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

Author:Browne, Arthur [Browne, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780807012611
Publisher: Random House Digital Dist
Published: 2015-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

COMMAND

TONY JUMPS INTO Battle’s black, turtle-shaped Lincoln and across the front seat from his grandfather. Battle is taking the boy to see Sugar Ray Robinson, the world’s greatest boxer, at his training camp in Greenwood Lake.

Battle first met the fighter when Robinson was a junior high school student. The Reverend Frederick Asbury Cullen of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church had brought the two together. The neighborhood around Cullen’s house of worship teemed with children who “were wild, bad, even vicious,” Cullen would remember. The roughest had a headquarters “in a cellar deep underground” and called their club “The Crescent.” Cullen persuaded the Crescent president, recalled only by the name Bunk, to take advantage of a gymnasium in the church basement. Thus was born the Salem Crescent Athletic Club.1

Then one day, Cullen found Robinson playing craps behind the church. The pastor took the boy to a cellar window through which he saw a boxing ring, punching bags, and a basketball court. Eventually, Robinson went in.

“About 20 guys were working out,” he recalled. “Sparring in the old ring. Skipping ropes. Punching the bags. Doing calisthenics. And sweating, the perspiration dripping like leaky faucets off their bodies. Over the years, the sweat had permeated everything in the gym.”

Robinson most remembered the smell. “The thick stale odor hung in the air and it hung in my nostrils,” he told a biographer. “Later on, it would represent a strange perfume to me.”2

Cullen recruited black police officers to keep the boys on the straight and narrow. Battle was at the top of the list. Boxer that he was, he got on famously with the fast-fisted boy and then the man.

“Robinson has been and still is a sort of protégé of mine,” he told Hughes. “I have been close to him through the years as he rose to the championship, having been at one time champion of two classes at once.”

TONY IS ACCUSTOMED to his grandfather’s standing among prominent people. He meets Paul Robeson on a Sunday when he performs before the Mother AME Zion congregation for forty minutes. America’s Communist blacklist has driven Robeson from the public sphere, but his brother, the Reverend Benjamin Robeson, is pastor, and nothing can stifle the tenor’s powerful voice on this stage. On other Sundays, Battle takes Tony to the Polo Grounds. Grandfather and grandson sit in a box behind the dugout. There, Battle introduces Tony to Don Newcombe, the pitcher who followed Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers and had won the 1949 National League Rookie of the Year Award.

But, clambering from the big Lincoln, Tony has never witnessed a welcome as extravagant as the one Sugar Ray Robinson extends to Battle.

“The entire program is choreographed to ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ with Sugar Ray dancing, skipping rope and sparring, all with the music going,” Tony remembers.

Hughes, too, counts Sugar Ray as a friend. He’s a regular at Sugar Ray’s nightclub in Harlem. He makes his own trip to the boxer’s camp in that summer of 1952, having returned to Greenwood Forest Farms for a few more weeks.

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