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

Delamars, he stepped into adulthood under Florence’s grounding influence. A butler’s income paid for free-form bachelorhood, a bed in a small room, and sums wired home to Anne, but it would hardly support a wife and family. Casting about for new possibilities, Battle heard that blacks his age were pulling down good money as luggage porters at the Grand Central Depot, but the jobs were hard to get. He would have to see the headman, the fearsome Chief James Williams.
    In the spring of 1905, Battle headed to the landmark built by Cornelius Vanderbilt for the railroad empire by which he became the world’s richest man. Designed to resemble the Louvre, the depot extended along Forty-Second Street for 370 feet and then turned north in an L shape for almost 700 feet. Outside, Battle wove among horse-drawn coaches and streams of arriving and departing passengers. Through the doors, crystal panes atop one-hundred-foot tall trusses overspread a train shed with seventeen tracks. “New York opened its eyes and gasped,” the
New York Times
had said of the depot’s opening in 1871.
    With more than a little trepidation, Battle made his way to the Chief’s cubby of an office. He found a broad-shouldered presence with deeply set eyes and a bearing that conveyed command and maturity. In fact, James H. Williams was just four years older than Battle. 61 Born in 1879, he had grown up in a household haunted by the ghosts of slavery. His grandmother Sarah Powell had been taken in girlhood from West Africa and had been sold into bondage in Virginia. She remembered the white men who had kidnapped her, the hard ship’s voyage, and servitude on the state’s Eastern Shore. She would tell of a plantation owner’s son who had taken her as a mistress, who had fathered a baby with her, and who had taught their son, light-skinned John Wesley Williams, to read and write while hiding in the woods. 62 John Wesley escaped, reunited with his mother after the Civil War, started his own family with a woman who also had escaped slavery, and brought James H. into the world bearing the gene of his grandfather’s fair complexion. Like Battle, James H. had been born into the South’s first postslavery generation of African Americans. Like Battle, he had an adventurous spirit. Like Battle, he had left home for the North as a teenager. By 1897, at the age of eighteen, he was living in the Tenderloin, was married to sixteen-year-old Lucy Metresh of Connecticut, and had found work as a hotel bellman. Lucy gave birth to a son that year. James H. and Lucy named the boy Wesley Augustus. He was the first of their six children, and he would grow up to be the most consequential of the brood by far.
    Around the turn of the century, James H. took a position with as unlikely a source of equal opportunity as could be: Charles Thorley’s House of Flowers on Fifth Avenue. To call the House of Flowers a florist shop would be akin to describing Tiffany’s as a corner jeweler. Thorley’s elaborate floral arrangements were a must-have nicety among upscale New Yorkers.
    Thorley had started in the business at the age of sixteen in 1874. Enjoying success, he then found even greater wealth as an investor in the city’s booming real estate market. Big money made Thorley a player in New York. He was a member of a committee dedicated to making Fifth Avenue the city’s grandest boulevard, and he belonged to the Tammany Hall war council. At the same time, he quietly helped the disadvantaged. When Thorley died in 1923, two hundred “down and outers” gathered at a mission on the Bowery to honor the generosity he had shown them. 63 And many were the black men to whom this rich and powerful white man gave work.
    Williams delivered flowers to well-to-do customers and served as the shop’s doorman. Thorley’s standards were exacting. Meeting his demands steeped Williams in the importance of first-rate customer service, and Thorley was pleased to recommend his protégé for a