He brought black to Blue
Day 1: Suffering the silent hatred of his fellow NYPD officers
Samuel (Jesse) Battle was a pioneer of black America — the first African American to join the police department in greater New York City. In the upcoming book “One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York,” author Arthur Browne traces Battle’s amazing journey — from his childhood in North Carolina, to his days as a railway porter at Grand Central Station and a 30year police career starting in 1911 that saw him become the city’s first African American police sergeant and then lieutenant. The following excerpt describes the first days of Battle’s life on the job: HIS SON JESSE slept in the shadows of the small apartment while his wife Florence prepared breakfast. The air of a summer of rains and high heat was heavy, even this early. Sam Battle got “tubbed and scrubbed,” and then he put on the uniform that designated authority to enforce the law.
In summer, the New York Police Department discarded its tailed and highbuttoned coat for a blue blouse cut from light fabric. The year-round constants were trousers seamed with white cord, a belted holster with revolver, and a gray helmet whose shell offered some protection from bricks tossed off tenement roofs, known then as Irish confetti.
Battle kissed his son and his wife, and then he went toward his just due with the confidence that had carried him from childhood, with faith in the goodness of human nature. From a distance, Battle saw the crowd in front of the stationhouse on the morning when the gawking began. “There’s the n---r,” some shouted as he drew close. He heard white voices say, “Why, he looks just like Jack Johnson,” and, “He’s a burly bastard,” while some African Americans called out, “Ain’t he a fine looking man?”
Battle betrayed no sign that anything unusual was taking place. He needed to appear ordinary so that, in time, he might be accepted as one more cop. The stationhouse door was thickly hewn, as if designed to repulse attack. Inside, an elevated platform — the desk — dominated the central room. From behind its ramparts, a lieutenant oversaw the execution of the laws, as well as compliance with the orders that governed a police officer’s life.
The lieutenant pointed Battle to a room where officers congregated before starting patrol. It was here or in a space nearby that blacks had been made to run the gauntlet. Battle offered a greeting that said he expected inclusion: “Good morning.”
The group responded with coordinated silence. Soon, a sergeant announced assignments. He gave Battle a post in a well-to-do neighborhood along Riverside Drive between West Seventy-Ninth and West Eighty-Sixth Streets. Then Battle joined a march outside. A superior officer inspected uniforms and equipment. Some in the crowd again referred to him as a “n----r.” When the order came to disperse, he set off, trailed by spectators.
The silence of Battle’s fellow cops was more than a statement of racial scorn. It was also a weapon. Every man among them had been schooled in policing by his elders. How to make an arrest, how to wield a nightstick, how to avoid the attention of internal affairs “shoo-flies” — stationhouse and street-corner tutorials were critical to survival.
The black man’s failure deeply wished for, Battle would have no help as he broke in under a scorching sun. His beat followed Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson River and passing beneath elegant manses and apartment buildings. Across eight long hours, without a moment for lunch, Battle showed only toleration to the unbelieving who flocked to see a black police officer. Friends from the Marshall Hotel, the musical comedy team of Dan Avery and Charles Hart, “drove by in a red roadster to see if all was well with me,” as Battle remembered. Finally, hungry, wet with perspiration, and exhausted, he gave his memo book to a sergeant for signature at 4 p.m. and headed home.
“There he is,” a voice cried, as Battle came up out of the subway in Harlem. Fellow blacks swarmed him. He found the apartment filled with friends who wished him well as he ate the dinner he had been waiting for. When finally they were gone, he recounted the day for Florence and Jesse, and, using her nickname of endearment, Florence told her husband, “Jesse, I am proud of you.”
The next day and the day after that and the day after that, Battle returned to the silence and the staring. His primary duty involved directing horse-drawn vehicles and early automobiles, while standing on display as if he were a circus performer.
‘When the street cars would pass the conductors would clang the bells and say: Look at New York’s first colored policeman.’
—SAMUEL (JESSE) BATTLE
“Everybody came by, and when the street cars would pass, the motormen and conductors would clang the bells, and the conductor would say, ‘Look over there at New York’s first colored policeman.’ When the sightseeing buses would come along, they would announce loudly to the people, ‘Here’s New York’s first colored policeman,’” he remembered.
“Then the colored fellows that drove these open barouches for people on sightseeing tours would bring the people down from the cabarets in different parts of the city, particularly from Harlem and Baron Wilkins’ night club, and charge them a dollar each to take them to see this colored policeman.”
Battle made his first arrest after a white man failed to stop his horse and wagon in front of a school, as Battle had commanded, and then refused to accept a summons from a black officer, questioning even that Battle was truly a cop. He arrested his first black person at about 2 a.m. one Sunday morning in Central Park.
“I saw what appeared to be a beautiful brown-skin girl in furs and a picture hat. Because it was unusual in that section for women to be out alone at that time of night, I approached and asked her destination,” Battle remembered. “A masculine voice answered, ‘Just walking.’ It was a man in female garb, painted and powdered. Although he begged me not to do so, my duty required that I take him to the station.”
Battle’s work chart scheduled his first reserve duty for midnight to 8 a.m. on the Thursday after he started patrol. Finishing a four-to-twelve night shift, he was to sleep in the stationhouse with a platoon on call in the event of an emergency. A dormitory was outfitted with a couple dozen bunks and was draped in the odors of overworked men, discarded shoes, soiled linens, and tobacco smoke.
Fetid air and all, the officers of the Sixty-Eighth Street stationhouse resolved that this was a whites-only domain. Cops carried a cot upstairs to a room on the second floor, where the precinct stored the American flag, and left the mattress and springs under Old Glory as the black man’s accommodations.
Without complaint, Battle went up to the flag loft. Several times, a captain named Thomas Palmer asked Battle how he was faring with fellow officers. Just fine, Battle reported. “I don’t expect the men to talk to me and take me in their arms as a brother,” he told the captain.
Inevitably, newspaper reporters caught wind that Battle was subjected to silence and isolation. They sought him out, but he held firm to voicing no unhappiness. Interviewed by the New York Times three weeks after he arrived at the stationhouse, Battle made sure to state that no officer had uttered offensive epithets, and he responded, “I have nothing to say about that, Sir,” when asked about his fellow officers’ refusal to speak with him.
As if to make a much larger point, he shared with the reporter Battle family lore that had been handed down through bondage and that represented a claim to fully earned United States citizenship: the story of his great-grandfather, a slave, fighting beside a young master in the American Revolution.
“He is a good sensible negro, and his conduct is above reproach,” Palmer told the Times, adding, “He seems to know what he bargained for in taking a place on the force.”
While that was surely true, alone in the flag loft, Battle would still consider the chasm between the ideals of the banner unfurled overhead and the abuse to which he was being subjected. He would say:
“Sometimes, lying on my cot on the top floor in the silence, I would wonder how it was that many of the patrolmen in my precinct who did not yet speak English well, had no such
difficulties in getting on the police force as I, a Negro American, had experienced.
“Some of them had arrived so recently in America that they spoke as though they had marbles in their mouths. Some of them again knew so little about New York City that they could not give an inquiring stranger any helpful directions. Yet, these brand new Americans could become policemen without going through the trials and tribulations to which I, a native born American, had been subject in achieving my appointment.
“My name had been passed over repeatedly. All sorts of discouragements had been placed in my path. And now, after a long wait and a lot of stalling, I had finally been given a trial appointment to their ranks and these men would not speak to me. Nativeborn and foreign-born whites on the police force all united in looking past me as though I were not a human being. In the loft in the dark, with the Stars and Stripes, I wondered! Why?”
True to form, Battle made a blessing of exile. Privacy afforded him the opportunity for self-education. He read, concentrating on police training manuals to start preparing for the promotion exam for sergeant. These men who would not speak with him today as an equal would answer to him tomorrow as a superior. Far from the others, he recited the police department’s rules and regulations, and then he relied once more on Florence to test his knowledge.
“When I went home after a night of study, at breakfast my wife would check me to see what progress I had made,” he recalled, adding, “Alone in the loft I could kneel quietly at prayer before going to sleep, talking with God for strength to carry on.”
On the street, Battle met the demands of pounding a beat, 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., 4 to midnight, midnight to 8, and sometimes 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps with eight hours off between shifts, perhaps with twenty-four. He offered collegiality but was rejected time and again. “Bright and sunny this morning, isn’t it?” he would say on relieving a man on post. There was never a reply.
After midnight, the precinct deployed men in pairs, one posted for two hours at the center of a fixed intersection, one to patrol the neighborhood for two hours and then to switch labors. The man in the intersection was prohibited from approaching the curb.
Battle strove for perfection, even offering help to any white officer who appeared to need assistance, because, he said, “I knew I was on trial, and through me, my race.” But scrutiny, ostracism, study, and the standard rigors of policing combined to produce fatigue. After three months on the job, while still on probation, Battle slipped.
“One rainy night, soaked to the skin, having been out of doors during my entire tour of duty, I went home for a brief rest before reporting for reserve. There was no one at home, so I fell asleep in a chair and failed to awaken in time to report at midnight. A complaint was sent in and I had to stand trial at headquarters.”
Well aware that the department needed scant excuse to cut him, Battle threw himself on the mercy of the tribunal and was fined two day’s pay. His staying power now clear, Battle faced still harder tests as the crucial six-month deadline neared. Death threats arrived in the mail. He hid them from Florence. Then, he found a note pinned over his bed. It was pierced to resemble a bullet hole, and the block-lettered words read: “N----r, if you don’t quit, this is what will happen to you.”
Arthur Browne is the editorial page editor of the Daily News. “One Righteous Man” goes on sale June 30.