Career
He later acted in a Harlem production of Clifford Odets play Waiting for Lefty. Johnson joined the Young Communist League of Harlem in 1940, prompted in part by lynchings in the American South and remained in the Communist Party United States of America until the late 1950s when he and many other members left over Khrushchev"s revelations about Stalin. He became a printer, and worked at The New York Times, earned a high school equivalency diploma and then a degree from Columbia University and subsequently taught black studies at the Fieldston School and later taught sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
