Stretch Johnson

Howard Eugene "Stretch" Johnson, born January 30, 1915, and died May 28, 2000, was an American tap dancer and social activist whose career spanned Broadway, Harlem's entertainment world, and decades of political and academic life.

Johnson's performing career took shape in the mid-1930s when he joined his brother Bobby and his sister Winnie, a featured dancer at the Cotton Club, to form a trio billed as the Three Johnsons. The act appeared in New Faces of 1936, marking Johnson's Broadway debut, and the group subsequently performed in the Duke Ellington Revue of 1937 at the Apollo Theater. Johnson also appeared in a Harlem production of Clifford Odets's play Waiting for Lefty, and his Broadway credits include the musical New Faces of 1943.

Beyond the stage, Johnson's life was shaped by deep political commitments. He had been a member of the N.A.A.C.P. since the age of fifteen, and in 1940 he joined the Young Communist League of Harlem, motivated in part by the ongoing lynchings in the American South. He remained with the Communist Party USA until the late 1950s, when Khrushchev's Secret Speech, revealing the crimes of Stalin, prompted him and many other members to leave the organization.

Johnson served in World War II with the 92nd "Buffalo" Division, earning two Purple Hearts during his service. After the war, he pursued education and a trade, working as a printer at The New York Times while earning a high school equivalency diploma and later a degree from Columbia University. He went on to teach black studies at the Fieldston School and sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

In the 1980s, Johnson relocated to Hawaii, where he became the first editor of the Afro-Hawaiian News, at the time the state's only African-American newspaper. Under his editorship, the publication successfully campaigned for Hawaii to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday. His memoir, A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club, co-written with Wendy Johnson, was published by Fordham University Press in 2014.