One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Syracuse universities in the United States, as well as at Strasburg University in Germany and the Sorbonne in Paris and soon to be named principal of an elementary school that served the black children of the Tenderloin, described the dynamic:
    The saddest thing that faces me in my work is the small opportunity for a colored boy or girl to find proper employment. A boy comes to my office and asks for his working papers. He may be well up in the school, possibly with graduation only a few months off. I question him somewhat as follows:
    “Well, my boy, you want to go to work, do you? What are you going to do?”
    “I am going to be a door-boy, sir.”
    “Well, you will get $2.50 or $3 a week, but after a while that will not be enough; what then?”
    After a moment’s pause he will reply: “I should like to be an office boy.”
    “Well, what next?”
    A moment’s silence, and, “I should try to get a position as bell-boy.”
    “Well, then, what next?”
    A rather contemplative mood, and then, “I should like to climb to the position of head bell-boy.”
    He has now arrived at the top; further than this he sees no hope. He must face the bald fact that he must enter business as a boy and wind up as a boy. 21
    For now, Battle was a country teenager come North with wide eyes. At Anne’s side, he navigated the hustle and muck of the streets and absorbed the shock of the new. Trains thundered and clanged overhead. Forerunners of the subways, their steam engines belched smoke and showered sparks. Where the sun came into view, the sky was etched with cables strung helter-skelter to carry electricity every which way.
    Crossing Manhattan’s busiest north-south thoroughfare, he encountered the New York Police Department for the first time in the form of the best the department had to offer: the Broadway Squad. All the men were at least six feet one. They stood resplendent in brass-buttoned uniforms. Battle was duly impressed. As one writer of the day said of this elite cadre: “They hold the peace of Broadway in their arms, and under these broad arms tens of thousands of frightened New Yorkers and strangers pass in safety each day.” 22
    Far beyond Battle’s view were the darker truths that New York Police Department was infused with brutality, corruption, and racism. Its ranks, 7,500 strong, were filled largely by ill-educated Irishmen who were given to the liberal use of a club called the “locust,” so named for the close-grained wood from which it was hewn. They took orders from the bosses of Tammany Hall, the all-powerful Democratic Party machine. Many blurred the distinction between cop and criminal.
    Vice was rampant, and nowhere more so than in the Tenderloin. There, New Yorkers indulged baser appetites away from the scolding of stiff-necked clergy and the daytime rectitude of proper citizens. There, sellers of sin shared their bounty with the police, and the police shared the wealth with Tammany chiefs.
    The area drew its name from a joyful remark uttered in the last decade of the nineteenth century by Captain Alexander Williams on being assigned to the local precinct with all its gushers of graft. “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin,” chortled Williams, an immense former ship’s carpenter who was renowned as “Clubber” because of his frequent use of the baton.
    There were gambling halls. There were nightclubs with curtained rooms for prostitution and galleries for watching sexual “circuses.” There were rows of bordellos and brightly lit avenues where prostitutes paraded: white women on the “Ladies Mile” along Sixth Avenue and black women on “African Broadway” along Seventh Avenue.
    Battle’s trek with Anne took them in front of City Hall to the western landing of the Brooklyn Bridge. He remembered the span as “a wonderful thing in those days,” and admitted to a touch of hayseed gullibility: “I heard