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Title details for One Righteous Man by Arthur Browne - Available

One Righteous Man

Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York

by Arthur Browne
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Winner of the Christopher Award and the New York City Book Award
Winner of the 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction
A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.
 
When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America.
By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as “godfather” to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the “Hellfighters of Harlem.” He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department.
At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 30, 2015

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780807012611
      • File size: 578 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780807012611
      • File size: 3313 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      March 1, 2015
      A veteran New York City journalist relates the dramatic saga of the first uniformed African-American police officer.New York Daily News editorial page editor Browne (co-author: I, Koch: A Decidedly Unauthorized Biography of the Mayor of New York City, Edward I. Koch, 1985) never met Samuel Battle (1883-1966), but he decided to write Battle's biography due to an unusual resource: an unpublished manuscript based on Battle's conversations with African-American poet Langston Hughes. In 1949, Battle hired Hughes to interview him and produce a manuscript. Hughes needed money, so he assented. However, according to Browne, Hughes' detachment led to a low-quality work that was rejected by multiple publishers. As a result, Battle died without a wide readership understanding the impressive accomplishment of a courageous cop who broke the racial barrier, at frequent risk to his safety. Battle rightly feared street thugs encountered during his daily work, but mostly, he feared the white police officers, most of whom exhibited overt racism. Some New York cops aimed racist comments at Battle, but most of them gave him the silent treatment, literally never speaking to him, hoping he would feel so isolated that he would quit. Reared in small-town North Carolina, Battle had learned how to deal with racism, and he felt determined to show the police command and the New York City mayor that his performance could match or outpace any other cop's. Eventually, enough powerful New York City individuals recognized Battle's abilities, and he was promoted to the rank of supervisor, where he was in charge of many white officers. Browne also explains Battle's major role in the New York Fire Department's racial integration, as well as the friendships he developed with prominent figures, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson. An occasionally rambling but especially timely book, given recent tragedies involving certain police forces across the country.

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2015

      In 1952, poet Langston Hughes finished a draft of a manuscript titled Battle of Harlem, which was a commissioned biography of Samuel Battle, the first African American officer in the New York Police Department. The manuscript failed to find a publisher, and Battle, a civil rights pioneer, died forgotten in 1966. Browne (I, Koch) retells Battle's fight for integration in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. The subject's time on the force brought him in contact with everyone from Booker T. Washington and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to writers from the Harlem Renaissance and athletes such as track-and-field star Jesse Owens and boxer Jack Johnson. The author provides a rich overview of the civil rights struggle in Gotham, and its place in the city's cultural and political history, but sometimes his attempts to include a wealth of material results in long digressions that detract from Battle's personal and professional difficulties. VERDICT Of interest, and recommended for, readers of civil rights histories, but the fractured narration and detailed accounts of secondary characters may turn away those seeking a more straightforward story.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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