The Renaissance Club and Community Center at the corner of 125th Street and Lennox Avenue burned for over forty minutes in February 1960 before fire engines arrived. By morning, word had spread across Harlem that the fire had been no accident — a crude burning cross had been painted on the alley wall with the words “Go back south” still dripping beneath it. Local crime figure Bumpy Johnson bought the building in 1958 with legitimate money. He stood in the ash for days afterward without responding publicly to the provocation, which puzzled many who knew him.
On the second floor of the building Johnson had run a community center that served as a reading room for children, a meeting space for organizers, and a weekly free legal advice clinic. The ground floor was a jazz club that hosted musicians like Dizzy Gillespie. New York City police found no immediate leads, and the fire was reported as likely arson, but the neighborhood understood exactly who had been targeted and why. The man responsible was Robert Earl Hutchkins, a 43-year-old warehouse manager in the Bronx who had relocated from Valdosta, Georgia, in 1957.
He had been driven out of the South after organizing a rally outside a newly integrated school and being beaten by local men who demanded he leave. In New York, he built a small white supremacist group called the Northern Brotherhood. For months, the group had been responsible for a string of attacks on Harlem businesses and churches, carving and painting white crosses at each scene. Late on a Tuesday night, Hutchkins and four associates drove to Harlem, poured gasoline through the mail slot of the Renaissance, splashed fuel on the side door, and lit the building.
The fire gutted the structure and destroyed the community center’s books and the club’s piano. Hutchkins returned to the Bronx and believed the attack had gone unnoticed. He was unaware that one of his own men had sold information about the crew to Johnson for $500. Rather than moving immediately, Johnson spent several days conducting surveillance.
He did not authorize retaliation against the larger group, explaining to his lieutenant Frank Lucas that attacking the followers was not the goal. He wanted the man responsible to believe he had escaped consequences before acting. On Friday night, Johnson entered Hutchkins’s apartment in the Bronx alone. He sat beside the sleeping man’s bed in the dark and woke him calmly.
Hutchkins reached for a gun in his nightstand and found it gone. Johnson confronted him about the fire and the painted cross. Hutchkins broke down, begged for mercy, and offered to leave New York permanently. Johnson fired two bullets into the wall near Hutchkins’s head, then told him he would be allowed to live only to carry a message back to his group: Harlem is off limits.
Hutchkins fled the apartment that night. Johnson directed his associates to spread the word that Harlem had not burned. But by Saturday afternoon, Hutchkins’s body was found beaten to death in the Bronx, and the police needed two days to identify him through dental records. Police investigated for four days, but neighbors reported seeing nothing, and the case was closed as unsolved.
Harlem whispered that Johnson had walked into the apartment alone and that Hutchkins had begged before the end, though the exact circumstances of his death remained disputed. The Northern Brotherhood fractured after Hutchkins’s death. Several members left immediately, and within weeks the group dissolved. No chapter of the group organized in Harlem again.
Reconstruction of the Renaissance began in March 1960, funded by community donations, benefit concerts, and church collections. Johnson contributed $10,000 publicly and told the Amsterdam News, “Only Harlem takes care of its own. ” When the club reopened, the community center had double the books, and the opening night featured a young girl reading a poem she had written about Harlem. Johnson died in 1968 of a heart attack while playing checkers in Wells Restaurant on Seventh Avenue.
The Renaissance stood until 1987, when it was demolished to make way for condominiums. Before the wreckers arrived, someone spray-painted five words on the front wall: “Now you hear me. ” A historical marker now stands on 125th Street referencing the fire and the community’s rebuilding, though it does not mention Johnson by name due to his criminal record.