A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club

By Howard Eugene Johnson, Wendy Johnson and Mark Naison

A Cotton Club dancer and Communist Party leader shares the story of his life in arts and activism from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Era.
 
Through his extraordinary life, Howard “Stretch” Johnson epitomized the generation of African Americans who broke through boundaries to make the United States more democratic. In this lively and engaging memoir, Johnson traces his path to becoming a dancer in Harlem’s historic Cotton Club, a communist youth leader and, later, a professor of Black studies.
 
A Dancer in the Revolution is a powerful story of Black resilience and triumph, as well as a window into Harlem’s neighborhood life, culture, and politics from the 1930s to the 1970s. Johnson thrived as a leader in the Harlem Communist Party, using his connections as a dancer to forge alliances between the party and the Black community. But Johnson also exposes another—often ignored—aspect of Harlem life: the homoerotic tourism that flourished there in the 1930s.
 
Johnson’s journey bears witness to critical times and events that shaped the Black condition and American society in the process. It also illustrates how political activism can be a powerful force, not only for social change, but also personal fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823256556

Book preview

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