Godfather of Harlem Creator Dishes on the New Season & More
Godfather of Harlem Creator Dishes on the New Season & His Journey Out the Mud
Source: Sean Bell/Dominique Maddox / Sean Bell/Dominique Maddo
Radio One scored an exclusive interview with the multihyphenate actor, executive producer, and creator of the popular MGM show Godfather of Harlem Markuann Smith. The highly anticipated fourth season is set to premiere on April 13, 2025. Radio/TV personality Jazmyn Summers chops it up with Smith, who also plays Junie Byrd, to get a little tea and explore his incredible journey from incarceration to winning with a hit show.
GODFATHER OF HARLEM IS THE NUMBER ONE ACQUISITION DRIVER FOR MGM MEANING THAT FOLKS SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL BECAUSE OF YOUR SHOW. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS?
Bumpy Johnson is a very complicated character. He’s one of the biggest gangsters of all time. He has to find a way to make a way. He has a family to take care of. He has a community to take care of. We never wanted to make Bumpy Johnson a hero because at the end of the day, he’s a dope dealer. I don’t care how many book bags he bought for kids to go back to school, how many turkeys you bought during Thanksgiving, and feed families. You still a dope dealer, but he was a man that was troubled. Malcolm X was trying to help him transition into becoming a better man. We show his journey from numbers to selling douji (heroin) to saying I don’t want to do this anymore.
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HOW DID BUMPY JOHNSON BECOME ONE OF THE NATION’S BIGGEST GANGSTERS?
Ellsworth Raymond Johnson, that’s his government name, didn’t come up to Harlem to become a gangster. He actually came to become an attorney like Malcolm X. So when he went to City College and tried to apply for financial aid and the bursar found out that Ellsworth Raymond Johnson was attached to a Black man, he was rejected. He just took the cards that he was dealt with and played it the best way he could. He was the first African American underworld boss to sit with the real La Cosa Nostra and in season four he goes hard against the Italians but he wasn’t just looked at just as a n*gga with them, he was looked at as a smart person of color who read Shakespeare, who read Nietzsche, but they used him as a conduit to enter into Harlem and flood the streets with dope. Bumpy didn’t drink alcohol, he didn’t smoke cigarettes, he didn’t do drugs and he didn’t get high on his own supply. He stayed a couple of steps ahead of all the Italians by being disciplined, handling his work and going home at night and not getting lost in the in the streets
Source: GABRIEL BOUYS / Getty
BUMPY IS PLAYED BY THE GREAT FOREST WHITAKER. HOW IS IT WORKING WITH HIM?
Forest is an amazing individual. That’s my big brother. He’s a professional. He’s a method actor. He takes his craft seriously. He’s like a technical surgeon. He becomes Bumpy Johnson. And acting is not just acting, it’s about embracing, engulfing that character and becoming that person, actually jumping into this person’s body and coming out knowing his vices, his dislikes, he may rub his pinky, he may look at his watch differently. Forest captures it all.
GIVE US A RECAP OF SEASON THREE AND WHAT WE CAN EXPECT FOR SEASON FOUR?
Season three you saw the demise of Malcolm X who got assassinated at the Autobahn Bowl. We left season three, like, wondering what’s next. Was it a conspiracy? Was it the Nation of Islam? Was it the FBI? Was it the CIA? We open up season four. being very analytical, like who was it? And we got Frank Lucas coming in. (played by Denzel Washington in American Gangster) He’ll be involved in a big way.. Frank, at the time, Is a an individual who has a lot of ambition. He’s coming to Harlem from the South trying to get the American dream by any means necessary.
In real life, Frank wasn’t a Bumpy Johnson fan and Bumpy Johnson wasn’t a Frank Lucas fan but for the art of television and telling a great story for the audience, we showed them kind of collaborating. But they weren’t really a collaboration because everybody was competitive in Harlem at the time, whether it was Frank Lucas, whether it was Bumpy Johnson. Whether it was the gangsters like Goldfinger and Jesse Gray and all these other guys that these old-timers told me about. They were all trying to get the American dream.
THE BLACK PANTHERS ARE PART OF SEASON FOUR
You’ll see a younger generation that says we want to get ours our way. We’re tired of just marching like Martin Luther King saying we shall overcome. They’re like we kicking down doors to overcome. You may see Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mom, pop up in season four.
Source: Dave Benett / Getty
SWIZZ BEATZ IS ON THE ONES AND TWOS DIRECTING THE MUSIC. HOW DID YOU GET HIM?
I said we need a real New York sound and Swizz Beatz is the number one person that I thought of to make it happen. He creates magic. You’ll give him a canvas with nothing but just paint and he’ll just start painting and there’ll be a masterpiece at the end.
IT TOOK YOU 18 YEARS TO BRING THE GODFATHER OF HARLEM TO THE SCREEN?
I never thought it wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t have a Plan B. Sometimes when you have Plan B’s, you think your plan A is not going to work out. That wasn’t me. The journey started in Lenox Terrace. I used to go up there every Sunday to see my godmother, Margaret Johnson and she used to tell me these magical stories about Harlem. It became addicting. She told me how she used to work out of a tenement building and smell fresh laundry hanging out of a window or walk past 125th Street, look up and see James Brown’s name on the marquee, or walk past Sugar Ray Robinson’s shop and see his pink Cadillac. She used to tell me about how African Americans migrated from the South trying to escape Bull Connors dogs and water hoses. But there was still racism here. It was still tumultuous for us If you would go to try on a hat here, they wouldn’t let you because they didn’t want your Black skin to touch the hat. She told me about her grandfather, who was Ellsworth Raymond Johnson, from Charleston, SC. He was a Geechee Gulluh who came up here not to be a gangster, but to become an attorney. And how smart he was. The warden in Alcatraz said he had the highest IQ ever. He has self-published poetry. I made her a promise over 18 years ago to get the real story of her grandfather told.
WHAT IS THE STORY OF MARKUANN “SILK” SMITH? YOU WENT TO COLLEGE YOU’RE WINNING BUT MANY PEOPLE DON’T KNOW YOU CAME FROM THE MUD
People look at the glory before they know your story. They called me “Silk” cuz I was smooth with the ladies and always dressed. I grew up in Harlem, 128th and Saint Nicholas, and moved out to one of the most desolate places in Queens, Far Rockaway. It’s the last stop on the A train. You don’t want to fall asleep on that train. We used to call it the round-robin. If you missed that last stop, you’ll be back in the Bronx. My moms was always working and my step pops, we used to bump heads a lot. I was just tryna be a kid. So having no one around and my brother’s running around trying to get his record deal. He’s working in a Kentucky Fried Chicken and they call him the chicken man, Flour, coming out every day with flour on him but he was always fly. I was just trying to find my way. I’ve been on my own since I was about 16.
I was a terror. I’ve been in every juvenile facility. I was in Spofford. I was in Lincoln Hall and it could have become a revolving door. My story is really about you can either chase your pension or chase your passion. I decided to chase my passion. My story is about just never giving up. And I know it sounds cliche, but you could do what you want to do. It’s like this: If you knock on that door and it doesn’t open for you, go to Home Depot, get some wood, and create your own door.
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Bumpy Johnson Is Coming Back: ‘Godfather of Harlem’ Renewed For Fourth Season On MGM+
AFTER BEING RELEASED YOU WERE ON PROBATION?
Being on probation sucks. It’s almost like it’s set up for you to fail. And when you start seeing people with these astronomical numbers like, 10 or 20 years probation it’s just crazy. I was on federal probation for three years and it was like one of the worst things ever. It’s such a violation of your life. You have a federal parole officer coming to your home like looking at the blueprint, making sure where all the exits are at. I remember one time I was just in the basement of my mother’s house, where I was staying at the time. My federal probation officer came in and this dude was sitting next to me. He came down and was like asking us ‘so who’s this guy sitting next to you?’ It’s very invasive, it’s just not a good feeling., I understand there has to be a land with laws but I think everything should be done in moderation. I’m doing a documentary on Spofford called The Lord of Spofford. Spofford was like a rite of passage for young men. I think I was 16 at the time and the things that I saw, created almost like PTSD now. And it can become a revolving door. Tyson was in Spofford. Shout out to Yusef, Raymond, and Korey of the Central Park 5 was at Spofford and the list goes on.
WHAT WAS THE WORST THING YOU SAW?
I’ve seen people attacked with pool balls in socks. I’ve seen fights, not even fights, beatdowns. I’ve seen counselors addressing kids in a manner that they shouldn’t be addressing kids. I see mental illness going untreated. They had a dorm E 6 and there was this inmate named Guzman. They said if you act up Smith, we’re going to put you in there with Guzman and Guzman was drinking bottles of shampoo. It was really detrimental. There’s certain things that people don’t even like to talk about.
It still really affects me. I know I have PTSD which means most of the time I’m by myself. Even as a celebrity or someone in the public eye, I don’t like to party, I don’t like to be out a lot because I know everything that I worked hard for could be thrown away in a blink of an eye. It’s like every move is a calculated step.
HOW DID YOU ESCAPE THAT REVOLVING PRISON DOOR?
In Spofford, I read a book called Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown. My counselor said if I read that I could get a furlough to go home. The book was very inspiring to me. It showed me that a young brown boy could achieve his dreams, and he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Watching movies saved me. Locking myself in a room and watching movies like Mean Streets, White Heat, Rebel Without A Cause, On the Waterfront, it just drowned out all the noise from outside. I was able to play make-believe for a couple of hours and just escape where I was at. And when my brother got signed to Uptown, he knew I was going down the wrong path and he was like,’I want to bring you on the road’. And he was able to show me a different world that a creator such as myself can exist in. That was one of the reasons I really got into the art. We had fun like I was on the road with Boys to Men before they were Boys to Men, they were just opening. It was just an amazing experience.
YOUR BROTHER PUT YOU ON AS A ROADIE?
My older brother, Timothy Brown, was known in the music industry as Father MC. He was signed to Uptown Records with Andre Harrell. We came up with the likes of Heavy D and that whole New Jack Swing. I was carrying everything, turntables as big as a coffin. , first one off the bus, last one on. Everybody’s in the hotel after parties hanging out with the ladies and the girls but because I was making sure all the equipment, the bags, and suitcases were on the bus. Tupac was a good friend and he was also a roadie and he said’ I want the world to know who I am, know my pain and my passion’. I wanted the same thing. You got two little brown boys that got an opportunity to travel the road. I think one of the most serene things for me was being on a tour bus, looking out the tour bus. listening to Blue Magic, the Whispers, and seeing the landscape just passing you by and just leaving my past behind, leaving Far Rockaway behind,
WAS YOUR BROTHER YOUR MVP IN LIFE?
He was an MVP, but I had to be my own MVP as well because my brother told me on his third album ‘Yo, you fired’. But it wasn’t out of being malicious. It was the fact that basically he was telling me, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to get my other deal at. It’s time for you to leave the nest and get on your own.’ It did hurt. I didn’t know where it was coming from and if it was coming from a bad place, but it was really coming from concern. He was sayin’ ‘you just hanging from my ankle. You have to create your own way. Create your own personality.’
HOW DID YOU MOVE ON FROM THE HURT OF BEING FIRED BY YOUR BROTHER?
I kept it moving. I didn’t look at it like, Oh my God, what am I going to do now? I’m a Scorpio. I’m a natural-born hustler. I’m gonna make it happen.
ARE YOU BOO’D UP OR CAN THE LADIES SLIDE IN YOUR DMS?
I don’t take sliding in the DMS. No sliding in the DMS. That’s kinda scary because you might get something that you don’t want to see. Relationships are so tricky nowadays, you just never know what’s happening. What’s going on? You don’t know if it’s one-sided you don’t know who’s real or who’s not real, who’s liking you for you or who’s not liking you for you but what you have. And in the age of social media, man, you got these keyboard gangsters that’s just wanna talk **** about you.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR MARKUANN “SILK” SMITH?
I’m the type of person I’m always working. I’m always thinking of being creative I’m working with Joe Morton on a project that I’m really excited about. It’s a project about the nation’s capital in the years of 85 to 1990, and about Reaganomics, capitalism, socialism. I’m working on the C murder documentary about his journey. It’s a long walk about the history of New Orleans and prison reform and the racism that was happening out there. I’m working with Sacha Jenkins on a film about Donald Goines (Iceberg Slim) I have two movies I’m in. One with Tommy Davidson and Jess Hilarious called the Realtor. It was fun shooting that and another project with the great Lou Gossett Junior RIP called Sin
I tell people all the time. Never give up on your dreams, your hopes and aspirations. Never let anybody steal from your vision, whether it’s your mother, your father, your children. Remember, you only got one life to live.
Source: Jazmyn Summers / Jazmyn Summers
Interview by Jazmyn Summers. Photos and video by Dominique Maddox and Sean Bell You can hear Jazmyn every morning on “Jazmyn in the Morning “on Sirius XM Channel 362 Grown Folk Jamz 6am-10am est and subscribe to Jazmyn Summers’ YouTube. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
