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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.
- Sales Rank: #1710547 in Books
- Published on: 2014-04-01
- Released on: 2014-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.30" h x .90" w x 9.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 216 pages
Review
"Although this book touches on issues of race and class endlessly discussed by the US left for decades, it is primarily the story of one man's experience living in a nation whose history is defined by those issues. that life explains more than a thousand debates." (―Counterpunch)
"In this vivid memoir, Howard “Stretch” Johnson shares his unforgettable journey from the dance floor of the Cotton Club to the top echelons of the Communist Party. With colorful tales of the nightlife of the Harlem Renaissance and insightful reflections on the American left and Black freedom struggle, A Dancer in the Revolution is hard to put down. Johnson tells his remarkable life story with wit and grace, sharing stories of pain and regret, but never-ending commitment to social justice." (―Martha Biondi author of To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City and The Black Revolution on Campus)
"Stretch Johnson's nickname honored his exceptional height and flexibility as a professional dancer, but also captured his rarer talent for reaching across cultural and political gaps. His effortlessly lively and rigorously honest memoir illuminates forgotten links between the Cotton Club and the Communist Party, the Harlem Renaissance and the early Black Studies scholarship that canonized it. A Dancer in the Revolution is radical life-writing that magnetically rejoins divided histories." (―William J. Maxwell Washington University in St. Louis, author of FB Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature)
"This is an excellent publication that provides an insider’s view of everyday life and culture in Harlem during the period in which the contemporary black community is being formed." (―Henry Louis Taylor Jr. University at Buffalo, SUNY)
"Howard “Stretch” Johnson’s life story, ably edited by Wendy Johnson, is a compelling drama of race, dance, and radical politics of the 1930s to 1960s. No other book offers so much deep personal insight in these areas, and this book deserves as many readers as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem." (―Paul Buhle authorized biographer of C.L.R. James and retired Senior Lecturer, Brown University)
About the Author
Howard “Stretch” Eugene Johnson (1915–2000) was a former Communist Party leader, Cotton Club dancer, World War II veteran, and academic. His final years were spent as a professor of Black studies at SUNY New Paltz and as an ongoing activist in Hawai'i, where he helped achieve state recognition of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a bank holiday, marching until the age of 80 in Paris, France, and Harlem for causes he believed just.
Wendy Johnson is the eldest of Stretch and Martha Sherman Johnson’s three daughters. She has worked as an activist, translator, and teacher of English. She lives in Paris.
Mark D. Naison is Professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University, where he also directs the Bronx African American History Project. He is the author of three books, including Communists in Harlem During the Depression.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
The title says it
By Paul Oxby
A fascinating account of a remarkable man, who overcame underprivilege and racism, repeatedly risking his life in a lifelong battle against fascism and intolerance, while retaining his zest for life,
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
“Dancer in the Revolution”: Memoir of Stretch Johnson, Harlem communist
By Barbara Russum
“Dancer in the Revolution”: Memoir of Stretch Johnson, Harlem communist
Tony Pecinovsky, Peoplesworld.org
History is a curious thing, full of drama, intrigue, plot twists and misadventures. Howard “Stretch” Johnson’s posthumously published memoir is similarly curious.
A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club is a quick-paced, fascinating glimpse into the life a one-time Communist Party USA leader. Part anecdotal, part history - though all entertaining - I breezed through A Dancer over a weekend.
I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact tone of Johnson’s story. His narrative jumps from Depression-era dancer to international communist, from youthful drugs and debauchery to isolation, loneliness and alcoholism during the McCarthy era, when he and other communists went underground, separated from his wife and family.
While working in the mob-run, world-famous jazz scene that was the 1930s Cotton Club, “Stretch” Johnson received “a postgraduate course in the complexities of class relationships in America.” According to him, the Cotton Club was “the laboratory”: The “arrogance of the mob toward society in general was exponentially multiplied when it was mixed with white racist attitudes.”
It was Johnson’s first-hand experiences with racism, as an entertainer, that would shape his political outlook and lead him to eventually join the Communist Party USA. “It was a perfectly logical step in my development,” he wrote, “to join the American Communist Party. Being Black and beginning to look for some solution to the problem of survival, there seemed to be nothing else to do. American society had excluded us.”
It was through the Harlem Young Communist League and American Youth Congress - a party-led, broad-based youth organization - that Johnson gained valuable early experience as an organizer and learned that “Blacks, generally, were not as easily hoodwinked about the advantages of capitalism.” The “disadvantages and penalties the system imposed” through “institutionalized processes and norms that maintain the racist infrastructure,” served to weaken African American loyalty to an economy and ideology that had had quite literally sold them down the river.
In 1941, Johnson attended the Southern Negro Youth Congress convention. SNYC, “a model communist-led youth organization,” challenged racism and Jim Crow head-on in the South. According to Johnson, “The cadre brought forward [by the SNYC and its communist leadership] in the South became the shock troops of the later developing civil rights movement.” James Jackson, Esther Cooper-Jackson, “Stretch” Johnson and many other young communists undoubtedly laid the groundwork and paved the way for the tremendous changes soon to come. They are only now beginning to be recognized for their outstanding, selfless commitment and leadership.
By 1946 Johnson had returned home from war, having spent part of that time with communist partisans in Italy. Now a veteran, he helped to found and organize the communist-led United Negro and Allied Veterans of America (UNAVA), an organizational illustration of “our practical activity,” which “develop[ed] a nationwide campaign on the terminal leave pay issue.” By some estimates, upwards of $300 million - a staggering sum, especially during this time - “was being denied veterans in the South through the control of the distribution of application forms by the [racist] plantation owners.”
Additionally, when African American veterans did receive their terminal leave pay, “white plantation bosses would charge from 50 percent to 75 percent of the value of the checks to cash it.” Terminal leave pay was usually around $300, or about one year’s pay. Undoubtedly, racist plantation owners did not like the idea of a “labor shortage” or of financially independent African Americans.
Eventually, Johnson and the rest of the UNAVA leadership secured an agreement with the War Department “to distribute the terminal leave pay application forms nationally,” which they did with “big fanfare and send-off from our New York headquarters,” where “1 million terminal leave pay blanks had been delivered quite dramatically.” Johnson estimates that “close to $30 million reached the veterans, a sum they would not have obtained without our efforts.”
Johnson’s telling of the UNAVA campaign (an amazing piece of history!), as well as his other adventures, has energy, direction, and propulsive drive. His stories whet the appetite and provide just enough of a hint to lead the curious, like myself, down the rabbit hole, searching for ever more clues to this intriguing phenomenon called history. Johnson is at his best when recounting these stories.
After Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations of Stalin’s crimes, Johnson “quietly” left the Party, “discontinuing my eighteen-year association” without red-baiting or repudiating “my whole past activism in the labor and civil rights struggles.”
While no longer a party member, Johnson continued as an academic and activist until his passing on May 25, 2000.
A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club is honest, maybe sometimes too honest. The events described in Johnson’s memoir paint a flawed, often contradictory, always humanizing picture. “Stretch” Johnson was a dancer and a communist, but he was also so much more. His memoir is well worth the read.
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