The father of the new Lieutenant is James H. Williams, chief porter at the Grand Central Terminal who of course enjoys the acquaintance of Governor Smith, Mayor Walker and other celebrities.
—NEW YORK SUN, 19271
In August 1925, Wesley’s name appeared on the city’s new list of firemen eligible for promotion to lieutenant. He pored over the stats: 3,010 men had competed, 1,200 had failed, and 920 withdrew. He scored a final percentage of 89.12. “A difference of one point,” he explained in a letter to the New York Age, “would mean a difference of about 100 names in the standing on the list.” He had taken the two-day examination a year earlier, having studied three years at the Delehanty Institute for Civil Service at Fifteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. He was only five years on the force when he took the test, whereas many of the men had it over him in seniority and points. Now Wesley’s name was 189th on the list. “I am in the money, as they say,” he wrote, overjoyed that his score qualified him.
Still, Wesley was wary of being overconfident. “Now will they promote me when my turn arrives?” he wrote to the Age.
“I believe in preparedness, so I am notifying the Negro Press now as I expect a fight about it later on. Although they will not reach my name for a year to eighteen months; don’t you think I am right in getting prepared now?”2
Wesley surely took after his father when it came to preemptive planning. Chief Williams set himself to advancing his boy’s promotion, and one of his most potent tools was small talk. Wesley’s past achievements gave him ample things to mention in passing to whomever might make a difference over the next two years.
In 1925, Mayor John F. Hylan ended his seven-year term by finally honoring Wesley Williams—still Manhattan’s only black firefighter on New York’s force. Left to right at City Hall were Wesley, his grandfather, the mayor, his father, and his son James II. Charles Ford Williams Family Collection.
On September 16, 1927, Fire Commissioner Dorman indeed promoted Wesley to lieutenant. Negro firemen and officers were already common enough in Chicago, Washington, and Baltimore, so their breakthrough was overdue in New York. Nevertheless, the delayed occasion was glorious. As with Wesley’s initial appointment to the fire department nine years before, papers across the country reported that he was the first colored fireman promoted to an officer’s rank in the department. The Chief was unreservedly proud: “I guess he’s about as fine a boy as you’ll find,” he responded to a reporter’s question. “The only trouble we ever had with him when he was a kid was that when it came to his turn to do the chores, you’d always find Wesley with his nose in some book. He sure loves to read.”3
In 1927, Wesley Williams’s promotion to lieutenant made him New York’s first black fireman citywide in the rank of officer. Charles Ford Williams Family Collection.
But an unsettling rumor had it that Wesley would be assigned a desk job after his promotion, shunted to another station. A Brooklyn daily acknowledged there was “much speculation around headquarters” that he might be assigned as company chauffeur for Chief John Kenlon, “the Fire Czar.” Notwithstanding Kenlon’s professed abiding affection for Negroes—in earlier days as a sailor, when he was about to drown, a black cook had plucked him from the brine to a drifting raft—the tactic was doubtless aimed to usher Wesley out of sight and thereby avoid giving a black officer “command over a unit of [white] firemen.”
Wesley was not happy about the prospect of reassignment, which would deflate his public triumph. It might also have economic consequences: if moonlighting in moonshine was truly bringing in “a whole lotta money,” as Wesley had said, he needed to remain at Broome Street.
The rumor troubled Chief Williams enough that he approached Robert F. Wagner, a U.S. senator from New York and a noted advocate of worker’s rights and collective bargaining, as well as a strong proponent of federal antilynching laws. Williams told him about Wesley’s impending promotion and his concerns about being displaced from Engine Co. 55 on Broome Street, where he had made his name and wished to stay. Williams found him a good listener.
Wagner told the Chief that Wesley “should continue on active service in a fire company as this was right and also necessary if the proper pattern was to be established for the future Negro members of the New York City fire department,” as Wesley later recounted the story. The senator urged Williams to write to Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes, Archbishop of New York, who he was confident would be sympathetic. A word from such an exalted religious leader should prove invaluable.4
Chief Williams surely knew Cardinal Hayes as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker: the prelate was born downtown in Dickensian poverty in the old Five Points slum, and he opposed Prohibition. The Chief had also presumably made his acquaintance now and then in the station. Considering the stakes, he unhesitatingly punched above his weight. On September 9, 1927, in his capacity as an official at Grand Central, he appealed to Cardinal Hayes:
Your Eminence:—
My son Wesley Williams, a member of the New York Fire Department is shortly to be appointed to a Lieutenancy and as he especially desires to continue his labors at his present location (Engine Co. 55—363 Broome St.) may I take the liberty of appealing to you to intercede with Commissioner Dorman on his behalf so that he continue there.
A word from Your Eminence would be the determining say so hoping that you will condescend to help me, I remain.
Respectfully & gratefully,
Your humble servant.
James H. Williams
Chief Porter, Grand Central Station5
The Cardinal’s response to the Chief’s plea is lost to history, but Wesley did remain nearly a quarter-century longer at the Broome Street firehouse—conspicuously, and through further promotions. Many years later, in 1962, when a black fire department officer, Acting Lt. Robert O. Lowery, was up for promotion to deputy fire commissioner, Wesley, echoing his father’s example, wrote to Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman to enlist his endorsement for the Lowery promotion.
On September 9, 1927, Chief Williams beseeched Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes, Archbishop of New York, to intercede with the New York Fire Department Commissioner on his son Wesley’s behalf. Schomburg/NYPL.
Now with apprehension over Wesley’s promotion and assignment vanquished, the Williams household celebrated with ease. On Sunday evening, October 16, 1927, James and Lucy Williams hosted a reception. Invited friends, mostly couples, filtered up the steps of their Strivers’ Row brownstone at 226 West 138th Street. Among the family members attending were the Chief’s brother Charles and their elderly parents John Wesley and Lucy; as well as his children Gertrude, Pierre, and Katherine. Also attending were extended family members including Police Sgt. Jesse and Florence Battle (who lived across the street), and Grand Central men C. B. Earle (who was also Williams’s lodger) and John Holder. Other guests came from as far off as Illinois and Vermont.
And still others attested not only to the importance of Wesley’s achievement but also to the Chief’s influence. Here was Lester Walton, the eminent columnist, who had covered Williams’s earliest sports management venture, the Grand Central Red Caps baseball club. A few months after the new terminal opened in 1913, Walton persuaded the Associated Press to henceforth capitalize the word Negro as a noun in print and to desist altogether from using the obnoxious term Negress. In the mid-1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would appoint him U.S. minister to Liberia.
James H. Williams and Lucy A. Williams. Charles Ford Williams Family Collection.
The Williamses hired vaudevillian star Tom Fletcher to entertain. One of the highest-ranking stage men of the day, Fletcher’s later autobiography, 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, would be regarded as an essential eyewitness source for musical theater historians.
As the Williamses welcomed their guests, each congratulatory handshake increased their flush of pride. Perhaps the most notable was Col. Charles W. Anderson, the late Teddy Roosevelt’s internal revenue appointee; that he had come to honor Wesley must have moved the entire Williams household.
A much more elaborate ceremonial dinner took place a few months later. On January 28, 1928, Chief Williams climbed the ten brownstone steps of the E Flat Banquet Hall at 56 West 135th Street. The hall was filled with distinguished men—businessmen, physicians, an army major, at least two aldermen—to whom the waiters served a lavish dinner that included shrimp cocktail, chicken, scallops with tartar sauce, filet mignon with mushrooms, and potatoes rissole. Eventually, with the service of fancy ices, cakes, demitasse, cigars, and cigarettes, the banquet hushed, and Williams’s old protégé Jesse Battle presided as toastmaster over the after-dinner speeches. All the guests cheered the Chief’s boy as a native son of the sidewalks of New York and exalted him for his temperance and self-discipline. “He does not smoke, he does not drink, a gentleman as well as an officer,” one reporter wrote. The Chief smiled broadly when Wesley credited his success to the guidance of his mother and father.6
Then the tribute committee of Red Caps, from both Grand Central and Penn Station, presented Wesley with “a beautiful Tiffany watch and chain, with a small gold knife attached”7 as well as “a huge mantel clock.”8 The Red Caps’ extravagant offerings to Wesley—the Tiffany gift alone was reputedly valued at $350—also demonstrated their affectionate loyalty for his father.9 They all grasped the deference due to the “chief of the more than 500 Red Caps employed at the Grand Central station,” where he enabled many of them to pay their way through school.
Throughout the 1920s, the Chief’s older children, Wesley and Gertrude, clearly caught the limelight much more than the younger three: Roy (whose full name was James Leroy), Pierre, and Katherine. In 1920, Roy was eighteen, living in the family’s Strivers’ Row home and working as a Red Cap porter, although it’s not known if it was at Grand Central or at Penn Station. On April 9, 1923, twenty-one-year-old Leroy married seventeen-year-old Lula Ledbetter, who was about two months pregnant with their first child, Gloria. The couple had a difficult marriage, perhaps further strained by the birth of a second child, June, in the spring of 1925. When June died at less than a year old, the couple separated.10
Lula, estranged from Roy, was inconsolable over losing her baby June and absorbed in caring for toddler Gloria; Lula was also struggling to support her mother, who lived with them. She joined the chorus line of “beautiful creole girls”11 downtown at the Club Alabam, one of the toniest Broadway cabarets in Times Square that featured black revues.
The dancing was arduous, as athletic as it was exuberant. A wave of chorus girls around the city fell in step to form a union: a particular sore point was the issue of salaries, which were not uniform in the Broadway cabarets. At the popular Plantation Club, a few entertainers had balked at making only $30 or $35 per week and left to join better-paying revues, prompting other clubs to negotiate wages. Ciro’s reportedly offered $45 weekly, and Club Alabam reportedly promised to match it; both seemed higher than Lula could hope to earn closer to home, since “Connie’s Inn in Harlem tops the uptown places with $35 per [night].”12 Jazzy black uptown shows had become lucrative ventures for white downtown nightclubs, which earned them cachet; indeed, as a chorus girl in the Alabam’s “all-colored” revue, Lula likely did well for herself.
Lula’s gig at the Alabam rocketed her professional reputation. In early July the club announced the extension of its immensely popular cabaret revue, Alabam Fantasies, through the summer. “Ethel Moses, out,” columnist Floyd Calvin reported. “Lula Ledbetter, in.” Some called the radiant Moses the “sepia” Jean Harlow, though Gertrude Williams actually outshone her in a beauty pageant the previous fall. Anyway, Moses was off to pursue a new opportunity toward stardom, and the revue’s producer clearly had confidence in Lula’s own star potential.13
Her companions in the fourth edition of Alabam Fantasies were a redoubtable troupe. Some were already internationally known, like the venerable soprano Abbie Mitchell and the eccentric pantomimist Johnny Hudgins; future film actress Fredi Washington; and two veterans of the musical hit Runnin’ Wild, monologuist George Stamper and dancer Lyda Webb, whose choreography “introduced the Charleston to Broadway.” “The stepping and dancing of these performers far exceeds any show of its kind we have yet seen,” a reviewer wrote, adding, “They are all born entertainers.” A few months later, on April 30, 1927, the Pittsburgh Courier cameoed Lula’s face on its front page, featuring her as “Miss Personality Plus,” a reigning cast member of the fashionable Times Square nightclub.14
Barely a month later, however, the public learned that the renowned Club Alabam, “which has hitherto employed a colored floor show, dismissed the revue last week and has put in an all-white aggregation, including band.”15 Jazz was still the rage, but even the progenitors of the “Jazz Age”—so delightfully percolating into mainstream culture—were not exempt from the American color line.
Lula’s unexpected loss of work may have brought her closer to her in-laws, the Williamses, who she remained on good terms with despite her separation from Roy. As she picked up new jobs here and there, their house on Strivers’ Row would have been a convenient place for her to leave Gloria from time to time. As a society column remarked one day in June, “We regret to learn of the illness of Mrs. James H. Williams 226 W. 138th St. and baby daughter. We wish them both a speedy recovery.”16
As Lucy Williams’s youngest daughter was ten at the time, more likely this “baby daughter” was Gloria, indicating that the elder Williamses continued to protect their daughter-in-law and grandchild. Though Katherine may have been affectionately called the baby of the family, the reference seems to better fit little Gloria, who was three.
The fall theatrical season of 1927 saw several new productions that drew from Dixieland settings. In white productions like the Theater Guild’s Porgy and David Belasco’s Lulu Belle, as well as in black ones, the trend looked to be an unusual boon for out-of-work race actors. And like these other companies, Florenz Ziegfeld’s new Broadway show, Show Boat—a musical staging of Edna Ferber’s best-selling saga of the year before—required a sizable cast of black players to authenticate its southern setting.
Ziegfeld called on Will Vodery, one of the most influential black musicians in New York theatrical circles and long one of the producer’s steadfast associates in various capacities as composer, arranger, and music director. Vodery had played a key role in brokering greater Broadway employment to some “of the prettiest colored chorus girls in town”—a corps of whom had drawn largely white audiences to the successful all-black revue Shuffle Along. He hired over a dozen dancers for Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, offering them “the highest salaries ever paid Negro choristers.”17 Now for Show Boat, Ziegfeld mandated the procurement of the show’s black talent to Vodery, the show’s choral director. Vodery needed forty black actors and invited Lula to join the company. Lula didn’t pass it up.
In December 1927, Show Boat opened two days after Christmas at the new Ziegfeld Theater on West 54th Street, and Lula Williams was in the cast as one of the dozen Dahomey Jubilee Dancers. The historic production employed numerous black talents including Jules Bledsoe; stars of the show’s future stage and screen incarnations would include Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, and Alberta Hunter, some of whom were Williams’s friends.
Vodery also likely acted as paymaster, dispensing $600 as the highest weekly salary. As a member of the chorus, Lula earned $50 a week. It was somewhat more than what the Club Alabam had paid two years before, but Lula was possibly living beyond her means in Sugar Hill, on Edgecombe Avenue near her in-laws. It was said that Sugar Hill became fashionable after Jules Bledsoe, a co-star of Show Boat, moved up to the neighborhood. That the Red Caps nicknamed Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Avenue entrance “Sugar Hill” suggested that once-exclusive Strivers’ Row now had a worthy competitor. To keep up appearances, Lula Williams was competing with herself to maintain a prestigious address for her daughter and her mother.
The result was tragic. On July 22, 1928, an awful headline appeared in the papers: “Gas Kills Negro Dancer.” Lula’s mother, Cassie Ledbetter, had found her daughter in their gas-filled apartment on Edgecombe Avenue. Overcome, she explained to the police that the landlord had given her daughter an eviction notice two days earlier. “The scant furnishings were mute evidence of their poverty,” a reporter observed. Lula left three notes in three separate envelopes: one to Gloria and Mama; one to “Roy, address unknown”; and one to Willie. She sealed the back of each with a fresh lipstick kiss. To her mother, Lula had written, “I’ve tried hard to keep things going, but I am a complete failure and know it. Giving up my home is more than I can bear. I want to die. . . . Nobody is to blame for this but me.” She expressed her concern for Gloria’s upbringing, “as she is the only person that loves mother and thinks I’m wonderful,” and specified her wish that Gloria “be placed in custody of the child’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Jas. H. Williams.”18
The awful scenario was sadly familiar to James Williams. Five years earlier it had been Oscar Gant, a Red Cap with him at Grand Central since ’08. The man’s mother woke to find her son locked in the bathroom, lying in the tub with the gas jet turned on full force. Some said he had had a nervous breakdown, that working in a war munitions factory broke him. Others said he never stopped brooding over his breakup from his wife.19 But supposings were all after the fact. There was Gant, here was Lula. What could anyone say to make up for this loss of young life?
Lula’s note to “Willie” revealed a love affair. “Good-bye, man of my heart,” she wrote. ‘I love you and only you. . . . I have done wrong to your wife, but couldn’t help it—Love is bigger than me.” That afternoon Lula’s mother had left her daughter at home “in the company of her friend, Singleton,” as she took little Gloria out. Willie Singleton owned a prominent billiard parlor nearby on 135th Street. Soon after the incident, Walter White would hire Singleton to cater the NAACP’s historic “buffet smoker” for attorney Clarence Darrow to meet over a hundred of Harlem’s foremost businessmen.
Lula’s letter for her husband Roy, “address unknown,” was the most enigmatic; it simply read: “Good-bye, Roy. I hope you marry Sip.” But who Sip was, was anyone’s guess.
Will Vodery, who had brought Lula to Broadway, took charge of her funeral arrangements. Lucy and the Chief, who was approaching his fiftieth birthday, took charge of their granddaughter, Gloria.
On a brighter occasion for the Chief a year later, the Campus was the point of departure for one of Harlem and Grand Central’s most unlikely envoys. On Sunday afternoon, June 16, 1929, a crowd of well-wishers in Harlem cheered William Theodore Davis as he set off on “a journey around the world from Seventh Avenue and 135th Street” on a motorcycle. He was riding an Indian Chief, model number 74, its fuel tank good for 150 to 200 miles. His traveling essentials included a “blanket, cooking utensils, a few books, diary, ukulele, tennis racquet, camera, field glasses and a change of clothing,” he later wrote. “And, quite important, $2,000.”20
Davis called himself the “Lone Wolf.” Though only twenty-four, he was no novice to this sort of adventure; three years earlier he rode from New York to Los Angeles, demonstrating “grit and endurance.” Then in 1927 slack-jawed fans watched Davis make history with a trip from Harlem to Halifax, Nova Scotia—“in the phenomenal time of 48 hours,” an enthusiast noted in the American Motorcyclist, a feat in itself. The American Motorcyclist Association, organized in 1924, had an official “whites only” policy and barred Davis from membership, but its magazine reported that some 2,000 Haligonians lavished fellowship on the black roadster, whom they “carried through the streets amid cheering, throwing of hats and waving of handkerchiefs.”21
Now Harlemites exalted the endurance champion Davis as he revved his engine in the Campus intersection. It isn’t known if Chief Williams was on the scene, but the salon where Gertrude worked had a window that gave fully on the spectacle of the departing “Lone Wolf” Davis and the colored Cyclone Motorcycle Club in formation to escort his departure. Disregarding Davis’s self-adopted nickname, many in the crowd cheered him as “Lindy of the Ground,” after Charles Lindbergh, who made the first transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris.
This time the Lone Wolf would ride from Harlem to San Francisco, where he had booked passage on a Japanese steamer to Hawaii—whose islands gave him his “first taste of the foreign . . . greatly Americanized”—that continued on to Japan. Doing exhibition riding along the way, his circuitous journey carried him to Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, and then to Korea, and to Manila.22 He would continue across Asia on his trusty bike. He would then drive through the Middle East and Europe. Backers and promoters flocked to sponsor white riders like Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker (namesake of later Cannonball Run races), some of whose records the Lone Wolf aimed to break. Lacking such support, Davis covered his own costs by bell-hopping at hotels and portering at rail stations. For this around-the-world escapade, Davis planned “to foot all the bills from his earnings last winter at Grand Central Station,” the Defender noted.23
What Davis did not foresee, as he set out in June 1929 on his Indian, was the imminent stock market crash. Once the dark cloud of the Great Depression rolled in, his family and friends surely welcomed any word of his exploits as diversion. The Amsterdam News sports editor Romeo Dougherty—whom black press colleagues esteemed as the “Dean of the East”—shared with his readers a letter Davis had written him from Yokohama, Japan, on April 12, 1930:
Having traveled thus far in safety from New York City without encountering any unusual difficulties, I am quite sure that the remainder of my journey will be successful.
Traveling, in my mind, is the surest and the highest education. It is the golden experience whose fragrant memory neither time nor adversity can take away. . . .
I am leaving for China and Africa next week.
Kindly extend my greetings to the people of Harlem.
Yours truly,
“The Lone Wolf Motorcyclist of New York City.”
William T. Davis.24
Fueled by Red Cap tips, on June 16, 1929, William T. “Lone Wolf” Davis set off from Harlem on an Indian Chief 74 motorcycle to circle the globe, returning from the endurance trip a year later. New York Age, July 12, 1930.
The Lone Wolf returned to New York on July 2, 1930. Perhaps wishing to leave neither stone nor cloud unturned, he went on to train as a pilot at the American School of Aviation and flew with race aviators of the Negro Flying School Aviation Club. His acute sense of wonder, underpinned by his mechanical knowledge, gave wings to descriptive travelogs he occasionally wrote for the Philadelphia Tribune and other papers.
It would be surprising if Chief Williams felt anything but pride over Davis, who, like his son Wesley, seized opportunities with an abandon that was at once confident and philosophical. The young man’s remarkable feat personified the “New Negro” that the race hoped to push to the fore. His broad interests, both mundane and extraordinary, pointed up other leisurely pastimes that blacks pursued just as ardently or apathetically as whites: convivial ukulele playing, competitive tennis and baseball, organized biking, and aviation. And seeing that his roles as teacher and learner were inextricably linked, Davis aimed “to continue his education both on the road and in the confines of educational institutions.”25
One woman was moved enough by Davis’s pluck and resourcefulness to encourage her grandsons to emulate him. But she was wary of backhanded flattery: “Please do not feel that the nickname ‘Lindy of the Ground’ is an asset to the race,” she advised. “Would Lindy feel it an honor to be called ‘Davis of the air’?”26 This caveat, in light of Davis’s fall into obscurity, was a sentiment Williams might often have considered, too.