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

denunciation from the most influential members of the metropolitan press, we mean the
Times
, the
World
, the
Evening Post
and the
Evening Mail
.” 69
    As 1905 closed, Fortune published an unsigned letter to the editor under a headline that exhorted, “Become Police and Firemen.” The author detailed the required physical qualifications. Barred were obesity, “rupture in any form,” “fissures, fistulas and external or internal piles,” varicose veins, color-blindness, and much more, including “very offensive breath.” It was mandatory that heart, brain, kidneys, and genitalia be in good working order.
    The author also warned—presciently, as Battle would discover—that an applicant might face medical sabotage after passing the written civil service test: “I am informed that it has been, and is now, the custom when Afro-Americans apply for examination for the examiners to fake up some technical physical defect and thereby reject them, while a white man in similar physical condition would be passed without question.” 70
    There was no rush of volunteers. The police department went on as the keeper of an unequal peace and as Tammany Hall’s arm of extortion.
    FLORENCE’S FIGURE GREW round as fall moved into winter. When finally the time arrived, Dr. Roberts delivered the baby at home, in those four rooms with the distinguishing brass bed. The date was January 23, 1906. The infant was a boy in whom Battle vested his own life’s dream, while accepting that, practically speaking, he could not hand down to his son the name Samuel.
    He remembered: “Jesse Earl was our first born. We started to name him Samuel Jesse Battle, Jr. But in that day and time, following the era of the ‘coon’ songs, colored people were becoming very sensitive about names like Rufus and Sambo. Some of our friends persuaded us that Sam was too closely related to Sambo, so we named our son Jesse Earl instead. I had wanted Jesse Earl to be a lawyer—to fulfill a secret ambition of my own.”
    Around this time, Florence chose the name Jesse as term of endearment for her husband as well. The nickname stuck and would often be used by Battle’s closest family and friends for the rest of his life. To them, he would not be Samuel, but Jesse. Battle and Florence had Jesse Earl baptized, and then the redcaps came to a christening party. There were prayers for the baby’s spiritual well-being—and, no doubt, for more. There were likely prayers that he would survive to grow up. Infant mortality was epidemic. With sixteen of every one hundred babies dying before the age of one—and with the mortality rate for black infants almost double that for whites—everyone knew mothers and fathers who had lost children. By comparison, the death rate today is more than thirty times lower: five of every thousand infants fail to pass the one-year mark. 71
    After the baptism, the Battles settled into roles they would follow across their six-decade marriage: Florence tended to home and family; Samuel devoted exuberant energy to his work and the social life that flourished around him. He thrived amid Grand Central’s pomp and glamour by studying up on the celebrities whose bags he toted. He became as knowledgeable about opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink as he was about actress Lillian Russell. He read the writing of Richard Harding Davis, who passed through the terminal as he went about becoming America’s first celebrity war correspondent. He greeted John D. Rockefeller.
    Battle told Hughes, who wrote:
    The famous
20th Century Limited
, the New York Central’s eighteen-hour train to and from Chicago, arrived at 9:30 a.m. For every hour it was late, passengers were refunded a dollar of their fare. Many of my customers, when the train was late, would simply hand me their refund slip and tell me to keep the money. Red Caps were never sorry to see the
Century
come in behind time, least of all myself. We were probably the only ones happy when it came in