Playwright Hopes to Bring Harlem Hero Bumpy Johnson Into the Light : Stage: Dramatist Amiri Baraka reflects on the real-life Harlem gangster, Ellsworth Johnson, his inspiration for “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson.”

You won’t find out much about Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson in the history books or in movies. At best, the black gangster has flitted into films such as “Shaft,” when Shaft goes on a search for Bumpy’s daughter. In “The Birdman of Alcatraz,” he beats the birdman at checkers. He also makes a cameo appearance in “The Cotton Club.”

Amiri Baraka wants to rectify that obscurity with “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson,” a musical with a score by jazz great Max Roach that had its world premiere Wednesday at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

Baraka, now 56, met the legendary mobster in 1965, just three years before Johnson’s death in 1968. Johnson was fresh out of Alcatraz, but Baraka says he was still the most respected man in Harlem at the time. He was the man who returned the profits that organized crime made off blacks to the black community. Johnson may have gotten his nickname from bumping people off, but he was also a hero in his community, credited with bankrolling the Harlem Renaissance and furthering the careers of the poets and musicians and writers of that time--people such as Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne.

One of the people he tried to help--with words, not money--was Baraka. Baraka then was an angry, militant young poet called LeRoi Jones. His poetry had been published and celebrated since 1958, and in 1963 his play “Dutchman,” a superheated drama about the betrayal of a black man by a white woman, was selling out off-Broadway.

“I was so revolutionary, I was putting everybody down,” Baraka recalled in a gentle voice.

Jones, who was to rename himself Amiri Baraka (“blessed prince” in Swahili) sometime later, was eating alone at the Red Rooster in Harlem when Johnson approached him for the first time.

“This man in a dark blue pin stripe, immaculately tailored, bald, shaven head, he slid up to me, and, in his low, sonorous voice said, ‘You’re LeRoi Jones, aren’t you.’ ”

Baraka said he told him yes, even though Johnson had not spoken the words as a question, but as a fact.

“ ‘I’ve read a lot of your work,’ ” Baraka recalled him saying. “ ‘I like your work. I think you’re doing a lot of good things. But you know, you can’t make enemies out of everybody.’ What he was trying to tell me is that you have to know your friends from your enemies. If you think everyone is your enemy, you’re isolated.

“We talked a little bit. And I said, ‘You know, people are attacking me.’ He said, ‘That stuff is not happening any more. Why don’t you come see me tomorrow, and we’ll talk some more.’ ”

Baraka did go back. He met Johnson at a legitimate business that Johnson owned called Palmetto Extermination Co.

“When you came up to that sign and saw it, you got the whole message. He sold rat poison, and I thought that was very poetic. That was his job. Rubbing out rats. That gave me all the P.S.’s and the footnotes to what he didn’t say.”

Johnson ultimately became a hero to Baraka, he said.

“He was very gracious, very gentle, very scholarly. He had a very soft, deep voice, not growly, but gravelly--very distinctive. If you heard his voice you would listen to what he had to say.

“People loved Bumpy Johnson in Harlem. He is still a hero to a generation that has died out. He was a man who as a little boy said, ‘I’m not going to mop nobody’s floors.’ ”

It was 20 years since that meeting that Baraka first decided to write Johnson’s story. In that time, despite Johnson’s advice, Baraka did his share of fighting.

“It’s my mouth that gets me in trouble,” he said ruefully. Still, he continues to support the stands he has taken--and there have been many.

His most recent fight was with the Newark, N. J., police. He was delayed from coming to the Rep’s rehearsals until last Thursday because he was arrested Dec. 30 for disorderly conduct and charged with “inciting a riot” when he protested injuries inflicted on his son by police, who were trying to break up what they said was a noisy suburban party.

At the same time, after 11 years as a tenured professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he is in the midst of planning a lawsuit against Rutgers University, which he accused of racism after the school turned down his request for tenure without informing him of specific reasons for the denial. Hundreds of students rallied to his defense.

Right now, however, he is full of plans for this show.

And he is not the only one.

There are rumors of Broadway or Hollywood interest in “The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson.” Baraka said he would be particularly interested in a film, which is how he conceived the project in the first place.

More concretely, representatives from Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, the Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, Va., and Berkeley Repertory Theatre are coming to check into the possibility of developing the production at their theaters.

The production may well need more developing. Up until opening night, significant cuts and changes were still being made. In the six days since Baraka has been here, he had to cut nearly an hour from the show.

Some of the cuts have been painful, he acknowledged. There is a lot to tell, and Baraka has long had the dream of getting Bumpy Johnson’s story told. Baraka said he feels his mission has always been to tell untold tales.

“When I actually got ‘famous’ as a young man, the first thing that came to my mind was my grandfather, who had three businesses burned down by the Ku Klux Klan in Dothan, Ala. And I thought of all the people I would speak on behalf of, people who were close to me, people who got lynched or lost their jobs.”

Johnson became one of those people, he said.

“His story represents not only one person’s life, but a people’s life. The trials and tribulations that people go through, have gone through, are going through and the life of this whole nation.”