Read One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) for Free Online Page A
Authors: Arthur Browne
superintendent did not wish them to know this. I received two pay envelopes, one of regular wages at the pay window and the other at a different time.”
Despite his accomplishments, Battle’s wanderlust took hold. He arranged for his brother John Edward to come North from New Bern to take the job at the mill and moved on, first working on the farm of a prominent judge, who cheated Battle out of pay, and then as a waiter on side-wheelers that ferried the well-to-do on overnight trips between New York City and a rail connection to Boston at Fall River, Massachusetts. He found the job enjoyable, especially summer excursions to watch the 1901 America’s Cup sailing competitions between the J. P. Morgan–backed
Columbia
and the
Shamrock
of the Lipton Tea Company’s millionaire founder.
Off hours in port, Battle explored New York. The city was still intimidating to a wayfarer barely eighteen years old. Fellow blacks dispensed cautionary advice. There were things that African Americans did in New York at their peril. It was wise to avoid the police; it was foolhardy to cross them. Hard experience taught that New York’s cops readily applied the locust, and a police riot that had erupted in the Tenderloin less than a year earlier lived vividly in memory.
At 2 a.m. on a sweltering August night, Officer Robert Thorpe had moved to arrest May Enoch at the corner of Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Enoch was twenty years old and black. Thorpe presumed that she was a prostitute. She was not. Enoch was a young woman waiting to go home with the man she lived with, Arthur Harris. A fresh arrival from Virginia, Harris was trying to beat the heat in McBride’s Saloon. He saw Thorpe grab Enoch. Thorpe was in plainclothes, so Harris presumed that Thorpe was assaulting Enoch. The two men fought. Thorpe battered Harris with a nightstick. Harris drew a knife, fatally stabbed Thorpe and fled.
Sixty officers from the local stationhouse gathered at Thorpe’s house to pay respects. They were in bad temper. Outside, not far away, a fight broke out between two men—one black, one white. A mob pounced on the black man and, as reported by the
New York Daily Tribune
, the cry went up that a “nigger chase” was on. “Men and women poured by the hundreds from the neighboring tenements. Negroes were set upon wherever they could be found and brutally beaten.” 26
Gangs pulled blacks from streetcars to pummel them. A man threw a clothesline over a lamppost for a lynching. A call went out to hunt down well-known blacks. Cops cheered on the white marauders or joined the attacks until a drenching thunderstorm restored peace.
In the aftermath, there were furious newspaper editorials, protests, and lawsuits. The board of police commissioners assigned a committee to investigate. The panel took testimony, barring lawyers for black complainants from cross-examining police witnesses and crediting the word of officers over their victims. That, officially, was the end of the matter.
The
New York Times
saw “no signs that the citizen of African descent is distrusted or disliked.” Quite to the contrary, the paper opined: “He is generally well treated in public, and accorded his legal rights without resentment. His crude melodies and childlike antics are more than tolerated in the music halls of the best class.” 27
BATTLE’S WANDERINGS in the city passed quickly. Idled by the completion of the America’s Cup, he encountered a tout on Forty-Second Street who spoke glowingly of a waiter’s position in a hotel a few miles north of the city. Battle went eagerly, but the job was short-lived. In defiance of orders, he took meals in the kitchen rather than in the help’s quarters and was fired. Scouting again, he heard about Yale University and headed up the coast to New Haven.
Yale was like nothing Battle had ever seen. The campus was a collection of magnificent buildings, some dating back two centuries, some newly built in celebration of the
Despite his accomplishments, Battle’s wanderlust took hold. He arranged for his brother John Edward to come North from New Bern to take the job at the mill and moved on, first working on the farm of a prominent judge, who cheated Battle out of pay, and then as a waiter on side-wheelers that ferried the well-to-do on overnight trips between New York City and a rail connection to Boston at Fall River, Massachusetts. He found the job enjoyable, especially summer excursions to watch the 1901 America’s Cup sailing competitions between the J. P. Morgan–backed
Columbia
and the
Shamrock
of the Lipton Tea Company’s millionaire founder.
Off hours in port, Battle explored New York. The city was still intimidating to a wayfarer barely eighteen years old. Fellow blacks dispensed cautionary advice. There were things that African Americans did in New York at their peril. It was wise to avoid the police; it was foolhardy to cross them. Hard experience taught that New York’s cops readily applied the locust, and a police riot that had erupted in the Tenderloin less than a year earlier lived vividly in memory.
At 2 a.m. on a sweltering August night, Officer Robert Thorpe had moved to arrest May Enoch at the corner of Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Enoch was twenty years old and black. Thorpe presumed that she was a prostitute. She was not. Enoch was a young woman waiting to go home with the man she lived with, Arthur Harris. A fresh arrival from Virginia, Harris was trying to beat the heat in McBride’s Saloon. He saw Thorpe grab Enoch. Thorpe was in plainclothes, so Harris presumed that Thorpe was assaulting Enoch. The two men fought. Thorpe battered Harris with a nightstick. Harris drew a knife, fatally stabbed Thorpe and fled.
Sixty officers from the local stationhouse gathered at Thorpe’s house to pay respects. They were in bad temper. Outside, not far away, a fight broke out between two men—one black, one white. A mob pounced on the black man and, as reported by the
New York Daily Tribune
, the cry went up that a “nigger chase” was on. “Men and women poured by the hundreds from the neighboring tenements. Negroes were set upon wherever they could be found and brutally beaten.” 26
Gangs pulled blacks from streetcars to pummel them. A man threw a clothesline over a lamppost for a lynching. A call went out to hunt down well-known blacks. Cops cheered on the white marauders or joined the attacks until a drenching thunderstorm restored peace.
In the aftermath, there were furious newspaper editorials, protests, and lawsuits. The board of police commissioners assigned a committee to investigate. The panel took testimony, barring lawyers for black complainants from cross-examining police witnesses and crediting the word of officers over their victims. That, officially, was the end of the matter.
The
New York Times
saw “no signs that the citizen of African descent is distrusted or disliked.” Quite to the contrary, the paper opined: “He is generally well treated in public, and accorded his legal rights without resentment. His crude melodies and childlike antics are more than tolerated in the music halls of the best class.” 27
BATTLE’S WANDERINGS in the city passed quickly. Idled by the completion of the America’s Cup, he encountered a tout on Forty-Second Street who spoke glowingly of a waiter’s position in a hotel a few miles north of the city. Battle went eagerly, but the job was short-lived. In defiance of orders, he took meals in the kitchen rather than in the help’s quarters and was fired. Scouting again, he heard about Yale University and headed up the coast to New Haven.
Yale was like nothing Battle had ever seen. The campus was a collection of magnificent buildings, some dating back two centuries, some newly built in celebration of the
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