On September 28, 1947, in a basement of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a man identified as James Wheeler walked to the front of a gathering of 400 Ku Klux Klan members, removed his hood, and revealed himself to be Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the notorious Harlem crime figure. The revelation stopped the ceremony cold. Vernon High Tower, the chapter’s Grand Cyclops, stood frozen at the altar as the man he had welcomed into the brotherhood six months earlier exposed the entire operation. Johnson had spent those months living as Wheeler, a quiet mill worker from Georgia.
He rented a room above a hardware store, worked at a lumber mill, and slowly inserted himself into the Klan chapter. His entry was brokered through Roy Tucker, a mill worker who vouched for him. Over 47 meetings, he memorized names, addresses, and plans, never volunteering for violent actions and always giving the right answers when questioned. The infiltration was born of a direct threat.
In July 1946, a bomb destroyed the front of Small Paradise Cafe in Harlem, injuring three people. Two weeks later, a second bombing targeted a barber shop. In September, a third bombing killed Ella Marx, a 43-year-old seamstress, in a boarding house on 132nd Street. Harlem residents knew the attacks were not random violence, and Johnson suspected a coordinated campaign from the South.
Police dismissed the bombings as internal disputes. Johnson did not. Through contacts in Atlanta, he learned the orders came from Birmingham’s First Baptist Church, where the Klan chapter met twice weekly. He planned a response that relied on deception rather than force.
He left Harlem in November 1946, telling only his wife, Mayme, and his right-hand man, Illinois Gordon, where he was going. Under the name James Wheeler, Johnson spent two months working at Barker’s lumber mill, learning the rhythms of Birmingham’s white working class. He approached Tucker with a rehearsed story about a cousin who lost his job to a Black man in Memphis. The story earned him an invitation to the chapter’s Thursday night meeting.
By December 1946, he was inside the organization. Over the following months, Johnson documented everything. He learned the chapter had 63 active members, including 17 Birmingham police officers, nine steel plant workers, and five city officials. By July 1947, High Tower revealed plans for a coordinated attack on 15 Harlem locations scheduled for October 4, targeting banks, clubs, and churches.
Johnson saw a photograph of himself passed around the room and showed no reaction. On September 27, Johnson mailed three letters. One went to his wife in Harlem, one to NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, and one to a federal prosecutor in New York. The letters detailed names, addresses, meeting times, weapon caches, and financial backers.
The following night, he attended the final ceremony before the planned operation, knowing he would expose himself. When Johnson pulled off his hood, he did not run. He stood at the altar and recited personal details about the men in the room, including their addresses, workplaces, and the names of their children. He told them the letters were already in the mail and that killing him would not stop the consequences.
He gave High Tower a choice: call off the Harlem operation or face federal investigation and retaliation. High Tower called the operation off. Johnson walked out of the church unarmed and unharmed. He reached Birmingham’s Terminal Station and boarded a train north.
An FBI agent approached him in the waiting room, acknowledging that the bureau had been watching the church for months but lacked enough evidence. The agent told Johnson he owed them a debt for the information he had delivered. The letters arrived in New York on October 1, 1947. By October 5, fourteen members of the Birmingham chapter had been arrested.
Federal agents raided homes, businesses, and the church basement, seizing records and weapons. The story became national news. High Tower was indicted on 17 federal charges and eventually pleaded guilty, giving up names of backers and members in exchange for a reduced sentence. In total, 63 people were arrested and 47 convicted.
Johnson returned to Harlem on October 4, 1947, the night the attack on his neighborhood was supposed to take place. No bombs went off. The Klan’s northern expansion collapsed, and similar operations in Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi fell apart as the network was exposed. The FBI classified its report on Johnson’s infiltration for 30 years, noting that his methods were “illegal but effective.
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The story of the infiltration became known quietly. Businesses in Harlem paid tribute to Johnson without naming him directly. A plaque outside the former Small Paradise Cafe reads, “In memory of those who protected this neighborhood when no one else would. ”
Johnson died of a heart attack on July 7, 1968, at age 63.
Over a thousand people attended his funeral at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, was there, as was Muhammad Ali. An unidentified older white man at the service said he had been part of the 1947 investigation and that sometimes the law cannot protect people, adding that “sometimes it takes someone willing to walk into hell alone. ”
High Tower died of lung cancer in a federal prison in Kentucky.
In a final interview, he said of Johnson: “I thought we were an army. Turned out we were just cowards in costumes, and he proved it without killing a single one of us. ” The interview was never published. A historian later found letters from Mayme Johnson describing her husband’s return from Birmingham.
She wrote that he never told her everything that happened, only that he had gone somewhere he should not have survived, and that he did it because no one else would.