A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club by Howard Eugene Johnson, Wendy Johnson

Abstract

410 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club. By Howard Eugene Johnson with Wendy Johnson. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014, 191 pages, $29.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Christopher Allen Varlack, University of MarylandBaltimore County Tracing his experiences from the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance of the early to mid-1900s through the Cold War and his subsequent separation from the Communist Party in the United States, Howard “Stretch” Johnson’s memoir, A Dancer in the Revolution, provides a unique vantage point for examining the African-American experience at a time of heightened racial tension as the American people tried to come to terms with the changing racial landscape of the post-Reconstruction age. An entertainer, Communist, and activist in the perpetual fight for increased civil rights for blacks, Johnson long held “romantic notions about being a deviant, an outcast, a revolutionary, unbound by the prescriptions of a bourgeois and decadent society” (3). His memoir therefore illustrates a life both politically and culturally conscious, challenging the misconceived notion of a black community contented with the very real racial hierarchy set in place in Jim Crow society. In doing so, Johnson uses his memoir to reflect on the pitfalls and the missteps of the earlier twentieth century. He critiques both whites and blacks alike for a range of issues such as the failure of American society to provide newfound rights and opportunities for blacks after their participation in World War I (and the overall fight for democracy) and the troubling divide within the black community itself along color, class, and intellectual lines even within promising institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Reminiscent in style and approach to works such as Claude McKay’s 1937 A Long Way from Home and Langston Hughes’s 1940 The Big Sea, the value of this work is less in its insight into the personal life of its author—a complex man whose experiences at the Cotton Club and the not so underground gay scene bring to life that crucial time when Harlem was in vogue. Instead, like its predecessors years before, the memoir is a vital text for its insight into the surrounding world and record of the black experience—a field of study that Johnson recognizes as “not easy in the Book Reviews 411 ‘30s” when he was growing up “with only a few stalwarts like Carter G. Woodson, Arthur Schomburg, J. A. Rogers, and W. Hansberry mixing the pitifully few exposed veins of the enormous but underground Black history ” (18–19). Offering a timeline, a map of Harlem’s night clubs in the 30s and 40s, and fourteen chapters ranging in subject from the Cotton Club to the war years to the celebration of Martin Luther King Day in Hawaii, A Dancer in the Revolution thus seeks to provide a more detailed firsthand account of twentieth-century history, adding to those “pitifully few exposed veins” in order to resurrect a unique and vital black history from the underground to its appropriate place on a more national stage (19). As a result, the memoir is a significant addition to libraries both personal and public—truly a long-awaited and much needed contribution to the growing field of black studies. Of his fourteen unique chapters, Johnson’s most significant contribution perhaps occurs in chapter ten, appropriately entitled “Starting Over.” Focusing on his developing philosophy after what he considers his quiet disassociation with the Communist Party in which he played a key part, Johnson examines strategies moving forward to obtain those rights and opportunities for blacks existing radical organizations were unable to achieve. “I felt that Black radicals had to form their own movement,” he writes, “utilizing the experiences of oppressed nationalities and colonial peoples around the world” rather than simply relying on the “majoritywhite left-wing organizations” where blacks constantly faced “the necessity of overcoming a white veto” (140). In this passage, Johnson surveys the existing political institutions in place from the Communist Party to the Progressive Labor Party to the Black Liberation Army, forever the deviant and outcast revolutionary pushing forward for socio-political change across what, at the time...