![]() ![]() The French, less preoccupied by race than were the Americans, welcomed the men known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Poorly trained, the unit mostly performed menial labor-unloading ships and digging latrines-until it was lent to the French Fourth Army, which was short on troops. Just a year earlier, Henry Johnson, who stood 5-foot-4 and weighed 130 pounds, had enlisted in the all-black 15th New York National Guard Regiment, which was renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment when it shipped out to France. Historians who located Johnson’s place of burial believed there could be no more appropriate honor for Herman’s father, who proved his valor on the night of May 14, 1918, in the Argonne Forest. But in 2001, 72 years after Henry Johnson’s death, a great and unlikely mystery was revealed to the soldier’s estranged son: On July 5, 1929, Henry Johnson had been buried not in an anonymous grave in Albany, but with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. The younger Johnson knew all about Jim Crow, second-class citizenship and the systematic denial of equal rights to black Americans. The denial of a disability pension, the Purple Heart oversight, the fleeting recognition-none of it surprised his son, Herman Johnson, who later served with the famed Tuskegee Airmen. A man who had earned the nickname “Black Death” in combat was quickly forgotten. As far as anyone knew, he was buried in a pauper’s field in Albany. It didn’t take long for his wife and three children to leave. Johnson’s inability to hold down a job led him to the bottle. He made it back home to Albany, New York, and resumed his job as a Red Cap porter at the train station, but he never could overcome his injuries-his left foot had been shattered, and a metal plate held it together. He simply tried to carry on as well as a black man could in the country he had been willing to give his life for. ![]() Uneducated and in his early twenties, Henry Johnson had no expectations that he could correct the errors in his military record. His discharge records erroneously made no mention of his injuries, and so Johnson was denied not only a Purple Heart, but a disability allowance as well. ![]() With dozens of bullet and shrapnel wounds, he knew he was lucky to have survived. Like hundreds of thousands of young American men, Henry Johnson returned from World War I and tried to make a life for himself in spite of what he had experienced in a strange and distant land. ![]()
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