Remembering the Activism Campaign that Made Samuel Battle the First Black NYPD Officer
By Matthew Guariglia
Fiorello La Guardia and Samuel Battle, 1941.
New York Daily News Archive.
Dedicated in 2009, Samuel Battle Plaza, at the sprawling intersection at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, commemorates Samuel Jesse Battle who, in 1911, became the first African American appointed to the NYPD.[1] Presided over by embattled NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the dedication came near the height of the protest movement against the department’s disproportionate stopping and frisking of young men of color in the city. At a moment of mass community resistance to Kelly’s NYPD, renaming served a political purpose. Creating a visible landmark to Samuel Battle at that pivotal moment preserved a narrative of symbiosis between the people of Harlem and the NYPD.[2]
At the unveiling ceremony, NYPD Deputy inspector Kevin Catalina told the crowd, “Battle integrated an organization; it had to be an incredible battle…he had to endure all sorts of feelings toward him. He was an inspiring man.” By focusing the constructed narratives of Battle on the racial animosity he faced and the labor he performed, these landmarks attempt to forge a solidarity that connects the police of the past with the civilians of the present. These monuments make it clear: Black police, and not civilians, were the real victims of prejudice that deserved attention and commemoration.[3]
The name on the street sign over the intersection has come to symbolize the solitude of Battle--a Civil Rights hero that presides forever, without historical context, in a political vacuum. While Battle has emerged from the historical void a solitary canonical figure hell-bent on integrating the NYPD, his 1911 appointment actually served as the end goal of a decade-long activism campaign that sought a solution to racialized police brutality.
After the wide-scale Riot of 1900, in which police and white New Yorkers terrorized and brutalized Manhattan’s largest interracial neighborhoods, the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill, residents and activists organized the Citizens’ Protective League as a way to find solutions to rampant police violence. One such solution was that Black police should patrol Black neighborhoods.
On Sunday August 1, 1909, Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom took to the pulpit of the Bethel A.M.E. Church on West 25th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, right in the heart of the Tenderloin. “The time has come,” he pronounced, “when the decent self-respecting and law-abiding members of the race should take a strong stand against the lawless negroes of New York City…we who are continuously denouncing the whites should show our honesty, broad-mindedness and sincere desire to see that the laws are not broken.” Because Black police would allegedly understand the neighborhood better, and be more familiar with local trouble makers or dangerous locations, they were believed to be better equipped than white officers to clean up, rather than just brutalize, Black communities. This also meant, in the eyes of Ransom and other reformers who adhered to Booker T. Washington’s respectability politics, having police who could serve as an example of Black civic responsibility and simultaneously uplift the race by punishing what they saw as criminality in a portion of African Americans.
“Chicago has three hundred Negro police,” Ransom continued, “We need in New York City at least two hundred to be distributed as patrolmen, plain clothes men and detectives. They can do more to help the situation than under present conditions. This should be done in the interest of public morals.”[4] During the 1870s and 1880s, mayors and police commissioners in northern cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, found the appointment of Black police essential for providing protection to underserved communities vulnerable to mob violence, as a way to address alleged Black criminality, and as a spoil of patronage to ensure Black votes for a specific party.[5] Even in Brooklyn before its consolidation with Manhattan in 1898, a Black population that had developed in the years following the targeting of Black residents during the 1863 Draft Riots necessitated the employment of multiple African American patrolmen.[6] Because they were hired before the Brooklyn police joined the New York police on January 1, 1898, those Black officers were not considered “firsts” by the NYPD.
In addition to the wide-scale integration of African American police in other cities, Ransom also had recent experiments in immigrant neighborhoods to draw on. “It has been cited,” wrote one reporter, “that in the district occupied by Italians, fights with police were frequent until Italians were made members of the police force.”[7] Another reporter, writing for the New York Evening Post and reprinted in the New York Age, one reporter remarked, “There are Italian and Hebrew policemen, as well as Russian, Irish and German; in fact, all classes have their representation.”
It was during this public debate that a young Samuel Battle, a redcap carrying bags in Grand Central Terminal, first decided to take the exam to join the NYPD. Samuel Jesse Battle was born on January 16, 1883 in the small segregated town of New Bern, North Carolina, about 115 miles southeast of Raleigh. His parents, Thomas and Anne Battle, were born into slavery not far from New Bern. Thomas had worked as a preacher and a bricklayer and was, in time, able to earn enough money to purchase his freedom and that of his bride-to-be, Anne. After a trouble-making childhood, he was sent to live with his sister and her husband in New York. Despite the fact that his brother-in-law had been a Black officer in Brooklyn, Battle claimed his entrée into the world of policing ultimately came from the block where he lived. Later in life, Battle recalled that he often saw, “this Irish policeman, a little fellow, a fine old fellow,” standing on his street corner, “I never saw him do anything except stand around and talk…If this kind of man can qualify as a policeman,” Battle reasoned, “Couldn’t I?”[8]
Despite racism and resistance from inside the department, Battle worked his way up the ranks of the department. In 1941, Mayor La Guardia appointed him as the first Black Parole Commissioner in New York City. Battle served as a symbol of successful integrationist politics and a social center in Harlem for decades, becoming close friends with notable New Yorkers like Langston Hughes, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, until his death in 1966. During his tenure with the department, the NYPD hired dozens of African American officers who served in every corner of the city.
Much of the historic knowledge we now associate with Samuel Battle comes from the lingering memory in New York of Battle’s presence and career, a brief oral history he gave to Columbia University in 1960, as well as thousands of biographical notes recorded by Battle and his friend Langston Hughes for a book that was never written. However, these documents, the NYPD’s public remembrances, as well as Arthur Browne’s recent biography of Battle, contribute to the canonization of Battle as a solitary figure. It took years and the effort of thousands of New Yorkers to help pave the way for the NYPD’s first Black officer.
Battle’s legacy, however, is more complicated than a street sign or a cameo on HBO’s Watchmen can express. On the one hand, his integration of a white-dominated institution that actively participated in the brutalizing of Black New Yorkers was a notable triumph. On the other hand, Battle participated in, and perpetuated, the very system of policing many of the activists that came before him tried to oppose. Although he was a beloved figure in the community he patrolled, he still recalled learning many times over during the course of his career that “there was more law + order in the end of a night stick than the statute books.”[9] For those who walk in his footsteps, the afterlives of the movement to integrate police forces is still undecided. To this day many people hoping to reduce racial police violence still hope that hiring of more Black police officers might save lives. However, at least one study has found that officers of any race are equally likely to shoot minority suspects. As the debate over the role of police in a multi-racial society continues, Battles’ shadow will loom large, and his name will reside over at least one intersection at the geographical center of the conflict.
Dr. Matthew Guariglia is a visiting research scholar in the Department of History at the University of California-Berkeley and a policy analyst researching surveillance at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His book-in-progress explores race and the impact of empire and immigration on policing in New York City.
[1] Simone Weichselbaum, “Harlem Intersection Renamed For NYPD Pioneer Samuel Battle Who Integrated Police,” New York Daily News, August 4, 2009.
[2] “Stop and Frisk Data” New York Civil Liberties Union, https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
[3] Simone Weishcelsbaum, “Harlem intersection renamed for NYPD pioneer Samuel Battle who integrated police,” New York Daily News, August 4, 2009, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/harlem-intersection-renamed-nypd-pioneer-samuel-battle-integrated-police-article-1.393943; Christopher Wilson, Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 65.
[4] “Negro Police For New York,” New York Age, August 5, 1909, 1.
[5] Dulaney, 19-21.
[6] The first Black police officer in Brooklyn was Wiley G. Overton, who was appointed to force in March 1891 and patrolled the 18th Brooklyn Precinct. “On the Force: Commissioner Hayden Appoints Wiley G. Overton,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 5, 1891, 6.
[7] “Negro Police For New York,” New York Age, August 5, 1909, 4.
[8] “Samuel J. Battle, The Reminiscences of Samuel J. Battle,” interview by Patrolman John Kelley, February 1960, Columbia University Oral History Office, Columbia University Archives, New York, N.Y., 16-17.
[9] Notes from Samuel Battle to Langston Hughes, 1946, Langston Hughes Papers, Box 275, Folder, 4527, Beineck Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.