N.Y. / REGION

The Story of New York’s First Black Police Officer, Told With the Help of Langston Hughes

By MOSI SECRETJUNE 26, 2015

Samuel J. Battle in 1941. CreditThe New York Times

It is odd that Samuel J. Battle, the first black officer in the New York Police Department, is not a larger part of our city’s lore. He was a giant man — 6-foot-3 and nearly 300 pounds — who more than 100 years ago led the integration of the department, then essentially an Irish-American enclave.

Mr. Battle’s arc from humble Southern roots through racist barriers in New York would be a familiar story, like the stories of other black pioneers. But he was largely forgotten until a veteran New York journalist followed a trail that led to a remarkable discovery.

On a summer day in 2009, Arthur Browne, a broad and thick-handed man himself with closely cut silver hair, was reading his newspaper when he came across an article that surprised him. The city was naming a Harlem intersection after Mr. Battle, whom the article called “the Jackie Robinson of the N.Y.P.D.” Mr. Browne, who had expertly covered the city in one way or another for 40 years, realized that he had never thought about how the Police Department was first integrated.

“It struck me as a lapse because there was so much controversy through the years about the Police Department’s relationship with the black community, and over the number of African-Americans on the force,” he said recently in his office at The Daily News, where he is now the editorial page editor. “It just struck me that I never thought about how it all began.” So he started digging.

Eventually, Mr. Browne located and called Tony Cherot, Mr. Battle’s grandson, who was living in California, and Mr. Cherot made a revelation. Did Mr. Browne know that his grandfather had hired Langston Hughes to write his biography, and that he had the manuscript?

“I was just blown away at the thought of it,” Mr. Browne said.

And Mr. Battle resurfaced, that much larger with his newly discovered connection to the Harlem Renaissance poet.

Mr. Browne’s coming book, “One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York,” based on Hughes’s manuscript and Mr. Browne’s archival research, serves as a tribute to Mr. Battle’s wish to leave a legacy that would outlive his death.

In 1949, at the twilight of his career and at the eve of the civil rights movement, Mr. Battle was a man who knew what he had accomplished, and he hired Hughes in the hope that the acclaimed writer would tell his story. The son of former slaves from North Carolina, Mr. Battle entered the department at 28 years old in 1911, following intense lobbying by Harlem’s elite ministers and newspaper editors, who saw integration as a remedy for police violence against blacks.

Arthur Browne in front of Samuel Battle’s home in the Strivers’ Row section of Harlem.CreditDana Ullman for The New York Times

Mr. Battle braved years of harassment and worked his way up to lieutenant. He left the force when Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia named him the first black member of the New York City Parole Commission in 1941. Mr. Battle served on the commission for 10 years, retiring in 1951.

Mr. Battle shared his memories with Hughes in a series of recorded interviews. But Hughes did not take the job seriously; with his sights set on more glamorous endeavors, he did little more than transcribe the recordings.

Mr. Cherot, 74, who was present for some of the interviews, said of his grandfather, “He had invested what he thought was important money so Langston would do Langston,” adding: “Langston didn’t do that. Langston actually quit on him. So he was disappointed.”

Poring over the old manuscript, Mr. Browne, 64, came to have great affection for Mr. Battle. “Once I came to grips with the history and to see where he fit,” he said, “I really believe he was a great man, and I had an obligation to tell that story.”

Mr. Browne joined The Daily News in the mid-1970s, during the glory years of splashy New York tabloid journalism — the era of Son of Sam; the 1977 New York City blackout; the Bushwick riots. Mr. Browne’s colleagues from that time recall him as a relentless and competitive reporter, very serious but with a sense of amusement about the comedy and tragedy that happened around him.

“Back in those days, when we worked at night, I would stop and marvel at him,” said Martin Gottlieb, then his colleague at The News and now the editor of The Record of New Jersey. One memory stuck out.

“There were two or three guys that may have been involved in a burglary or something in South Ozone Park,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “The guys jump a fence and wind up on Aqueduct racetrack and are running on the track. Arthur jumps over the fence and chases them around the track. We could listen to this in the office over the police radio, and it was bizarre.”

But Mr. Browne also developed the reputation of being not just tough but abrasive. He acknowledged that it had some basis. “I have confessed to a certain lack of emotional intelligence that led me not to understand the things that I was saying, doing or writing, that anyone would take offense at it or be upset about it,” he said.

Langston Hughes, standing, with Mr. Battle, in an undated photo. Mr. Battle hired the poet to write his biography in 1949.CreditGriffith J. Davis

His colleagues say Mr. Browne developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city, covering City Hall at the end of Mayor Abraham D. Beame’s tenure and the start of Edward I. Koch’s, and working as an investigative reporter and later as a manager and editorial writer. In 2007, he was among writers at the paper awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorials on behalf of ground zero workers whose health problems were neglected by the city and the country.

“I used to think of The Daily News as the old New York cabby who would start talking to you,” said Joel Siegel, managing editor of NY1, the television news station, who worked with Mr. Browne at The News. “Somebody who was a little bit weary, but streetwise and smart, and he would tell it to you straight. Whatever the DNA is of The Daily News, he has it. There are other people who may have acquired it, but he has it.”

Mr. Browne came from a primarily Irish-American family with deep connections at the paper, which in those days, like the Police Department, was dominated by Irish-Americans. By family lore, his grandfather was one of the paper’s first employees, and aunts and uncles followed, as did his father. Mr. Browne got his first job there as a copy boy through a man his father knew.

“I did not realize when I was an early reporter at the paper what the race issues were,” Mr. Browne said. “I didn’t have a sense that this newspaper or any of the others were not well serving New York’s black community. Nor did I have any sense that the paper I was working for or any of the other papers had a terrible record on hiring black reporters, journalists, copy editors. It didn’t seem to be an issue. That’s the blindness.”

He had grown up in Freeport, a village on Long Island that he remembered as deeply segregated. “The east side of Main Street was black,” he said. “The west side of Main Street was white. And never were you supposed to cross. I grew up in a society where racism was openly expressed.”

“Not in my house,” Mr. Browne added. “And I don’t know why. My mother in particular was very, very strict about how you thought about people and how you spoke about people. But still, that was the world that I grew up in.”

Soon after he joined The News, a group of black journalists sued the paper for discrimination, a case they eventually won. “It was an awakening moment for everybody,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cherot, Mr. Battle’s grandson, was surprised that a white person wanted to tell the story. “I scratched my head a little bit that he was interested, but after our discussions, it was obvious to me that he was a credible, sincere man,” Mr. Cherot said. “A story doesn’t need to be told by any sort of race; it’s your commitment.”

Mr. Browne recalled his childhood as he wrote the book. “I would think about the people who all surrounded me, what their mind-set was, and know that it was the mind-set of the white society that was Battle’s,” he said. “That was kind of a filter for all of this.”

“I thought it was a real privilege to channel Sam Battle with Langston Hughes’s help,” Mr. Browne said. “There are many things that I am proud of in my career. I cannot think of something that would be a capstone that gives me more pride than this.”

Correction: June 28, 2015

An earlier version of this article erroneously attributed a distinction to the blackout that affected New York City in 1977. It was not the city’s first major blackout; that, of course, took place in 1965.

Correction: June 28, 2015

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified Langston Hughes. He is standing, on the left side of the photo, not on the right.