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

Author:Browne, Arthur [Browne, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1261-1
Publisher: Random House Digital Dist
Published: 2015-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

It was a heady time for the young writers. They were wanted at downtown A-list parties, and they were welcomed at fabulous soirées thrown by wealthy hair-care heiress A’Lelia Walker, later described by Hughes as “the joy-goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Amid the carousing and the high that came with being in fashionable demand, the writers took to calling themselves the “niggerati.” Ever affable yet ever inscrutable because he was never known to have opened a deeply personal, let alone sexual, relationship with anyone, Hughes remained the movement’s leading light. He spelled out its lofty ambitions in an essay in the Nation that declared: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”75

Soon, at the age of twenty-five, Hughes published a volume of poetry that biographer Rampersad described as “his most brilliant book of poems, and one of the more astonishing books of verse ever published in the United States—comparable in the black world to [Walt Whitman’s] Leaves of Grass in the white.”76

Evoking the lives and ways of poor African Americans, the book scandalized much of the black establishment with such starkly revealing poems as “Red Silk Stockings,” which spoke of a black woman dressed to allure white men. Unfortunately titled “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” a reference to poor people selling their clothing to pawnbrokers, most of whom happened to be Jewish, the collection was Hughes’s declaration of freedom for his generation of African American artists. That it didn’t sell well seemed of little consequence in a time when black expression was the essence of hip. A wealthy, elderly white woman, Charlotte Mason, known endearingly to Hughes as “Godmother,” became his patron, funding him with $150 a month, asking only for an accounting and, far more important, a say over his writing projects.

Swept up as well, many in the black intelligentsia predicted that the cultural outpouring would lead whites, at long last, to see blacks for all their humanity. “I am coming to believe that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator and contributor to American civilization,” wrote James Weldon Johnson.77

WALKER’S TAMMANY HALL background gave Battle little reason to hope for a reprieve, nor did Walker’s unlikely appointment of George V. McLaughlin as commissioner. Then serving as New York State Superintendent of Banking, McLaughlin had no experience in policing and seemed ideally suited to act as Tammany’s puppet. Regardless, the new commissioner summoned Battle.

“Officer, have a seat,” McLaughlin said. “I want to ask you do you know why you were not promoted to sergeant when your turn came?”

“I do not,” Battle answered.

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