One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (19 page)

He had the Fifteenth swear in unison “that whichever may be in survival as commanding officer of this regiment when we get back to New York, that we see to it that the glory and the honor of the Negro race in America may be served by having our welcome home parade celebrated.” One witness recalled, “And to that pledge and prophecy, all present clasped hands—and said:—‘Amen!’”
⁵²

THE REGIMENT’S HOPES
dimmed with fresh racial violence, this time disastrously involving black troops who were successors to the Buffalo Soldiers. The War Department deployed members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry to Camp Logan outside Houston. Anticipating the arrival of African American servicemen, a newspaper advertisement warned Houstonians to “Remember Brownsville,” site of the trumped-up shooting that lived on as a rallying cry against arming blacks.

The soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth were experienced men and accustomed to respect. They refused to sit in the blacks-only section of movie theaters or to ride at the back of streetcars. Whites chafed at their seeming insolence. Then, on August 23, a black soldier named Edwards happened upon a group of white police officers manhandling a black woman. When Edwards tried to intervene, the police pistol-whipped and arrested him. A short time later, a black MP, Corporal Charles Baltimore, protested Edwards’s treatment at the stationhouse. He was assaulted and fled under gunfire. A rumor spread that the police had killed Baltimore. Soldiers broke into the weapons storage and, with one yelling, “To hell with going to France, get to work right here,” more than one hundred troops did battle with white cops and armed white civilians. The death toll was sixteen whites, including five police officers, and four blacks. With rapid efficiency and Woodrow Wilson’s approval, the army soon hanged nineteen soldiers.

The Houston riot “left a bitter taste in the mouth,” Battle remembered. For the men of the Fifteenth, it also raised fears that the War Department would sideline the unit entirely. But, under Hayward’s pressure, the War Department put the regiment on notice of a deployment to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The mayor there told the
Times
: “I am sorry to learn that the fifteenth Regiment has been ordered here, for, with their northern ideas about racial equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here they will not be treated as anything except Negroes.”
⁵³

On arriving, Hayward appealed to the regiment not to meet “the white citizens of Spartanburg on the undignified plane of prejudice and brutality,” and he urged that “if violence occurs, if blows are struck, that all of the violence and all of the blows are on one side and that side is not our side.”
⁵⁴

Napoleon Marshall complied when he was ordered off a trolley after paying his fare. When two whites threw a company member into a gutter, the Fifteenth stood down while white soldiers from New York, in a rare show of solidarity, pummeled the assailants. Noble Sissle took a kicking from the manager of a hotel who had knocked his hat off. When white soldiers in the lobby rose up to retaliate, James Reese Europe issued a booming order for calm.
⁵⁵

Finally, because of Hayward’s relentless persistence, the order arrived: the two thousand men of the Fifteenth would sail for France. On November 8, the regiment assembled on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for its only farewell parade. Battle’s kin, the Reverend Norman Roberts and his wife, Emma, came for last moments with their son Needham, a runaway transformed into disciplined soldier. And there was Napoleon Marshall’s wife, Harriet Gibbs, the first black graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, preparing to part from a man who, well past draft age, was going to make a point. And there were all the others who esteemed Battle as the unit’s godfather.

James Reese Europe conducted his band of renowned musicians in a program that included “Auld Lang Syne,” “Religioso March,” “a kind of half-syncopated arrangement of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” “Come Ye Disconsolate,” and, finally, George M. Cohan’s swinging, patriotic anthem “Over There.”
⁵⁶

WITH THE REGIMENT’S
departure, Battle raised his aspirations yet again. He had subscribed to the Equity Congress’s three goals: establishing a black regiment, breaking the color line of the New York Police Department, and integrating the New York Fire Department. The first two were now achieved. Accomplishing the third would require finding the ideal man to seek admission to a firehouse. Battle focused on Chief Williams’s son, Wesley.

Approaching the age of twenty-one, Wesley was the father of two sons. He supported Margaret and the boys—James, who was approaching two, and Charles, who was a newborn—on the steady, if modest, salary of a postal truck driver. While the job could carry a black man through a career and into a pension, its opportunities for advancement were slim and its duties were purely humdrum. By all rights, an adventurous young guy like Wesley would find greater fulfillment as a firefighter; and the fire department would be lucky to attract a job candidate who had Wesley’s combination of brains, strength, and athleticism. But he would have to force open a barred door and then conquer brutal resistance. Battle judged Wesley to possess the emotional resilience to weather the unceasing hostility of white men in close quarters. Just as important, he also had no doubt that Wesley could whip just about anyone if necessary. Finally, the Chief’s powerful friends could be invaluable.

Battle broached the idea of joining the fire department with Wesley. Fully aware of the
difficulties
that had beset Battle, Wesley bought in. His great-grandmother had come through slavery and his grandparents had escaped from bondage. Now, Wesley could endure the worst that white firefighters dished out in order to prove that a black man could excel in the job. Because Wesley knew that he would excel. So did the Chief and Margaret, who was as frightened as Florence had been in Battle’s early days.

THE NEWSPAPERS OF
May 1918 brought Battle up short. Almost six months had passed with scant news of the Fifteenth, but now a headline declared:

Then, with mounting joy, Battle read a war correspondent’s astonishing words: “Our own ‘cullud folks’—negro infantrymen mainly from the State and City of New York—have met the Germans and worsted them.” And there, just below, was a tale of “dusky warriors” and “the glorious exploit of Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts.”
⁵⁷

All across the United States, Battle’s cousin Roberts and Johnson, a redcap from Albany, were a heroic sensation. Honored as few blacks had ever been honored, they delighted Battle and his colleagues at the Equity Congress for proving in extraordinary measure the American fiber of the black soldier. The path from the Sheep Meadow to valor had been long and hard.

At the beginning of 1918, the Fifteenth had landed in Brest and boarded boxcars for transport to Saint-Nazaire, where the troops were pressed into laying railroad tracks and building docks, a hospital, and a dam. The Saint-Nazaire camp was “a racial war zone” in the description of Gail Buckley, whose
American Patriots
is an impressively researched history of African Americans in the US military. Interviewed by Buckley, one aged veteran recounted that white Marines “began killing black soldiers one by one,” prompting blacks to retaliate by killing whites.
⁵⁸

The men pressed Hayward for a transfer into combat. Hayward appealed to General “Black Jack” Pershing without success, but a desperate French army offered to take the troops to the front under its command. With Pershing’s approval, the Fifteenth then became the first American regiment to serve entirely beneath a foreign flag. The French dubbed the men
les enfants perdu
, the forgotten orphans.

Redesignated as the 369th Infantry, the regiment went to the front as the first of the thirty-seven thousand American black troops who were allowed into combat, while more than four times as many were limited to logistical duties.
⁵⁹
The men plunged into the horrors of trench warfare amid exhausted Frenchmen and heavy German attack. The trenches were muddy and ran with blood. Beyond barbed wire, rotting corpses littered no man’s land. Artillery shells, laden with explosives and shrapnel or poison gas, dropped random death to earth.

Spread on a four-kilometer line that ran from the ruins of Ville-sur-Tourbe to the Aisne River, the orphans took to the fight—with the exception of Jim Europe’s band. On orders, he led a goodwill tour that introduced the demoralized French to swing music unlike any they had ever heard. Every performance was a rousing success. In Aix-les-Bains, the audience “rose en masse” with word that the band was heading to the front and carried the men to a troop train.

The regiment built forward ambuscades to guard against nighttime stealth attacks. Post 29 was isolated near a bridge over the Aisne. There, Battle read in the newspaper, Needham Roberts peered into the blackness after two-thirty in the morning. His partner on guard, five-foot, four-inch Henry Johnson, was about forty feet away. Roberts heard a sound, perhaps the click of wire cutters. When Roberts and Johnson heard the sound again, they fired an illuminating rocket and shouted “Corporal of the Guard” in alert.

A raiding party opened fire and hurled hand grenades. Roberts and Johnson were wounded and knocked down. Propped against a door of the dugout, Roberts threw grenades toward where the Germans had been. Johnson got to his feet. A German loomed out of the darkness. Johnson fired, taking the man down but emptying his magazine. A second German rushed forward with a pistol. Johnson cracked the man’s skull with the butt of his rifle.

Two of the enemy had hold of Roberts and were dragging him off. Johnson fell under gunfire, struggled to his feet, unsheathed a bolo knife, and plunged the eight-inch blade into the skull of a German who had Roberts by the shoulders. He turned the knife on the second of Robert’s captors. The attacker who had fallen under the blow of Johnson’s rifle butt fired a Luger. Wounded again, Johnson disemboweled the man. As American sentries arrived, Johnson threw grenades after retreating Germans. Then he slumped, wounded in both legs and both feet.
⁶⁰

Major Arthur Little, a white veteran who had enlisted in the Fifteenth because no white regiment would take him at the age of forty-three, tracked the German retreat “by pools of blood” and enough abandoned equipment to indicate that the raiding party had included as many as twenty-four men. That morning, three New York war correspondents happened to visit the regiment and sent home the story read by Battle and all of America.

And, eight years after starting the fight to create an African American National Guard regiment, the Equity Congress sent a dispatch to the “Officers and Men of the 15th Regiment of New York; with the American Expeditionary Forces in France.” It read: “Colored people of New York and America in general, join the Equity Congress (your association) in congratulating you upon your splendid victory; especially Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts.”

The war to end all wars was over for Johnson and Roberts. They were hospitalized for long recuperations, while the report of their exploits prompted the French, for the first time, to award the
Croix de Guerre
to Americans. In recognition of Johnson’s hand-to-hand fight, they bestowed on him the still-higher honor of the
Croix de Guerre avec Palme
. Both men sailed from France without the slightest official American recognition, not even a Purple Heart.

ANTICIPATING MIGHTY RESISTANCE
, Battle strategized with Wesley and Chief Williams to maximize Wesley’s chances of winning appointment to the fire department. Wesley would have to pass a written examination and a medical evaluation. Additionally, the department required applicants to undergo a physical test that assessed strength and speed and to submit written attestations of good character. With no shot at enrolling in the Delehanty Institute, Wesley embarked on intense self-study. Publications available for review at the municipal reference library covered subjects including fire department duties and rules, technical descriptions of steam pumpers, fire prevention techniques, the safety obligations of theaters, and the structure of city government—plus memory and arithmetic drills.

After Wesley registered for the civil service exam, his honey-colored skin was a notice to the department that its twenty-seven hundred applicants included a black man. Called for the physical test, Wesley assembled with several hundred of the men against whom he was competing. There was a distance run. Wesley far outpaced his heat with one of the fastest times ever recorded by the department. Loaded down with gear and weights, he raced up and down ladders and climbed over and under obstacles with similar ease. He proved to be the sole applicant—and only the second in the department’s history—to achieve a 100 percent score. Then, he was almost as proficient on the written exam.

The marks ranked Wesley in the thirteenth spot on the hiring list, guaranteeing that the commissioner would reach his name. Battle celebrated with Wesley and the Chief and insisted that Wesley undergo a physical by a white doctor to be ready with indisputable evidence of good health. The doctor pronounced him in excellent condition.

The Chief, meanwhile, secured letters of recommendation from some of the prominent men with whom he had become friendly as head of the redcaps. To Battle’s delight, Teddy Roosevelt gave Wesley an endorsement. The chief also stopped by to see Charles Thorley in the hope that the politically connected proprietor of the House of Flowers would back Wesley if need be. Thorley committed to providing whatever help he could.

It was widely believed that the fire department had never admitted a black man. In fact, in 1898, William Nicholson of Brooklyn had passed all the tests required for appointment, but he was relegated to working as a groom for wagon horses. In 1914, John Woodson, a former mail messenger, quietly joined the department and kept a low profile in a Brooklyn firehouse. Neither Battle nor Wesley nor anyone in the Equity Congress knew of Woodson, nor was he aware of them.