Howard Eugene "Stretch" Johnson (January 30, 1915 – May 28, 2000) was an American tap dancer and social activist.
[1] In 1936, he joined his brother Bobby and his sister, Winnie, one of the featured dancers at the Cotton Club, to form an act called the Three Johnsons, which was featured in New Faces of 1936 and the Duke Ellington Revue of 1937 at the Apollo Theater.
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 USA until the late 1950s when he and many other members left over Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin.
In Hawaii in the 1980s, Johnson served as the first editor of the Afro-Hawaiian News, the state's only African-American newspaper at the time.
[2] Under his leadership, the newspaper successfully advocated for making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a state holiday in Hawaii.