A Dancer in the Revolution

Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club

Howard Eugene Johnson, Wendy Johnson

• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823256532
• eBook ISBN: 9780823256556
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The life of Howard Johnson, nicknamed "Stretch" because of his height (6'5"), epitomizes the cultural and political odyssey of a generation of African Americans who transformed the United States from a closed society to a multiracial democracy. Johnson's long-awaited memoir traces his path from firstborn of a multiclass/multiethnic" family in New Jersey to dancer in Harlem's Cotton Club to communist youth leader and, later, professor of Black studies. A Dancer in the Revolution is a powerful statement about Black resilience and triumph amid subtle and explicit racism in the United States.Johnson's engaging, beautifully written memoir provides a window into everyday life in Harlem—neighborhood life, arts and culture, and politics—from the 1930s to the 1970s, when the contemporary Black community was being formed. A Dancer in the Revolution explores Johnson's twenty-plus years in the Communist Party and
illuminates in compelling detail how the Harlem branch functioned and flourished in the 1930s and '40s. Johnson thrived as a charismatic leader, using the connections he built up as an athlete and dancer to create alliances between communist organizations and a cross-section of the Black community. In his memoir, Johnson also exposes the homoerotic tourism that was a feature of Harlem's nightlife in the 1930s. Some of America's leading white literary, musical, and artistic figures were attracted to Harlem not only for the community's artistic creativity but to engage in illicit sex—gay and straight—with their Black counterparts.A Dancer in the Revolution is an invaluable contribution to the literature on Black political thought and pragmatism. It reveals the unique place that Black dancers and artists hold in civil rights pursuits and anti-racism campaigns in the United States and beyond. Moreover, the life of "Stretch" Johnson illustrates how political activism engenders not only social change but also personal fulfillment, a realization of dreams not deferred but rather pursued and achieved. Johnson's journey bears witness to critical periods and events that shaped the Black condition and American society in the process.

Part I

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

—Duke Ellington

1

Early Days

Orange, New Jersey
January 30, 1915

While I was the first-born, I was not the first son, according to my father. He told me, during one of our man-to-man chats after I had become one of his favorite drinking buddies, that my mother had previously had an abortion of a baby boy about a year before I was born. For some reason I felt pre-empted. I was no longer the first son, one of the few things about which I felt good. I hadn’t realized that one of the hooks that bolstered my self-esteem was being the first-born. By the same token I could understand the emulation, respect, jealousy, and even, sometimes, deference that my brothers, Bobby and Wesley, expressed to me at various times. Later, when I needed to have proof of age to enter the Army in September 1943, I wrote the Orange, New Jersey, city clerk for my birth certificate and received it a week later. It was a document stating that I’d been born at Orange Memorial Hospital on January 30, 1915. My name on the document was Baby McGinnis. Apparently, my father had not claimed me as his child. I had never seen a marriage certificate around the house, nor had my parents ever celebrated a wedding anniversary, but I had never added that up to being a “bastard,” according to the mores of our neighborhood. It did not throw me; in fact, it added to my romantic notions about being a deviant, an outcast, a revolutionary, unbound by the prescriptions of a bourgeois and decadent society. No evidence of a legal marriage document has ever surfaced for my mother and father. For both of them it was a long marriage in the common law bound by a love relationship that was regarded as ideal among our friends and acquaintances.

Our family was of multiclass/multiethnic origins. In a six-generation span the family embraced the socioeconomic brackets from slave owner to “street nigger,” fed by a fertile mix of Dutch, Irish, Cherokee, Iroquois, African, West Indian, French, and perhaps everything but Czech and “double-Czech” American, as Paul Robeson sang in his stirring rendition of Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans.”

My father’s father was George Gaither, a gambler, pool shark, and man-about-town who enlisted in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” fighting in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Because of his veteran’s status on discharge, he was able to secure a position in the Bureau of Engraving in Washington, D.C. He never returned to New Jersey. How we got the surname Johnson is something of a saga in itself. My grandfather’s “cut buddy” was Eugene Johnson, also a gambler, and a hustler who specialized in dealing cards for big stakes. When my grandfather went off to war, he asked Eugene to look out for his woman—my grandmother Lethia Goode—and his kids. He did so with such love and affection that my father grew to love him and named me Howard Eugene after himself and the man he considered his stepfather. My father did not know that a Junior had to have exactly the same name as the Senior, so I was incorrectly called Howard Junior.

My father was a genius in all directions. Anything he attempted to do, he did well, at least; he oftentimes did things exceptionally well, and he was my role model for many years. I always strove to emulate him. Among his friends, I was known as “Little Monk.” My father’s nickname was established as “Monk” based on his agility on the basketball court and on the baseball diamond. I was known as “Little Monk” until I became significantly taller than my father at the age of twelve. I was already 5′10″ at the age of eleven, and by the time I was fourteen I had grown to six feet. By that time, my father’s buddies were jokingly saying, “That’s a mighty thick piece of spit” or “Monk, he can eat peanuts off your head.” The affectionate appellation “Little Monk” died a natural death as a result of the Mendelian behavior of height genes that skipped my father from my grandfather, who was 6′4″, to me, at 6′5″.

Whatever he lacked in height, my father compensated for in physical dexterity. His blinding speed, hair-trigger reflexes, coordination, and accuracy of throwing arm led him to stardom on such Black baseball nines as the McConnell Giants from Montclair, the Grand Central Red Caps, and the Lincoln Giants. The Lincoln Giants later became the Black Yankees.1 On the basketball court, those same athletic qualities allowed him to dazzle audiences all up and down the East Coast with the St. Christopher’s, the Independents, and the Puritans, who were later to form the nucleus of the world-famous Renaissance. “Fats” Jenkins, “Pappy” Ricks, George Fiall, and “Fats’s” younger brother, “Legs” Jenkins, were the members of this team. My father didn’t make the Renaissance team because of a conviction that put him in Sing Sing Penitentiary at a time when he should have been playing basketball. Bob Douglass, the manager of the team, was a West Indian entrepreneur who had come to Harlem about the same time as Marcus Garvey, sharing the same basic philosophy of bourgeois nationalism. He owned the Renaissance Ballroom, the Renaissance Basketball Team, and the Renaissance Theatre. All of these names were inspired by the term for the period after World War I called the Renaissance. It represented the belief among Blacks of that time that the defeat of the Triple Alliance in the war “to make the world safe for democracy” would result in a renaissance of the aspirations and hopes of African Americans that had been so rudely crushed in the post-Reconstruction overthrow of the Civil War gains over slavery.

Romeo Dougherty, the best-known Black sportswriter of that time, wrote many columns in the New York Amsterdam News and, later, in the Pittsburgh Courier, describing Monk’s exploits on the sports fields. The prison sentence responsible for my father’s not getting selected for the Renaissance team was never mentioned. Black athletes were not highly paid in those days, and my father’s transference of his skills into other, what he thought would be more lucrative, pursuits backfired on him.

In the 1920s, only a handful of Blacks had access through the rigid “Jim Crow” segregation of American society to more than a subsistence-level income. This caused many of the most talented, not-to-be-denied African Americans to move into various survival tactics known in our community as “hustles.” The general term for such people was “hustlers.” Monk had been prepared for this eventuality by his father and “stepfather,” who, hustlers themselves, took great pleasure in passing on their pool-playing, card-dealing, crap-shooting, and other skills of the demi-monde to the quite eager, apt, and talented Monk at a very early age. Monk became a great billiards and pool player. He was often called upon to take on out-of-town traveling cue stick artists when the betting reached high stakes. The local players would support him in the hope of winning back money they had lost to the out-of-town hustlers. Monk was steely-nerved and would rarely lose when the stakes were high. He prided himself on being a “professional,” and I was often witness to games in which a hundred dollars or more was riding on the outcome. Even under that stress, he could calmly and effortlessly run off fifty or sixty balls with tournament-level concentration to the incredulous consternation of the formerly arrogant visiting “pro.” He was considered to be in a class with the greatest Black pool hustler of all time, James Evans, who had once beaten the legendary Willie Hoppe in an exhibition match.

I can recall, after we moved to New York, walking into neighborhood poolrooms and finding all of the best local players refusing to play him for money. He was also a masterful manipulator of a deck of cards; in the card players’ argot, he was a first-rate mechanic. That meant he could do about anything he wanted to do with a deck of cards. As they said, “He could make a deck do everything but talk.” He could deal “seconds”—that is, withhold the desired card for himself at the top of the deck and deal the inferior cards underneath to his opponents. He could shuffle a deck so that all the aces would come up for him.

He could cut the deck exactly in half and then riffle-shuffle the cards so that they would be spread out in alternative sequence from each half of the deck. When times got really tight during the Depression, he would augment his own expertise with prepared decks. These specially prepared decks would have the desired cards, such as aces, sanded imperceptibly so that they would never come up in a cut. The cards could also be marked in a microscopic way so that only the dealer or his confederate could understand the marks which indicated the value of the card so that they could be read from the back. These cards were a type called “readers.” To my youthful astonishment, my father took me to a gamblers’ factory in New York City in the ’30s. The factory was located around 53rd Street and Tenth Avenue—right in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, a territory that had once been the turf of the gang known as the Hudson Dusters. Owney Madden, one of the top chiefs of the Cotton Club mob, had been the most notorious leader of the gang. I now suspect that my father learned about this factory through his friendly connections with the Cotton Club owners when he was a waiter there. He and Madden had both done time in Sing Sing.

The factory was a veritable warehouse of gamblers’ “cheats”—wholesale, retail, and custom-made to individual gamblers’ specifications. While there was a spectacularly displayed array of phony cards, crooked roulette wheels, weighted cue balls that would not roll straight in big-money matches, brass knuckles, blackjacks (also called saps), bulletproof vests, holsters, pistols, and switchblade knives, it was the dice section that dazzled me most. Bust-outs, six-ace flats, roll-forevers, and other dice would make endless passes at the expense of unsuspecting “marks.” Bust-outs were dice that would automatically roll seven. They would be slipped into the game after an opposing bettor would establish a point and force him to lose his bet.

One of the arts much practiced by professional gamblers was the knack of substituting the crooked dice for the regular dice at the crucial moment of the big bet and then replacing the regular dice as soon as the crooked dice had performed their function or, at least, at some time before the “mark” had grown suspicious. Six-ace flats were dice that had two sides shaved so that the six and ace would roll up a larger percentage of times than any other numbers. The prescribed bets for the percentage player were “don’t come” bets based on the much higher number of craps that would be thrown (double sixes and double aces). The roll-forevers were dice with only fours, sixes, and fives on their six sides, meaning that a seven could not be thrown. The recommended procedure when these dice were in was to start out with a high bet and parlay, or double, the bet with each roll so that the stakes could be rapidly escalated for the quick impoverishment of the “mark.” Uncle Leon, my father’s brother, informed me some time after my father died that much of the lore of gambling had been passed down to the two brothers by my “hustling” grandfather George Gaither and his pal Eugene Johnson.

The same expertise demonstrated in the pool hall, the gaming room, or on the crap table was available on the sports field. Monk was often on the Black all-star nines that played postseason games with barnstorming white major league all-star teams, including Babe Ruth and others of his stature. The Black teams often won, thus dispensing with the argument that Blacks did not have the skill to make it on the ball field. I needed little convincing that Blacks were not an inferior species. Hearing my father recite Shakespeare by the yard, I became quite skeptical, at a very early age, of the prevailing idea that whites were the intellectual superiors of Blacks. Contrary to all the sociological studies on so-called Black lack of self-esteem, I was never ashamed of being Black. Frustration, anger, and rage were more often the feelings. We knew we were as good, but our talents were circumscribed by the rigidly imposed walls of segregation, even in a northern town like Orange, New Jersey. Even as late as 1941, Blacks were not allowed to sit in the orchestra of the local movie house, the Colonial Theater on Main Street.

On my grandmother’s side—that is, my paternal grandmother, Lethia Johnson—the family history is somewhat obscure. There must have been a mix of African, Cherokee, and European because of her walnut color, high cheekbones, ample lips, and muscular stride. When she had time to sit down and talk to me, she revealed her proudest moment: a visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. She was just twenty-two years old then. I recall her mementos on the sideboard in her dining room—a pennant with the words “Chicago World’s Fair” emblazoned on it, a silver serving tray, and a glass paperweight with “Columbian Exposition” printed on the underside of it so that you could read the legend through the glass.

For many years she peppered her conversation with comments such as “Douglass would have said this” or “Douglass said that” or “Douglass wouldn’t have stood for that.” I used to wonder who this man she was referring to was, because the only Douglass I knew didn’t appear capable of the wisdom her Douglass espoused from time to time. It was only after many years of research and study on the life and activities of Frederick Douglass that I made the connection. Douglass’s last public speech was given at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Lethia had been there to hear him in the flesh! That instruction during my early adolescence probably accounts for my longstanding identification with Frederick Douglass. I recall that she often spoke with scathing contempt for those she termed “Booker T. Washington Negroes.” She had nothing but scorn for some of our local Black leaders, who entered her books as “Toms.” And the way she emphasized the “T” in “Booker T” led me to believe she considered that it stood for TOM in no uncertain terms. She chose sides very early in the debates that raged between W. E. B. Du Bois and B. T. Washington after Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech called on African Americans to put aside the struggle against segregation and focus exclusively on economic betterment.2

Grandmother Lethia was part of an enterprising family from Greenville, South Carolina. She had three brothers, each of whom made his mark in his chosen field. The oldest was George Goode, who became a headwaiter at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. The second brother was James, who changed his name to Anderson because of his respect and admiration for a man who had raised him. The youngest brother was John, who became a barber and owned one of the most popular barber shops in Harlem during the ’20s near the corner of 117th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Uncle James left home at the age of fifteen to go to sea, then came to New York to live in what was then the San Juan Hill area around 64th Street and Tenth Avenue, a stone’s throw from what is now Thelonious Monk Place. He started a small mimeographed newspaper that he hawked for pennies on the subway. The paper prospered and continued as the Amsterdam News, named after Amsterdam Avenue, which is the name of Tenth Avenue after it reaches 59th Street. His editorials condemned segregation, supported the NAACP, protested lynching, defended Du Bois, and characterized the African American people as a developing nation as early as 1915, at least a decade before the Communist International had its debates on the character of the “Negro Question” in the United States. He hired Cyril Briggs as an alternate editorial writer, strengthening the radical orientation of the paper. Cyril, while at the Amsterdam News, joined with Harry Haywood and Harry’s brother, Otto Huiswood, to form a Black Marxist organization known as the African Blood Brotherhood. This organization existed before Harry Haywood was to sit with Joseph Stalin in the meetings that led to the Comintern Resolution on “The Negro Question as a National Question.”

The charge that the American communists imported their position on “the Negro Question” from Moscow had no significance to me, because I knew the role of Black radicals in the United States in developing the party line in this area. Cyril Briggs told me about my great-uncle’s leading discussions on the Negro nation years before Harry introduced the concept in the Comintern meetings.

Uncle James became prominent in the Republican Party, served as an Exalted Ruler of the Oddfellows, and was also a Mason. His wife, Hattie, whom he loved very much, died in 1919, and he began to drink heavily. During that period he came under the influence of his secretary, Sadie Warren. Sadie married a racetrack tout and pimp named Charlie Davis, at whose direction she convinced Uncle James to turn over the management and ownership of the Amsterdam News to her. He did so, much to the chagrin of my father and grandmother, about a year before he died in 1925 of the combined ravages of cancer and acute alcoholism. Later I came across a picture of Uncle James sitting next to W. E. B. Du Bois with a group of Black leaders who had assembled as a committee in 1913 to celebrate in Harlem the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Uncle James had on a morning coat and a starched collar with ascot tie and looked quite the dandy. It presented a very startling contrast to my recollection of him sitting while looking hopelessly out of my grandmother’s living room window in an alcoholic haze. He had to come to Orange, New Jersey, to literally drink himself to death.

My father had a sister, Corinne, ten years younger, who died of alcoholism in a basement in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Only many years later did I discover that alcoholism was a family disease and I was to inherit it in deadly proportions from both the paternal and maternal sides.

My mother’s name was Gertrude. On her side, the family history is well documented, though the documentation is studded with racist theoretical explanations of that history, for generations going back to 1791. Albert Payson Terhune’s novels about dogs (later the basis of the Lassie series on TV), set in the Pompton Lakes area of New Jersey, contained frequent references to the “Jackson Whites” or the “Jackson Blacks” and more frequently to the “blue-eyed niggers.” My mother told me when I started reading about the “blue-e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Mark D. Naison
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Photographs
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Map of Harlem Nightclubs in the 1930s and ’40s
• Howard E. Johnson’s Curriculum Vitae
• Index