two hours away by elevated train and subway. Pitt wrote to Enright, hoping that the commissioner would correct the injustice, got no response, and resigned rather than suffer the misery of a long daily commute to and from work. For good measure, the department falsely accused Pitt of refusing to work in a black community because he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.⁵⁸

By then Battle knew that many of Enright’s closest aides—his “understrappers”—had corrupt ties with powerful people.⁵⁹ Still, he sent an undercover investigator into Wilkins’s game. The officer returned with more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant. Armed with court authorization, swarming cops arrested Wilkins’s lieutenants and more than fifty gamblers. One by one, a magistrate called the defendants before the bench and pronounced the charges baseless. They all walked free from a courtroom controlled by Jimmy Hines.

Long after his association with Hughes was over, Battle would ruefully tell an interviewer: “I didn’t know what I was doing, I guess, because I thought it was honest and honorable to do your work correctly.”⁶⁰

Under more pointed questioning by Hughes, he explained: “The underworld whispered that both Wilkins and Connor were friends of Inspector Lahey. They predicted that in any case, since the game was protected by a ‘Tammany fix’ nothing would happen to it. They were right. The game continued to run.”

And, then, on October, 14, 1923, the order came down: The department was booting Battle from the Special Service Division to a stationhouse in Canarsie, far out across Brooklyn, where the sewer pipes emptied into the bay. The building was known for that reason as “The Shithouse.”

Battle took sick leave and requested an audience with Enright. When the commissioner refused a meeting, Battle turned to Charles Anderson, who had rallied behind Battle’s fight to join the force and was still a Republican power broker. Anderson spoke with Enright and then reported back to Battle that “Enright advised me to go slow, lay low in Canarsie, and in due time I would be appointed sergeant and brought back to Manhattan.”

His eyes on the prize of promotion, Battle swallowed the bitter medicine of exile to “the hind-end of New York” where “goats, chickens and turkeys ran unmolested down streets and lanes.” He endured the hours-long ride to and from Harlem and the last stop on the subway line while waiting his turn on the promotion list. His new colleagues shared none of his hope about the future. They believed it was only a matter of time before he suffered a painful awakening.

A sergeant, “a very fine man, and officer,” decided to burst the bubble, Battle remembered.

“He said to me, ‘Battle, come here. What does it read over that station house?’

“He said, ‘No. Those words are not emblematic. What it should read is, “All Those Who Enter Here Leave Hope Behind,” meaning that you’re here for good.’”⁶¹

MANY SAID THAT Enright had played Battle for a fool. In Harlem and the Guardians Society, they said that Battle had been too willing to credit Enright with good faith. He had been a dupe, they said. Enright had given him a plum assignment and had let a handful of African Americans form their own organization, and from these small favors Battle had concluded that this commissioner would give black cops a fair shot.

Still more hurtful to Battle, neighbors and police colleagues drew a Shakespearean parallel to his relationship with Enright. They cast Battle as Othello and Enright as the deceitful villain who manipulated the tragically trusting, dark-skinned nobleman in order to achieve his own hidden ends. “Harlemites said that in sending me there Commissioner Enright had become my Iago,” Battle recalled.

AS FALL MOVED toward winter in 1923, Battle looked toward the top of the slow-moving list for promotion to sergeant. He joined with Wesley, who was still studying for the fire lieutenant’s exam, in believing that the civil service system offered the most certain route to advancement. Wesley was eager to match his brainpower against that of his fellows—plus he wanted to best them physically, black man against white men in the ring.

The fire department sponsored annual boxing championships. Hundreds of firefighters competed. The victors in each weight class went on to fight the men who had prevailed in police department championships. Both forces rooted for the combatants who bore the honors of the rival legions.

Wesley signed up in the heavyweight division. He had put to good use his private firehouse gym and was well coached. Battle’s encouragement and Sam Langford’s tutorials at the Colored Men’s Branch of the YMCA sent Wesley to the bouts in top form. He disposed of opponents one after the other, until a single contender remained standing: Wesley.

This heavyweight crown, this thing that whites took so seriously as a badge of racial pride, now belonged to a black man. No one could deny Wesley the recognition in the way that his superiors had refused to acknowledge his life-saving valor on the job. More, by virtue of the victory, he would now represent the entire fire department in a duel with the police department’s best.

On December 12, 1923, three thousand firefighters, cops, and dignitaries crowded into an arena to witness the spectacle. Battle was likely the only police officer pulling for Wesley as he climbed into the ring against the finest’s legendary bruiser, Big Frank Adams. The bell rang. Wesley traded punches with Adams. Firefighters rose to their feet. Departmental pride trumping racial attitude, they urged on their man with roaring support. Here, he was their man because the blows he struck were their blows and the punishment he took was on their behalf. If Wesley won, they won. He stood proudly in until Adams was declared the victor. They cheered him then, too, for putting up a hell of a fight.⁶²

On his next tour of duty, Wesley returned to a transformed firehouse. Men who had refused to speak with him outside the line of duty offered congratulations and included him in the give-and-take of comrades.

“Immediately everything changed,” Wesley would remember, adding as only he and Battle might, “Why people seem to idolize brute force in preference to culture and intellect is beyond me.”

EARLY IN THE evening on the 223rd day of Battle’s banishment, May 24, 1924, Baron Wilkins passed the time outside the Exclusive Club with an associate nicknamed Yum Yum. Seventh Avenue was in full stroll. In the basement of a building down the block, five men played dice. One of them, William “Yellow Charleston” Miller, was a drug addict and thief. He went broke. The game’s big winner spurned a loan request. Yellow Charleston drew a pistol, shot the man in the stomach, and fled.

What happened next was painted in bright and varying colors by the newspapers and in a retelling by the WPA Writers’ Project. All agreed that Yellow Charleston ran toward Wilkins for help.

“Above all, he had been the best friend the little fellows in the underworld had ever known,” the WPA author wrote. “He had helped them when they were in trouble, fed them, clothed them, had given them shelter, money to feed their families, and money even to beat the rap.”

“Give me some money,” he pleaded. “I’ve just killed a bird and I got to make a getaway.”

Yellow Charleston clutched Wilkins by the lapels, crying in the dialect of the WPA account, “You got t’ gie me some money. I jes’ kilt a man. I got t’ git away.”

“Don’t pull on my coat so hard,” Wilkins answered. “I tell you I haven’t any money. I simply don’t have it now.”

After one more refusal, Yellow Charleston pumped four shots into Wilkins and left him bleeding beside the Exclusive Club’s doorway.⁶³

The news spread rapidly. Battle’s neighbors flooded into the streets. The stationhouse reserves cleared the way for an ambulance to bring Wilkins to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The next morning’s newspapers reported that posses had fanned out to hunt for Yellow Charleston. Shortly, he surrendered and would go to his death in the electric chair.

Wilkins had not been a church-going man. Family members arranged for a funeral service in his home. Testimonials poured forth.

“Local charities in Harlem were benefactors of Wilkins’ charity. Just recently he contributed 300 bathing suits to a local organization for the use of poor and needy children of Harlem,” the Age reported, while the Chicago Defender wrote, “His money went to Race enterprises and helping his friends and the poor. . . . Baron Wilkins was a man who lived in the age fighting for the uplift of his Race.”

In certainly his last good deed, Wilkins extended unsolicited help to Sam Langford. Nearly blind and approaching destitution, the boxer had arrived in New York to seek treatment by a prominent eye specialist. Just hours before Yellow Charleston opened fire, Wilkins had mailed Langford a twenty-five-dollar check to pay medical bills and had ordered his tailor to fit Langford for a suit. Two days after Wilkins’s murder, Dr. James Smith began cataract treatments that would restore Langford’s sight.⁶⁴

An estimated seventy thousand people lined the sidewalks around the club on the morning Wilkins was to be buried. As happened in the outpouring for Luther Boddy, the crowd stood in admiration of a man who had violated Battle’s unyielding sense of right and wrong. This time the affront was personal, and this time Harlem’s most prominent men joined in paying testament to Wilkins.

Frederick Randolph Moore of the Age; Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright of Strivers Row and Harlem Hospital; Ferdinand Q. Morton, the first African American appointed to New York’s Municipal Civil Service Commission; and Charles Anderson gathered around Wilkins’s casket as honorary pallbearers. Members of Battle’s Monarch Lodge performed a ritual Elks farewell. The noted Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, led prayers. Then the honorary pallbearers walked solemnly behind casket of a man who had unabashedly supported Jack Johnson, championed black professional baseball, and promoted so many African American entertainers.

That Wilkins had also cast New York’s first black police officer into the wilderness was of no moment to a group whose allegiance Battle deserved. They carried Wilkins’s body one last time in front of the Exclusive Club. With understandable bitterness, Battle described the cabaret in a way that no one else did. He saw it in memory as having gone “downhill to become a sinister hang-out for gangsters and dope peddlers.”

Under watch by the masses, the slow procession to a waiting hearse included a pallbearer whose bond with Wilkins grew not from the shared experience of America’s racial crimes. He was a white man with ice-blue eyes, Wilkins’s partner in political crime: Jimmy Hines.⁶⁵

THAT FALL, IN September 1924, with the requisite five years on the job, Wesley sat for the two-day fire lieutenant’s exam. Most of the 3,010 test takers were more experienced than he was and so would get an advantage in the scoring. He chanced it nonetheless, confident of his studies in the hose tower and eager to force salutes from white men who would refuse to acknowledge even a near-superhuman feat of heroism.

A month after the exam, Wesley and the Chief came upon a burning building in Harlem. Flames roared from the structure. The local fire company leaned a portable ladder against the facing and maneuvered their rig’s hand-cranked aerial ladder toward nineteen-year-old William Thompson, who was silhouetted against flame and smoke at a window. Wesley sped to the top of the portable ladder but was still a considerable distance below Thompson.

As the crew brought the aerial ladder closer, Thompson jumped from the sill. His hands grasped the aerial ladder, only to be torn free by the momentum of his body. Instantly, Wesley leaped from the portable ladder, grabbed a rung of the aerial ladder with one hand, and caught the plunging Thompson with his other, holding fast to both with his muscular grip and rippled arms and shoulders. Then he carried Thompson to the street before climbing back up to help rescue five more people. A reporter witnessed the feat and chronicled what he had seen in a story headlined “NY’s Only Colored Fireman Saves Six From Burning Building.”⁶⁶

WITH PASSAGE OF the seasons, the police department’s churn of retirements created openings for promotions, until finally Enright had given sergeants’ stripes to 342 officers—or found them not to his liking. Battle was next for consideration at the 343rd spot on the list.

On June 5, 1925, a promotions order reached Canarsie. A sergeant, and only the sergeant, was to report to headquarters for elevation to lieutenant. The meaning was certain. Passed over again, Battle would stay a cop for good.

Crushed and furious, he watched the lucky sergeant depart in full-dress uniform. Adding to the insult, this sergeant drank heavily. Battle would later hear that Enright recoiled on meeting the man. The story went that he told a subordinate: “You take this badge and put it on that bum. He’s too drunk for me to do it.”⁶⁷

Battle would also discover that Enright had promoted three white cops ranked lower on the list. Now the picture was clear to a man who had been deceived by his own blindness as much as by his Iago: never would Enright give a black man command of whites. Battle would write with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Passed over by Enright, I cursed the day he was born, cursed all related to him, and wished the wrath of God upon him.”⁶⁸

At home, Battle could only tell Jesse, Charline, and Carroll that he would soldier on in the hard world they were coming to know. Then the Municipal Civil Service Commission published the results of the fire lieutenant’s exam. Of the 3,010 men who had competed, Wesley had ranked 189. The fire commissioner would get to his name within eighteen months—and deny Wesley if he chose to. Wiser than before, Battle urged Wesley to enlist allies immediately. Wesley wrote to Frederick Randolph Moore, spelling out his rescues, boxing victories, and test score.

“Now will they promote me when my turn arrives?” he asked. “I believe in preparedness, so I am notifying the Negro Press now as I expect a fight about it later on.”⁶⁹

Quickly, the Amsterdam News ran a story headlined “Only Negro Fire-Fighter Passes Civil Service Exam for Lieutenant, Wesley Williams Who Has Made Many Thrilling Rescues, Makes General Average of 89.12—Over 1,200 Fail to Pass.”⁷⁰

Black New York’s anger at the injustice done to Battle provoked Enright to respond. A psychologist for the police department, E. E. Hart, presented the commissioner’s views in an article published by the Amsterdam News. An extraordinary example of dishonest condescension, the piece hailed Enright as a dedicated benefactor of African Americans. Hart wrote that a black traffic cop stationed at the intersection of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street was a symbol “of the things that have enabled the Negroes of New York to so progress that word of their prosperity has spread to the dark-skinned peoples of the world around.” Hart added that Enright deserved the applause of a grateful race for having allowed forty-five African Americans to join the force. “Thus he was the first city official to give them their place in the sun,” Hart wrote.

As for Battle, Hart said that Enright had passed over several men, both black and white, “for good police reasons.”⁷¹ With these lies, Battle’s hopes were dashed. But, suddenly, miraculously, Enright was gone two weeks later.

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1925, after a then-record eight years as commissioner, Enright announced that he would head the newly formed International Police Association. Actually, he quit because the political wheel had turned. New York was about to install a new mayor for the Jazz Age: James “Jimmy” Walker.

Born into a Tammany Hall family, Walker grew into a handsome, stylish, witty, fun-loving man. Early on, he wrote songs, including “Will You Love Me in December (as You Do in May)?” In the state legislature, he presciently pronounced that Prohibition was a “measure born in hypocrisy and there it will die.” He championed legalizing professional boxing and lifting a ban on Sunday baseball games. When the legislature took up a “Clean Books Bill,” he declared, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book.”

After a hard-fought campaign, Walker deposed Red Hylan, who had fallen out of favor with the bosses. The American Mercury soon profiled him as a mayor who came not from the streets but “from the dance floors.”

“His hair is black, thick and unruly,” the magazine reported. “His eyes are dark and restless. He has the slim build of a cabaret dancer, of a gigolo of the Montmartre. He dresses in the ultra-advanced fashion redolent of the Tenderloin. He is a native New Yorker, smokes cigarettes continuously, has a vast contempt for the Volstead act, and reads nothing but the sporting pages. He looks, in brief, to be slightly wicked and is therefore charming.”⁷²

New Yorkers happily went along for the ride as the married Walker slept through mornings, stayed out late, and made the nightclub rounds with his showgirl mistress.

Young black writers like Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston came into vogue. Publishers saw the promise of their work, as the American educated class hungered for all that was “new” in style and thought. No one fostered the phenomenon—this Harlem Renaissance—more than Charles Spurgeon Johnson. The son of a Baptist minister, Johnson secured a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and took over as research director of the National Urban League. In that position, he founded a journal called Opportunity and joined the Crisis in publishing the emerging writers.

In April 1924, Johnson organized a dinner at a downtown club to introduce the up-and-comers to white publishers, editors, and critics. The affair was a spectacular success. The editor of Survey Graphic magazine titled his March 1925 issue, Harlem—the Mecca of the New Negro. Guest-edited by Alain Locke, who had been the first African American Rhodes scholar, the magazine largely featured the writings of black authors, including Hughes. Brimming with optimism, Hughes’s poem began: “We have tomorrow / Bright before us / Like a flame.”⁷³

Later that year, Spurgeon Johnson staged a literary competition “to encourage the reading of literature both by Negro authors and about Negro life, not merely because they are Negro authors but because what they write is literature and because the literature is interesting.”⁷⁴ The competition offered monetary awards. A broad panel of judges included Fannie Hurst and Eugene O’Neill. More than three hundred people attended an elegant dinner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Hughes took first prize for “The Weary Blues,” a masterpiece that captured the rhythms of a musical form infused with the American black experience. It opens and closes:

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

I heard a Negro play . . .

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

It was a heady time for the young writers. They were wanted at downtown A-list parties, and they were welcomed at fabulous soirées thrown by wealthy hair-care heiress A’Lelia Walker, later described by Hughes as “the joy-goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Amid the carousing and the high that came with being in fashionable demand, the writers took to calling themselves the “niggerati.” Ever affable yet ever inscrutable because he was never known to have opened a deeply personal, let alone sexual, relationship with anyone, Hughes remained the movement’s leading light. He spelled out its lofty ambitions in an essay in the Nation that declared: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”⁷⁵

Soon, at the age of twenty-five, Hughes published a volume of poetry that biographer Rampersad described as “his most brilliant book of poems, and one of the more astonishing books of verse ever published in the United States—comparable in the black world to [Walt Whitman’s] Leaves of Grass in the white.”⁷⁶

Evoking the lives and ways of poor African Americans, the book scandalized much of the black establishment with such starkly revealing poems as “Red Silk Stockings,” which spoke of a black woman dressed to allure white men. Unfortunately titled “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” a reference to poor people selling their clothing to pawnbrokers, most of whom happened to be Jewish, the collection was Hughes’s declaration of freedom for his generation of African American artists. That it didn’t sell well seemed of little consequence in a time when black expression was the essence of hip. A wealthy, elderly white woman, Charlotte Mason, known endearingly to Hughes as “Godmother,” became his patron, funding him with $150 a month, asking only for an accounting and, far more important, a say over his writing projects.

Swept up as well, many in the black intelligentsia predicted that the cultural outpouring would lead whites, at long last, to see blacks for all their humanity. “I am coming to believe that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator and contributor to American civilization,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.⁷⁷

WALKER’S TAMMANY HALL background gave Battle little reason to hope for a reprieve, nor did Walker’s unlikely appointment of George V. McLaughlin as commissioner. Then serving as New York State Superintendent of Banking, McLaughlin had no experience in policing and seemed ideally suited to act as Tammany’s puppet. Regardless, the new commissioner summoned Battle.

“Officer, have a seat,” McLaughlin said. “I want to ask you do you know why you were not promoted to sergeant when your turn came?”

“The only complaints I find against you in the files are anonymous letters. I have torn them up and thrown them into the wastebasket. Unsigned letters have no status with me. When I make my next appointments, Battle, I shall make you a sergeant. And when I appoint you, you will be a sergeant—not a Negro sergeant.”

Battle’s promotion came though on May 21, 1926. After almost fifteen distinguished years of service, including, by his count, two years, seven months, one week, and two hours in Canarsie, Battle was a sergeant, Shield No. 612, and for the first time the New York Police Department had authorized a black man to give orders to white men.

The Monarch Lodge of the Elks threw Battle a testimonial dinner. The Harold C. Clark Melody Orchestra played. The lodge’s exalted ruler toasted Battle as “a symbol of benevolence, activity, truth, tenacity, love and elasticity.” Dressed in a peach-and-orange crepe dress, Florence declined to speak, saying only that “one Battle a night was enough.”⁷⁸

Battle stood before his admirers as a forty-three-year-old man, almost twenty-one years a husband, the father of three children, one on the verge of manhood himself. He remembered that, in his days as a redcap, friends had warned him not to try for the police department, but he had tried, and today he had a higher rank than most of the white men on the force. He had been ostracized in the stationhouse and gawked at on the streets. They had not. He had been barred from a parade and threatened with death. They had not. He had been jailed with a murderer and saved a white officer’s life. They had not. And he was a sergeant, and they were not.

In his pocket, Battle had a telegram, sent by Anne from Beaufort, where she was living happily with Mary Elizabeth. Anne reminded the son who had been born so large “that his good fortune was due to God and to prayer.” And a quarter-century later, long after Enright had faded into obscurity, shortly before he would die at the age of eighty-two in a fall down a flight of stairs on Long Island, Battle would write of his tormentor, “I asked the Lord to forgive him.”⁷⁹

CHAPTER THREE

BETRAYED