Underworld king: The real Bumpy Johnson (right) in Harlem, apparently during the 1940s. Photo: New York Magazine

Resume

The criminal resume of Johnson, who was born in Charleston, S.C., and moved to Harlem with his parents when he was a small boy, is neatly summarized by Walter Bell on Court TV's Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods website:

"He was a dapper gangster who always made it a point to wear the latest and best clothes and to flash a wad of cash wherever he went. Bumpy was a pimp, burglar and stickup man who possessed a recalcitrant attitude. He always carried a knife and gun, neither of which he was hesitant to use. All too often Bumpy ended up in barroom clashes over the slightest of issues....

"His negative demeanor led to his spending almost half of his life in prisons before he even reached age 30....Bumpy also proved to be an incorrigible prisoner and spent one-third of a 10-year sentence in solitary confinement."

Upon Johnson's release from prison in 1932, he built a powerful criminal empire that included narcotics, prostitution, strong-arm enforcement and the "numbers" racket, or illegal lottery.

According to Mayme Johnson, Bumpy Johnson's 93-year-old widow, "He had a hand in almost every illegal enterprise operating in Harlem."

At the time of his death from a heart attack on July 9, 1968, he was free on $50,000 bail following a 1967 indictment by a federal grand jury on charges of importing narcotics from Peru for sale in Harlem.

But many Harlemites, police and prison authorities and some of the latter 20th century's most important Black radical and nationalist leaders, including Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Floyd McKissick and H. Rap Brown, were also aware that Johnson possessed a distinctive racial consciousness, which, contrary to his portrayal in "American Gangster," expressed itself in more than cheap promotional stunts.

It is this that makes Johnson's legacy an ambivalent one, not reducible to good-or-bad summations, much less to one-dimensional Hollywood portrayals.

Bankers of last resort

Johnson's underworld role is part of a reality that is little known to white America.

A mug shot of Bumpy Johnson

Indeed, many numbers bankers were highly regarded in their communities. They provided the seed money or support for all manner of Black businesses, including funeral homes, hotels, insurance companies and newspapers.

For example, in Detroit during and following the Depression, John Roxborough - the dignified, college-educated manager of boxing great Joe Louis - Irving Roane and Everett Watson were among the leading bankers of the numbers, known locally as the policy. All were known and respected for their philanthropic acts.

Indeed, according to Paradise Valley historian Jiam Desjardins, who had two uncles who were numbers bankers during the same era, the profits generated by these men were the "foundation" of Black business activity in Detroit's famed commercial and entertainment district.

However, these relatively victimless activities should be distinguished from Johnson's more mercenary criminality, particularly drugs and prostitution.

Stirrings

Johnson's racial consciousness apparently developed early and ran deep, if selectively.

During the 1920s, ‘30s and early ‘40s, the teeming Black Harlem ghetto, known as Uptown, was an after-hours playground for thrill-seeking whites in search of forbidden sex, liquor, drugs and Black entertainment, sometimes at clubs that barred Black people as patrons.

Johnson had nothing but contempt for these transient gawkers, according to Helen Lawrenson, a white lover, in Sondra Kathryn Wilson's "Meet Me at the Theresa: The Story of Harlem's Most Famous Hotel" (New York: Atria, 2004).

"We ain't no zoo," Johnson told Lawrenson. "How would you like it if we was to go downtown to your clubs and restaurants to stare at you people? Not that we'd get in. So why should we let you up here? I can't no way go downtown and walk into the Ritz [hotel]. ... Except maybe I'm walkin' behind you, carryin' your bags."

The independent-minded Johnson felt an affinity for other Black people who bucked the unequal racial and political status quo. In 1943 and 1945, for example, he supported the controversial Benjamin J. Davis, a Harvard Law School-educated organizer of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), to represent Harlem on the New York City Council.

Paul Robeson's protector

But the clearest example of Johnson's sense of racial allegiance occurred two years later. He described it in a late 1967 interview with expatriate African American journalist William Gardner Smith, which was later published in "Return to Black America" (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970).

Paul Robeson sings at a May Day rally, Union Square, New York, May 1, 1954. Photo: People’s Weekly World

"He studied me for a long moment," Smith wrote, "and I could sense the welling up of a fierce pride inside him. He said, ‘[W]hat I really am, when the chips are down, is a Black nationalist.'

"Then he said, ‘Remember the Peekskill riots, back in 1950 [Sept. 4, 1949 - PL], when all these crackers had Paul Robeson surrounded and wanted to do him in? I heard that on the radio. So I got some of my boys together, between 70 and a hundred, and I called the chief of the state police and said, "Listen, this is Bumpy Johnson. We're coming through to get Paul out, and if anybody tries to stop us, police or civilians, there's gonna be a hell of a lot of bloodshed."

"‘Then my boys and me, we piled into a fleet of cars and we drove. We drove all the way to Peekskill. The police got out of our way; they had been warned. We had every kind of gun imaginable. And we drove right through them screaming civilian crackers, too, and they damn sure got out of the way, too. And we brought old Paul out. Brought him out in a convoy. Because Paul is Black, he's my brother, and I wasn't gonna let no crackers set hand on him.'"

Although elements of Johnson's account might have been exaggerated, it nevertheless confirms Smith's sense of his "fierce [racial] pride."

In his magisterial biography, "Paul Robeson" (New York: Knopf, 1988), Martin Bauml Duberman describes Johnson as a "friend" and "devoted protector" of Robeson.

Malcolm X's protector

Similarly, Johnson offered his protective services to Malcolm X, the African American Muslim and nationalist leader.

Malcolm X at 22 West Restaurant, his favorite Harlem eatery, after his break with the Nation of Islam, probably July 5,1964. Waitress Helen Lanier presents him with a layette gift for his fourth child, Gamilah Lamumbah. According to one account, Malcolm X later met Bumpy Johnson here. Photo: Don Hogan Charles, Johnson Publications

"I'm a marked man," he assured Jones. "No one can get out without trouble, and this thing with me will be resolved by death and violence."

Malcolm X reportedly knew Johnson when the former New York NOI minister and national representative was a minor Harlem street hustler in the early 1940s known as "Detroit Red" because of his flaming red "conk," or relaxed hairstyle, which was produced by a lye and egg concoction.

Peter Goldman, Malcolm X's best biographer, briefly recounts Johnson's discussion with the president of the Sunni Islamic Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), and chairman of the pan-Africanist Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in "The Death and Life of Malcolm X" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, 1979):

"One day, he [Malcolm X] had coffee at 22 West [Restaurant on 135th Street in Harlem, his favorite post-NOI luncheonette] with an old Harlem racketeer named Bumpy; Malcolm talked about the threats against his life, and Bumpy argued that he ought to go to war against his enemies. ‘Malcolm,' he said, ‘they ain't ready to die no more than anyone else. You pinch them, they'll holler, too.' Malcolm seemed mostly amused."

Earl Grant, one of Malcolm X's closest aides, recalled the incident somewhat differently in an interview with Gil Noble on the long-running New York Black affairs series Like It Is in 1983.

After a near-confrontation with NOI members at a meeting in Harlem's historic Abyssinian Baptist Church on Dec. 12, 1964, "When we left, we went up to 135th Street. ... And there used to be a shoeshine stand there and Bumpy Johnson was sitting up in there getting his shoes shined. And [when] we come across [the street], he looked out, he jumped down, run out and grabbed Malcolm's hand.
"He said, ‘Hey, brothers!' Said, ‘Been reading about you. I hear you got some problems.'"

(Johnson might have been referring to the Dec. 4, 1964, issue of Muhammad Speaks, the NOI newspaper, which included a five-page attack on Malcolm X by Boston NOI Minister Louis X [now Farrakhan], which Goldman correctly described as a "death warrant.")

"He [Malcolm X] said, ‘Yeah, I kinda have some ...,'" Grant continued.
"Bumpy told him ..., ‘Well, you know how to handle that, man. All you gotta do is make a phone call and that'd be taken care of.'

"They talked for a while about the old times. And we walked down 135th toward Lenox Avenue and ... I says, ‘You know what he meant, don't you?'
"He says, ‘Yeah, I know what he meant. ... I don't want Black folks killing Black people.'"

"That was his attitude," Grant said. "And a lot of those people down there [NOI members] need to be told that the only reason some of ‘em [are] still walking around is because Malcolm allowed them to keep walking around."

Grant added that there was "another group of his old buddies from his running days out in the streets" who visited Malcolm X at his Hotel Theresa office. "They came up and offered their services - just for old times' sake. That they'd take care of it, you know."

However, Malcolm X again declined. "I believe in taking action," he told Ted Jones, "but not action against Black people. No, sir."

The late Abiola Sinclair claimed in "The Harlem Cultural/Political Movements, 1960-1970: From Malcolm X to ‘Black is Beautiful'" (New York: Gumbs & Thomas, 1995) that Johnson also had his own reasons for clashing with the NOI, which campaigned against drug use.

In an undocumented account, she asserted: "Drug lord Bumpy Johnson had run-ins with both the Nation of Islam and Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, and in fact lost his grip on that area."

The masjid, located on 116th Street at Lenox Avenue, was named in honor of Malcolm X, its former minister, after Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975. It was known as Muhammad's Mosque No. 7 during Johnson's time.

Frank Lucas claims to have "owned" the other end of 116th Street, at Eighth Avenue, in the early 1970s.

CORE's protector

Johnson reportedly also afforded protection to one of the New York chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded as a pacifist interracial group in the 1940s but was transformed in the tumult of the 1960s into an all-Black Black Power group advocating self-defense.

Reportedly, Johnson risked conflict with the Italian mafia in doing so. Again, William Gardner Smith is our best source for this incident:

Floyd B. McKissick, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), carries a “Black Power” sign while picketing in front of Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater to protest the drafting of African Americans to fight in Vietnam, July 22, 1966. Photo: Corbis

"Bumpy was informed of the threat against the CORE pickets. He promptly sent the following message to the local Mafia leaders: ‘If any of those CORE kids are harmed, I will not guarantee the safety of any Mafia member in Harlem.'
"The youths were not molested.

"I questioned Bumpy about these reported incidents, and he confirmed them. Concerning the CORE episode, I asked why, as an acknowledged member of the ‘underworld,' he had taken the risk of conflict with the Mafia."

It was at this point that Johnson said, "Because what I really am, when the chips are down, is a Black nationalist."

Given Johnson's support for CORE, it is unsurprising that Floyd McKissick, the national director of the organization, was "shocked over the death of Bumpy Johnson," according to an outraged Ernesto E. Blanco, an associate professor at Tufts University.

Blanco cited McKissick's reaction in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearings on "subversion" in campus disorders on June 19, 1969. McKissick, Blanco fumed, "must have known this man had a dope record a mile long. ... There is no telling the harm that Bumpy Johnson did to the Black race."
In December 1965, Johnson took a page from civil-rights groups like CORE by staging a sit-down strike in a police station, according to the Rev. John H. Johnson (no relation) in "Fact Not Fiction in Harlem" (Glen Cove, N. Y: Northern Type, 1980).
He refused to leave as a protest against their continued surveillance of his activities. He was charged with "refusal to leave a police station," but was acquitted by a judge.

Advising Amiri Baraka

Johnson could also affect the role of the wise elder "race man."
Sometime in 1965, after the fiery poet, playwright and essayist Amiri Baraka, then still known as Le Roi Jones, abandoned his East Village Bohemianism, embraced Black nationalism and moved to Harlem in the wake of Malcolm X's assassination, he was summoned to a meeting with Johnson, who wanted to discuss Baraka's new Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS).

Amiri Baraka, formerly Le Roi Jones, after embracing black nationalism, date unknown.

"We met a lot of people, many of who had our best interests at heart, but we did not take some of the best advice. We did not benefit from the wisdom of our elders. We met Bumpy Johnson, the grand old man of organized Harlem crime. Bumpy was one of the first to insist that Black dudes run their own rackets and stop paying off the white boys. He was a respected elder, straight as a board, with an office in a warehouse that sold exterminator [products], a legit front for his widely known and widely respected operations.

"For an hour or so Bumpy talked to me like my father, telling me I had to meet different people and get hooked up really to the community and not get too far out so that negative folks could shoot me down.

"I listened and was proud to be there with the bald-headed dignified Mr. Bumpy Johnson, but I couldn't really hear what he was saying. I didn't really understand. But Bumpy could see we were heading for trouble if we didn't get fully conscious in a hurry, but I was too naive to dig."

A quarter-century later, in 1992, Baraka collaborated with percussionist, drummer and composer Max Roach (who died on Aug. 16, 2007) to compose a bebop opera, or "bopera," with the curious title, "The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson," in homage to the old man.

Baraka does not mention that Johnson, too, wrote passionate poetry with a hard race-conscious edge. In Freedomways, the liberal-leftist Quarterly Review of the Negro Freedom Movement, Johnson contributed "Democracy at Home":

Black babes are spat upon,

their mothers raped

While mobsters howl, the police

stood and gaped.

Their homes are burned, their

churches' mood defiled.

And their appeals are answered,

"Wait awhile."

Rapping with H. Rap Brown

Finally, Johnson reportedly had an interesting conversation with H. Rap Brown, (later known as Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), the highly quotable new chairman of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC's arc toward Black nationalism preceded and inspired CORE's.

H. Rap Brown (dark shades), national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), talks with reporters in front of the group’s Harlem headquarters in late July 1967. The black panther in the background is the symbol of Lowndes County (Ala.) Freedom Organization, co-founded by SNCC members in 1966, which was the first Black Panther Party. Photo: AP

As in the case of Robeson, Malcolm X, Baraka and CORE, Johnson made clear his sympathy for Brown's nationalist politics, which were widely blamed by the news media, local authorities and mainstream Black leaders as the spark for the insurrections, or "riots," that had rocked nearby Newark, Detroit and scores of other cities the summer before.

However, if the report of their talk - which appears to have been based on some form of government surveillance - is accurate, Johnson coupled it with a threat borne of self-preservation.

The conversation was recently revealed by Randall Bennett Woods in "LBJ: Architect of American Ambition" (New York: Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 2006), based upon a report by Harry C. McPherson, Jr., then the special counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson:

"In their efforts to quell discontent before it erupted into violence, [New York] Mayor [John V.] Lindsay and local Black leaders sometimes found themselves forming unusual alliances. ‘We heard of a conversation between Rap Brown and a man named Bumpy Johnson - allegedly the top Negro in the Mafia rackets,' McPherson told the president. ‘After Brown spoke, [Bumpy] Johnson told him, ‘I agree with a lot of what you said. Except I don't want any riots. I got to raise $60,000 to buy off some people downtown on a narcotics rap. I can't do that if there's a riot. You start a riot and I'll kill you.' Brown is said to have left town the next day."

Would that some inspired filmmaker or documentarian should one day see in this remarkable real-life person reason enough to create a truly authentic representation of the truth of his life - which is stranger, and more dramatic, than fiction.

Copyright © 2007 by Paul Lee, who can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This story is reprinted with permission from the Michigan Citizen (Detroit), www.michigancitizen.com.

‘American Gangster': It ain't necessarily so

The veracity of American Gangster, promoted as being "based on a true story," is being challenged by Mayme Johnson, Bumpy Johnson's nearly century-old widow, three former Newark, N. J., police detectives and freelance journalist Ron Chepesiuk, author of the forthcoming book, "Superfly: The True Untold Story of Frank Lucas, American Gangster."

They contend that the movie is a deceptive pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations and outright fabrications peddled by convicted heroin mastermind-turned-government informer Frank Lucas. (See the links below.)

This includes the movie's portrait of Bumpy Johnson as a dapper, cynical mob boss, who could calmly watch while Lucas, his alleged driver and bodyguard, gruesomely dispatches a bound victim one minute, then lob Thanksgiving turkeys to grasping Harlemites calling out "Bumpy!" the next.

Johnson's only redeeming features seem to be his kindly tutoring of his loyal supposed protégé in the fine points of brutality and "legitimate," old-school gangsterism and the "order" that he imposed on the destruction of his own community and people.

Additionally, this writer noted glaring historical errors in the movie, such as the ludicrous claim in a faux television report that the governor of New York and the New York City mayor, police commissioner and chief of police attended the funeral of Johnson, a notorious Black gangster, who was under indictment for drug trafficking.

It seems that the movie's (white) screenwriter and director were only too willing to accept, enlarge upon and glamorize Lucas' tales, which are being sold to audiences through the charm and smoothness of the Emmy award-winning Washington.

See the following links for more information on the movie's misrepresentation of Johnson's and Lucas' real life stories.

• Statement by Mayme Johnson: http://harlemgodfather.com/PressRelease.htm
• News reports on former Newark, N., J., police detectives Eddie Jones, Al Spearman and Ben Abruzzo: www.nydailynews.com/news/crime_file/2007/11/01/2007-11-01_3_exnj_police_say_american_gangster_rewr.html, www.naplesnews.com/news/2007/nov/02/based_true_story/
• Interview with journalist Ron Chepesiuk: http://blog.blowbackproductions.com/
• Statement by Ron Chepesiuk and Anthony Gonzalez re the uncritical "infomercial" on Dateline NBC: http://franklucasamericangangster.com/lucas/

A writer's confession

by Paul Lee

Any fair estimation of Bumpy Johnson, the flesh-and-blood man, and his works must admit, as I'm compelled to, Johnson's dark side.

Historian Paul Lee

"At the time Bumpy was on trial for racketeering and I was covering the story. Bumpy ... accused me of slanting the stories to please the white man. Another reporter ... came upon the scene and pleaded with Bumpy to free me.

"I knew Bumpy," Booker maintained. "Yes, he has been romanticized in the movies lately. He was a madman - a common narcotics thug." But Booker could have added that Harlem had romanticized Johnson long before Hollywood ever thought to.

As was (and is) the case in the Harlems across this nation, powerless, marginalized and exploited Black people took vicarious pride in those who, through courage, boldness, ingenuity or force, managed to seize some measure of power and respect, who made a way out of racism's no-way, even if they did so by means considered criminal or illegitimate by the larger society, and even by the norms of the Black community itself.

While staying with my maternal great aunt in Harlem during summer visits in the late 1970s and working in New York after college in the 1980s, I never heard a negative word about Johnson. Instead, he was a revered figure, spoken of with respect and awe.

Although it was clear that Harlemies knew full well how he made his living - often by feeding off of their misery - still, a part of them admired Johnson for standing up to the Italian mob, the police, rivals and anyone else who threatened his power.
However, it was also an open secret that Johnson often helped many of Harlem's poor with cash donations and gifts.

In that curious way of oppressed people, many Harlemites made a psychic split: They saw Johnson's faults, yet exulted in his strength as an example, and perhaps an extension, of their own. I feel a similar duality.

Drugs devastated my Harlem cousins. One, who showed a precious talent for drawing (he made his own comic books), is in prison in Sing-Sing; another is living upstate, but still struggling with his addiction; and a third is still on the streets, lost to us. Thankfully, a fourth cousin, the father of the one in prison, managed to beat his habit.

Yet Johnson - Bumpy - the man who helped lay the foundation for the drug culture that ravaged the Harlem of my youth and destroyed the lives of my own blood kin, remains a kind of hero for me, too.

However, it is not Johnson's raw power that touches me, but rather how he occasionally extended it on behalf of our people. Or at least some of us.

Tag it:

?