One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) by Arthur Browne

the Battles’ apartment. Ovington described the tenements there as “human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings.” “Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease,” she wrote, adding that, generally, the “people on the hill are known for their rough behavior, their readiness to fight, their coarse talk.” She said that vice is “open and cheap,” that “boys play at craps,” and that “Negro loafers hang about the street corners and largely support the Tenth Avenue saloons.” 68
    At the age of twenty-three, Battle had come a long way from Anne, from river-chilled watermelons, from the countryside—from the South, with all its studied courtesy and overt cruelty—only to live among people who had little more space than was allotted to their ancestors on slave ships.
    Still worse, the danger of white-on-black violence overshadowed the neighborhood—and the New York Police Department was the most feared threat. Officers operated out of a stationhouse on West Sixty-Eighth Street. They were well known for wielding nightsticks with impunity. Never did they do so more vehemently than during the Siege of San Juan Hill. On a Friday evening in July, about a month after Battle’s wedding, a white gang taunted an elderly white peddler on the gang’s corner. When a young black man attempted to help the peddler, a police roundsman ordered a black minister, who ran a coal business, to go into his shop. The minister refused.
    “You black———, get in there or I will knock your brains out,” the roundsman ordered, according to the detailed retelling in Timothy Thomas Fortune’s
New York Age
. Inside the store, the roundsman hit the minister. The minister grabbed a gun from a drawer. Police beat the minister senseless. Black residents swarmed the cops when they carried the minister outside.
    Across Battle’s neighborhood, tensions ran high the next day. The
Age
reported:
    On Saturday Afro-Americans were bullied by the police. Respectable business citizens, if they stood for a minute, were told to get out of the way, and the first man arrested . . . was, according to his statement, beaten after being taken to the 68th Street station. Similar treatment was accorded to every prisoner that evening. On Sunday more needless arrests were made upon frivolous and concocted charges.
    On Monday night, a police officer ordered men who were standing in front of a saloon three blocks from Battle’s apartment to get off the sidewalk and go inside. A brick thrown from a roof struck the officer’s head.
    The police made a rush into the saloon and into the adjacent houses. The back room of the saloon was cleared and a number of shots shattered all the back windows. . . . Later the policemen, firing in all directions swept across the billiard and pool room of Walter Frazier . . . and rushing pell mell into his place of business, where nothing had occurred, and where men were indulging in recreation and sitting around, placed every man under arrest. According to the testimony of Frazier, one policeman said to the other: “Shall we arrest all of these men?” and one of the officers replied: “Yes, arrest every nigger you see.”
    Dozens were hauled to the stationhouse, where, the
Age
reported, “they found prepared for them a modified form of the Indian torture called ‘running the gauntlet.’” One by one they were shoved into a darkened room in which “police officers with clubs proceeded to beat these upon the head and bodies until they were nearly dead.”
    For weeks after the nightsticks had swirled around Battle and Florence, Fortune trained the
Age
’s editorial firepower on Police Commissioner William McAdoo, writing: “By no one, except Commissioner McAdoo whose enthusiasm over the force too often outruns his judgment, has the behavior of the police in these ‘riots’ been praised; on the contrary, it has caused blistering