On the morning of February 9, 1956, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson stood in a fourth-floor room at 118 West 143rd Street in Harlem and made a private promise. The room belonged to Ida Beckwith, a 68-year-old seamstress who had died of pneumonia hours earlier. Her electricity had been shut off in late January by the building’s manager, who controlled the meters from a locked closet in the cellar and demanded $4. 40 for December and January.
When she could not pay, he pulled her fuse. She worked by candlelight, caught a chill, and died. Johnson, a man Harlem had known since his youth in Charleston, had lived nine blocks away for six years and had walked past that building hundreds of times. He knew the manager kept the meters and charged what he pleased.
He arrived too late, and he judged himself for it. Standing on the landing, he promised he would never enter that room again. For nearly three years, he kept that promise with no difficulty. Then, on the evening of October 14, 1958, a 24-year-old laundry worker named Alberta Van knocked on his door.
She lived in that same building, on the fourth floor, in the room at the rear. The woman on her floor had told her that Mr. Johnson had helped people before. She showed him her rent book and a bundle of paper slips.
Each slip recorded a weekly charge for electric current in a single furnished room: $1. 75 per week, plus a 50-cent “meter service” fee each month. She had been required to leave a $5 deposit for which she received no receipt. She owed $6.
25 in arrears, and she had a notice dated that Monday saying her current would be discontinued by Friday if she did not pay. She had a lamp, a radio, and a hot plate she was not supposed to have. She was paying more than $8 a month for electricity in a year when a family of four in a metered apartment on the same block paid between two and three dollars. Johnson asked her whether she had ever seen the meter.
She said there was a locked closet in the cellar and the manager read it. He asked whether she had ever seen a bill from the light company. She said she had never seen one. He asked what happened to people who argued.
She told him that in August, a man on the second floor had argued and his fuse had come out for nine days. When the man went to the office on 125th Street, they told him he had no account with anybody. On Friday, October 17, Johnson walked into the light company’s district commercial office to pay Alberta Van’s arrears and ask a question. He waited in line for 25 minutes.
At the window, he offered his personal check for the $6. 25 and asked politely for a copy of the company’s rate schedule for residential service. The clerk looked at the notice and said it was nothing to do with them. Johnson asked again for the rate schedule.
The clerk sent for the assistant manager. The assistant manager came out from behind the partition and made his decision about the man in front of him in the time it takes to read a name. He said, loudly enough that the line behind heard all of it, that the company did not maintain accounts for the occupants of that building and could not accept a payment from a person who was not a customer. He said the company did not do business over its counter with persons of a certain description and that he was aware of who Mr.
Johnson was. He said if Johnson wished to remain in the office, he would have to step outside the rail, and he asked the guard to note the time. Every person in that line was from the neighborhood. There was a particular silence in the room.
Johnson took the notice back, folded it, removed his hat, held it in his left hand, and said in a level voice that he would like the rate schedule mailed to him. He wrote his address on a slip of paper, left it on the counter, and walked out without raising his voice or looking back. He did not go home. He walked two blocks to a lunch counter on 8th Avenue, took a stool at the far end, and ordered coffee and a piece of pie he did not eat.
He stayed about 40 minutes. Men came in who knew him and saw his face and did not sit down beside him. Two of his own people had come with him downtown and were waiting at the curb. One of them said afterward that he expected the word to come that afternoon to go back to that office and make somebody sorry, but the word never came.
What came instead, after 40 minutes, was an instruction to find out who owned 118 West 143rd Street, who else that owner owned, and to bring the answer Monday morning. Over the weekend, Johnson saw something clearly. The assistant manager had not been lying. He had been rude and contemptuous, but the substance of what he said was correct.
The company had no account for Alberta Van. It had no account for any of the 31 rooms in that building. It had one account for the address, in the name of a realty corporation, billed once a month for the whole building at a rate that came down as the quantity went up. The manager had cut the current up into 31 pieces behind a locked door and sold it back to the tenants at whatever price he chose, in cash, without a bill, without a reading, without a receipt that showed a rate, with a fuse box as his collection department.
The problem was not the man at the window and not the manager in the cellar. The problem was that 200 and some households in those buildings had no standing anywhere. They were not customers. They were not parties.
A person with no standing can be robbed all day long with clean hands. He wrote four words on a legal pad and underlined them: Make them the customer. He began with people who could do particular things, not people who could make noise. He did not want a crowd.
He wanted six or seven persons who each held one thing the campaign could not run without. The man he wanted most was Rudolph Gaines, 71 years old, a retired licensed electrician who had wired half the theaters on 125th Street. Gaines could read a meter correctly, calculate a room’s consumption from its fixtures and habits, and certify that the wiring in a building would safely carry individual service. Without his certificate, the light company would not agree to set separate meters.
Ernestine Cobb, a 58-year-old practical nurse, had worked in those blocks for 19 years and knew which door on which landing hid which fear. She organized 11 women into reading teams. Hollis Duckett, a 44-year-old attorney with two rooms above a shoe store, had spent four years doing rate work for a small bus line and knew how the state’s public service commission actually took a complaint. When the rate schedule finally arrived in the mail, Duckett found the provision that mattered: current supplied under the residential schedule was for the customer’s own use, and resale was permitted only at the company’s own rate.
The manager in the cellar had been in violation of a document he had never read. The Reverend Aldrich Prior of a church on 142nd Street gave the campaign a basement with 60 chairs, a mimeograph, and three trustees who could hold money that was not theirs. Odessa Fry ran a small credit union and agreed to advance the required deposits as small loans repayable at 50 cents a week. Cyrus Amir, an editor at one of the weekly papers, agreed to one thing only: he would print tables, not an article, not a photograph, not an appeal.
Columns of figures, room by room and building by building, with the amounts collected in one column and the amounts owed under the published schedule in another. The strategy each layer was designed so that its failure would not destroy the others. They were not going to argue about what was fair. They were going to establish in writing what had happened and hand that writing to four different bodies, each with a separate reason to act.
Gaines built a reading form and had 500 run off on the church mimeograph. Each tenant who agreed was given a carbon receipt book and instructed that from that day forward, no payment for light would be made to the manager without a receipt written in the book in the manager’s own hand, with the date, the amount, and the room, and the carbon kept by the tenant. The receipt books changed the situation within a fortnight, without a single confrontation. A manager who is handed a receipt book by a woman standing in her doorway can refuse to sign, but if he refuses, he cannot take the money.
If he takes the money without signing, he has made a witness of the woman standing behind him. He signed 190 times in November. Gaines could not read the master meter, so he measured from the other end. Working with the 11 women, he inventoried every room in nine buildings, the wattage of each bulb, the presence of a radio, a clock, an iron, a hot plate, a fan, a refrigerator.
For six weeks, the women collected a daily record of hours of use on a card with a printed grid. Gaines converted the strokes into kilowatt hours, applied the light company’s own published residential schedule, added the service charge, and produced for each room a figure. He did the arithmetic twice and had a schoolteacher check a sample of 60 rooms independently. It took him from the second week of November to the middle of January.
No tenant refused to pay. Refusal was the trap, because it made every tenant an easy target for eviction. Each tenant paid the manager the full amount computed under the company’s published schedule, in cash, into the receipt book, and paid the difference between that amount and the amount demanded into an escrow account held by the three church trustees at a savings bank on 7th Avenue, with a numbered receipt to the tenant and a monthly statement posted on the church door. Nothing was withheld from anybody.
By the end of January, the escrow held $1,140 and was growing at about $410 a month. The manager’s income from the cellar closet had fallen by roughly two-thirds. Duckett prepared a formal complaint to the Public Service Commission on behalf of 188 named occupants, asking for an order that the company offer and install individual metered service to any occupant applying for it. Gaines prepared, as a licensed electrician, a certification of the wiring in all nine buildings with a schedule of the additional risers and panel work required, priced by two contractors.
A separate set of complaints went to the city’s electrical inspection bureau, because the submeters in those cellars had been installed without permits, without inspection, and in four buildings with taps ahead of the master meter that were both illegal and dangerous. Copies of the fire department’s own reports on two hallway fires in 1957, both caused by extension cords run under doors from the one outlet a room was permitted, were attached to everything. Johnson knew he himself was a liability. He did not attend the general meetings.
He attended the small planning sessions, and he paid for the mimeograph paper, the receipt books, the stationery, the postage, the contractors’ estimates, and Duckett’s costs, and his name appeared on nothing. When a young man from another block proposed a march on the 125th Street rental office, the proposal was voted down on the argument that a march would produce a photograph and a photograph would produce a story about the neighborhood, whereas a table of figures would produce a story about a company. The rule the meeting adopted and printed at the bottom of every mimeographed sheet was that no tenant would settle privately, and any tenant offered a private reduction should accept nothing, sign nothing, and report the offer to the trustees in writing. The tables were held back deliberately for 11 weeks.
Amir printed them on Saturday, January 24, 1959, four columns wide across two pages: room, kilowatt hours consumed, amount payable under the company’s filed residential schedule, amount actually collected. At the bottom, three totals. In the month of December 1958, the occupants of nine buildings had consumed current worth $381. 60 at the company’s own published rates and had been charged $1,692.
75. There was no adjective anywhere on the page. The 11 weeks between the completion of the work and its publication were the hardest part of the campaign, and not because of the opponent. People wanted something to happen.
Two of the 11 women quit in December. A man on the third floor of 122 West 143rd Street accepted a private offer to have his light charge cut to a dollar a week if he would give back his receipt book. He took it, and the trustees recorded the fact without reproaching him. Johnson’s instruction was given in five words and repeated to the trustees: Nobody is put out of anything.
After the tables were printed, things happened slowly. The Public Service Commission acknowledged the complaint on February 3rd and docketed it on February 19. The city’s electrical bureau sent an inspector on February 6 and again on February 24, and by the middle of March had written 74 violations across the nine buildings, 22 for the submeter installations themselves and four for taps ahead of the master meter. The light company discovered in the last week of February that a customer of record had been reselling its current at four and a half times its filed rate, a matter its own tariff department could not ignore once it was on paper with a docket number attached.
The realty corporation’s response came in three forms, and all three failed, though not immediately. Notices to vacate were served on 11 tenants in the last week of January, all of them chosen from among those whose names appeared on the complaint. Each of the 11 walked into the municipal court with a receipt book showing every payment made, a numbered escrow receipt for the balance, and a statement from the trustees. The proceedings were adjourned twice and then withdrawn or dismissed one after another.
Fuses came out in four buildings on the night of February 11th. The current in 19 rooms was cut, in February, with children in some of those rooms. Ernestine Cobb had planned for it in December. Nineteen households were moved that night into the homes of neighbors within two blocks, under a list she had assembled and kept in her handbag since Christmas.
The church basement took four families for six days. Gaines photographed each opened fuse box the following morning, and the photographs went to the electrical bureau and to the commission. By the end of the following week, the current was back on in all 19 rooms, and the fact that it had been cut had become the most useful piece of evidence in the file. Word was also put about that Mr.
Johnson had interests of his own and that a man in his position ought to be careful about attracting official attention to himself. It was the most accurate assessment the other side made in eight months. Johnson had come out of federal prison in 1953 and was under supervision, and he understood that any campaign associated with his name could be answered by putting his name where a newspaper would find it. His answer was to reduce his visibility further.
He stopped going to the church entirely after the middle of February. He met Duckett in a car. He was not present at the conference in April, and no document produced in the whole affair carried his signature. The breaking point was a letter, and the letter did not come to the tenants at all.
On March 26, 1959, the light company wrote to the realty corporation with a copy to the Public Service Commission, stating that its investigation had established resale of current at rates in excess of the filed schedule and that service to the nine premises would be discontinued on 60 days’ notice unless the practice ceased. The company was protecting its tariff, which a regulated utility will protect from anyone, including a customer who pays on time. Sixty days’ notice to a landlord who has cut a building into furnished rooms is not a bargaining position. It is a date.
The corporation’s attorneys asked for a conference on April 8. The conference was held on April 21 in a room at the commission’s offices, and there were nine people in it: two attorneys and a vice president for the realty corporation, two men from the light company’s rate department, an examiner from the commission, Duckett, Gaines with his certification and his estimates, and the Reverend Aldrich Prior with the escrow statements. The tenants had asked for no damages and no penalties, a decision Duckett had argued about with the trustees for two weeks in March, and which turned out to be the reason the conference produced anything at all. Nobody in that room was being asked to admit a crime.
They were being asked to agree to an arrangement of plumbing. The tone of the room changed at a point Gaines was able to describe afterward with some pleasure. The corporation’s vice president said that individual metering of 214 furnished rooms was physically impossible in buildings of that age. Gaines opened his folder and laid out the wiring survey of all nine buildings, the panel schedules, the riser calculations, and two independent contractors’ estimates, the lower of which was $11,400 for the whole portfolio.
The examiner asked one question: whether the estimates were current. Gaines said they were dated within the month. Nothing further was said about impossibility. From that moment, the discussion was about who paid the $11,000 and on what schedule, which is to say the discussion had become a negotiation between parties, which is the thing the tenants had not been for a single day of the preceding 20 years.
The stipulation was signed on Thursday, June 11, 1959. The realty corporation agreed to apply for and permit individual metered residential service in all 214 occupied rooms in the nine buildings, the work to be done in three stages with the last completed by November 1, 1959, and the cost of the interior wiring borne by the owner. All submeters were to be removed and the cellar closets opened for inspection. Collection of any charge for electric current by the owner or its agents was to cease on the date each room was individually metered, and no charge described as “meter service” was to be made at any time after July 1.
The $5 deposits taken from tenants were to be refunded in full within 60 days, which came to $980 across 196 rooms. Overcharges from January 1, 1957 forward, computed by the method used in the published tables and verified by the commission’s examiner against the company’s own billing records for the master meters, were to be refunded or credited against rent. The figure agreed was $7,864. 20 to 198 tenants.
The 74 electrical violations were to be cleared by September 30th. A notice was to be posted in the ground floor hall of each of the nine buildings stating that current was supplied directly by the light company and that no payment for current was to be made to any employee or agent of the owner. The light company adopted a practice memorandum in August 1959. In converted multiple dwellings in that district, an application for individual residential service by an occupant would be accepted upon presentation of a certificate of wiring adequacy from a licensed electrician, without requiring the owner’s consent as a condition of application.
It was two paragraphs long. It was the sentence Johnson had underlined on a legal pad in October, arriving by the long road in a form nobody would ever put in a headline. The escrow was returned in July. $3,190 went back to the tenants who had paid it in, each to the dollar against the numbered receipts, and the trustees published the accounting on the church door for a month afterward.
Johnson had never held any of it and never asked what the balance was. When Reverend Prior offered him the accounting, he declined to take the paper. The manager who had kept the meters was transferred out of the district in September. The 125th Street rental office began giving itemized rent receipts on a printed form that autumn.
Two other realty firms operating rooming houses on 141st and 144th streets applied for individual metering in 11 buildings before the end of the year without anybody asking them to. And in the spring of 1960, when a manager on 139th Street pulled a fuse over a disputed charge, the tenant did not come to Johnson or to the church. She went to the light company’s district office with a certificate from Gaines, applied for service in her own name, and had her own meter within five weeks. The assistant manager at the district office was not disciplined and was never mentioned in any of it, and nobody in the campaign ever raised his name again after October 1958.
Johnson had understood on a Friday afternoon in a room with a marble floor that the man was a doorway and not a house, and that going through a doorway angrily gets you nothing except a reputation among people who were already frightened of you. What the eight months changed was not dramatic and was not meant to be. Two hundred and fourteen households acquired a piece of paper with their own name on it, arriving by mail once a month, showing a reading, a rate, and a total that could be checked. A woman who has a bill in her own name has a place to complain, a record of payment, a rate she can compare, and a fuse box that belongs to her.
The gap in the middle, the room with no window, had been closed, and it stayed closed. Rooming house electricity ceased to be a private toll in that part of Harlem, and by 1964 the arrangement had spread far enough that the practice memorandum from 1959 was being cited by tenants’ groups in the Bronx who had never heard of any of the people who caused it. The hallway fires stopped. There had been two in 1957 and one in 1958 in those nine buildings, all from extension cords run under doors from a single overloaded outlet.
In the four years after the rewiring, there were none. Gaines was asked to sit on a wiring advisory panel by a city bureau in 1961, at 74, and did the work for two years and was never paid for it. Cobb’s list of neighbors who would take a family in on a cold night was used again in 1961, in 1962, and in the winter of 1964, and it was in her handbag when she died. Duckett handled utility complaints for tenants’ groups for the next 15 years and taught four younger lawyers how a tariff is read.
Alberta Van was elected recording secretary of a tenants’ association in 1960 and later became its president, and stayed in the same room on the fourth floor at the rear of 118 West 143rd Street until 1971. She told an interviewer many years afterward that she had not understood at the time why the man on Lennox Avenue had asked her so many questions about a locked closet in a cellar and had then never once come upstairs. He never did come upstairs. The meters were set in that building in the second stage of the work on a Tuesday in September 1959, and Johnson came to 143rd Street that afternoon because Gaines had asked him to look at the panel work in the cellar.
He looked at it, and he climbed to the fourth floor afterward and stood in the hallway outside the brown door marked 4B while the company’s man finished inside. He could hear the meter being sealed. He did not go in. When the company’s man came out, Johnson asked whether the reading had been recorded and was told that it had.
He went down the four flights slowly with one hand on the rail, past the landing where the bulb was now burning, and out through the vestibule into the street. He got into his car and went home. Nobody photographed any of it.
There was no meeting and no announcement, and the weekly paper printed nothing that week except a short paragraph noting that the last of the nine buildings would be completed ahead of schedule.