Darker Than Blue: Policing While Black in N.Y.C.
Samuel Battle’s first three attempts to become a police officer were rejected because he allegedly had a heart murmur. Before his fourth attempt, Battle went to an independent doctor, and, in 1911, after receiving a clean bill of health, he became the first black officer appointed to the metropolitan New York City Police Department. Battle was stationed in the West Sixty-eighth Street precinct. Almost fifty years after he joined the force, he participated in a Columbia University oral-history project. Battle communicated an impression of strength. He was a big guy—six feet three inches, two hundred and eighty-five pounds—and his personality seems to reflect that, especially when he tells one story about how he was treated at the precinct.
They never made any threats personally, to me. Never. Nobody would ever do that. But there was one occasion, when I was at the flag loft—and this was before Sergeant Stewart came up there to stay with me—I found a note pinned right over my bed, with a hole in it about the size of a bullet hole. It could have been done; I don’t think they shot off a gun, but it was something to make it look like a bullet hole. And on this note was written: “Nigger, if you don’t quit, this is what will happen to you.”
On the day he was appointed, Battle said, Rhinelander Waldo, who was then the commissioner, told him, “You will have some difficulties, but I know you will overcome them.” Perhaps his reaction to the note fulfilled that premonition: “After this note was left there, it didn’t faze me at all,” he said. “I didn’t care; it didn’t make any difference. I knew whoever did it was a coward.”
Battle also recalled a riot, in 1919, at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, where, he said, “The white officers worked in an all-Negro neighborhood, practically, and they needed me as much as I needed them, and sometimes more.” He was promoted to sergeant in 1926, and to lieutenant in 1935. In 1941, he became New York City’s first black parole commissioner. In 2009, the intersection at 135th and Lenox was named Samuel J. Battle Plaza.
Battle became an officer at a time when integration seemed to be the prevailing solution for what was then called the “race problem.” Police departments are not only institutions that aim to insure public safety; departments, and their unions, are powerful political machines, and in politics representation is important. But efforts to integrate police departments, however successful, have not erased tensions between police departments and black communities.