Free One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) by Arthur Browne Page B
Authors: Arthur Browne
Thorpe by black Arthur Harris on a sweltering August night.
“Thanks to McBride’s Saloon, no one in our dormitory basement ever went hungry,” Battle recalled. “For a dime, a man could get a foaming pail of beer. With the beer, the purchaser was entitled to access to McBride’s free lunch corner. I did not drink, but I would put my pennies tighter with those of the other boys and someone would be sent for the beer. While the beer was being drawn he would pick up enough free lunch for all of us.”
Then nature disrupted Battle’s plans. Florence’s frequent queasiness pointed toward pregnancy. Battle brought Florence to the West Fifty-Third Street office of Dr. E. P. Roberts, one of the city’s few black physicians.
Born in Louisburg, North Carolina, in 1868, Roberts was raised in a log cabin whose porous roof revealed the stars overhead as he lay in bed. The family had virtually no money. He would laugh to remember that playmates called him “Pillsbury” because his mother had made his underwear out of flour sacks.
By dint of brains and determination, Roberts graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where William D. was enrolled (and where Langston Hughes would study), and took medical training at New York’s now shuttered Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital. He was the lone black student and one of just two class members to have completed college.
Roberts’s credentials as a physician were overmatched by the color of his skin. Looking back in 1951, still practicing at the age of eighty-three, he remembered being spurned as prospective patients discovered that they had enlisted the services of a doctor who turned out to be black. Whites simply rejected him, while many blacks, conditioned by racial boundaries, refused to trust that a black man was a doctor, let alone a doctor who was as capable as a white doctor. 65
Roberts’s confirmation of the pregnancy propelled Battle and Florence into marriage. Looking back, Battle confessed that Florence fulfilled his hope of marrying a woman “as near like my loving mother as I possibly could.” He wrote as he gathered his memories for Hughes: “In this I have been most fortunate in the selection of my mate.”
The wedding took place on June 28, 1905, under the auspices of Florence’s Baptist pastor, the Reverend George Sims, at Sims’s home. A former farmhand and railroad worker, Sims had founded Union Baptist Church in a storefront on West Fifty-Ninth Street. He devoted his ministry to the “very recent residents of this new, disturbing city,” was becoming well known for the vigor of his services, and was embarked on building Union Baptist into a major house of worship. Like Battle, Sims had the physique of a heavyweight fighter. “When he talked of Christ from his pulpit, Jesus became alive, a workman, a carpenter who took off his apron and went out to answer the call to preach,” wrote Mary White Ovington. 66
The wedding certificate records that Florence reported her age to be eighteen, rather than sixteen. 67 Never mentioning that Florence was two months pregnant, Battle recalled the day: “My wife was two hours late for her own wedding. We had an appointment with the minister for eight o’clock. I left my work at Grand Central at seven in the evening and was dressed and waiting anxiously at her sister’s apartment before eight—but Florence was still out shopping. We were not married until ten at night.”
For a short time, Samuel and Florence roomed with her sister in a tenement on the far west end of Sixty-Eighth Street. Then they moved to a place of their own, another tenement, this one “four rooms with a distinguishing brass bed” at 341 West Fifty-Ninth Street. The neighborhood teemed with unemployed and underemployed men, women who went to work as domestics if they were lucky, and poorly clothed children, many of whom were also ill attended.
More than six thousand people were counted as living on a single block just north of
“Thanks to McBride’s Saloon, no one in our dormitory basement ever went hungry,” Battle recalled. “For a dime, a man could get a foaming pail of beer. With the beer, the purchaser was entitled to access to McBride’s free lunch corner. I did not drink, but I would put my pennies tighter with those of the other boys and someone would be sent for the beer. While the beer was being drawn he would pick up enough free lunch for all of us.”
Then nature disrupted Battle’s plans. Florence’s frequent queasiness pointed toward pregnancy. Battle brought Florence to the West Fifty-Third Street office of Dr. E. P. Roberts, one of the city’s few black physicians.
Born in Louisburg, North Carolina, in 1868, Roberts was raised in a log cabin whose porous roof revealed the stars overhead as he lay in bed. The family had virtually no money. He would laugh to remember that playmates called him “Pillsbury” because his mother had made his underwear out of flour sacks.
By dint of brains and determination, Roberts graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where William D. was enrolled (and where Langston Hughes would study), and took medical training at New York’s now shuttered Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital. He was the lone black student and one of just two class members to have completed college.
Roberts’s credentials as a physician were overmatched by the color of his skin. Looking back in 1951, still practicing at the age of eighty-three, he remembered being spurned as prospective patients discovered that they had enlisted the services of a doctor who turned out to be black. Whites simply rejected him, while many blacks, conditioned by racial boundaries, refused to trust that a black man was a doctor, let alone a doctor who was as capable as a white doctor. 65
Roberts’s confirmation of the pregnancy propelled Battle and Florence into marriage. Looking back, Battle confessed that Florence fulfilled his hope of marrying a woman “as near like my loving mother as I possibly could.” He wrote as he gathered his memories for Hughes: “In this I have been most fortunate in the selection of my mate.”
The wedding took place on June 28, 1905, under the auspices of Florence’s Baptist pastor, the Reverend George Sims, at Sims’s home. A former farmhand and railroad worker, Sims had founded Union Baptist Church in a storefront on West Fifty-Ninth Street. He devoted his ministry to the “very recent residents of this new, disturbing city,” was becoming well known for the vigor of his services, and was embarked on building Union Baptist into a major house of worship. Like Battle, Sims had the physique of a heavyweight fighter. “When he talked of Christ from his pulpit, Jesus became alive, a workman, a carpenter who took off his apron and went out to answer the call to preach,” wrote Mary White Ovington. 66
The wedding certificate records that Florence reported her age to be eighteen, rather than sixteen. 67 Never mentioning that Florence was two months pregnant, Battle recalled the day: “My wife was two hours late for her own wedding. We had an appointment with the minister for eight o’clock. I left my work at Grand Central at seven in the evening and was dressed and waiting anxiously at her sister’s apartment before eight—but Florence was still out shopping. We were not married until ten at night.”
For a short time, Samuel and Florence roomed with her sister in a tenement on the far west end of Sixty-Eighth Street. Then they moved to a place of their own, another tenement, this one “four rooms with a distinguishing brass bed” at 341 West Fifty-Ninth Street. The neighborhood teemed with unemployed and underemployed men, women who went to work as domestics if they were lucky, and poorly clothed children, many of whom were also ill attended.
More than six thousand people were counted as living on a single block just north of
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