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

city, seminal African American civil rights leaders and brave blacks had waged a hard struggle to break the color line of its police force. They had succeeded—but only to a point, Battle discovered.
    It took gutsy, farsighted vision in the late 1880s to imagine opening the Brooklyn force to African Americans—and Timothy Thomas Fortune, the man who took up the challenge, was nothing if not a gutsy visionary.
    Born into slavery in 1856, Fortune was then a generation removed from Irish and Seminole contributions to his blood. After the Civil War, his father, Emmanuel Fortune, supported the family by leather tanning and by farming land he had been given by a white friend. Newly prominent, Emmanuel was elected to the Florida state legislature. Swiftly, though, hopes of freedom died in the horrors of Reconstruction.
    The rise of the Ku Klux Klan forged Fortune’s youth in blood. His father, a special target, fortified the house so that the family slept in a loft from which Emmanuel could drop through a trap door to return gunfire. Once, Timothy Thomas missed a Sunday-school picnic that became the site of an atrocity.
    “All were gathered at the picnic grounds and enjoying to the full their first experience of the kind,” he recalled decades later, “when a party of white hoodlums hidden in the surrounding forest, opened a deadly fire with shotguns on the women and children and the very few men in the gathering. . . . The ground was littered with dead and maimed children and grownups.” 31
    Emmanuel Fortune moved the family to Jacksonville, Florida, where he continued to serve in the legislature. Having excelled at a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Marianna, under the tutelage of two Union soldiers, Timothy Thomas enrolled in a black public school called the Stanton Institute, to be taught by two women from New England.
    Again he shone academically, but he stayed only a short time. Instead he embarked on a series of jobs: legislative clerk, postal worker, a newspaper printer’s apprentice, railroad mail route agent, and federal customs inspector. Eventually, Fortune’s wanderings brought him to reading the law at Howard University at night while working as a compositor for the
People’s Advocate
, a black newspaper in Washington. There, he began to write for publication and found the career that led him to New York in 1880 and then to the editorship, between 1881 and 1907, of three successive black-oriented papers, the
Globe
, the
Freeman
, and the
New York Age
. In those positions, he emerged as one of the great United States newspaper editors, but he remains largely unsung because he focused on—and championed—the causes of black America. 32
    Described by a scholar as “a Byronically handsome African-American who once seemed destined to inherit the mantle of the great Frederick Douglass,” Fortune was an unparalleled journalistic crusader. 33 His newspapers chronicled the evils of Jim Crow and political developments of special interest to blacks. His uncompromising editorials made the
Age
the country’s most influential publication among African Americans. And Fortune did more.
    He mentored W. E. B. Du Bois, who was to become the intellectual godfather of the modern civil rights movement, and gave Du Bois his first assignments as a newspaper correspondent. He gave Ida B. Wells a platform in the
Age
to crusade against lynching after vigilantes destroyed her newspaper in Memphis. He founded the National Afro-American League, precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became confidant, collaborator, and critic of Booker T. Washington. 34
    And, as the 1890s approached, Fortune joined three path breakers in devising a strategy to integrate Brooklyn’s police force. Philip A. White was the first black to receive a degree from the New York College of Pharmacy. Charles A. Dorsey was one of the few black school principals in Brooklyn. T. McCants Stewart was a minister and lawyer