www.washingtonpost.com – 2023-06-15 03:21:00
Johnson died in 1929, just 11 years after he prevented at least a dozen members of a German raiding party from capturing his fellow soldier in France’s Argonne Forest. Johnson’s bravery earned him praise at the time, including from American poet Langston Hughes and the son of a former president, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who called Johnson “one of the five bravest American soldiers in the war.” Despite the praise, Johnson didn’t receive the Medal of Honor for his courage until 97 years later, when it was posthumously awarded by President Barack Obama.
Following a ceremony Tuesday, the commander of the newly christened Fort Johnson said its eponymous hero’s legacy will inspire future soldiers who enter the sprawling Joint Readiness Training Center on post — a network of mock villages and woodlands where units conduct final training exercises before deploying overseas.
“The Warrior Spirit that burned within Sgt. William Henry Johnson now inspires generations of Soldiers. Soldiers that will now call JRTC and Fort Johnson home and Soldiers that will continue to come here from all over the nation and the world to train,” Brig. Gen. David Gardner said in a statement.
Fort Johnson is among nine Army posts that have been selected to be renamed as the Department of Defense attempts to make its ranks more inclusive for marginalized groups like women and racial minorities, while also reckoning with long-standing racial inequities.
Part of that effort includes a $62 million project to scrub from Confederate names and monuments from bases like Fort Johnson, which had previously been named after Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop who enslaved people and served as a major general in the Confederate army.
Richard Brookshire, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and co-founder and chief executive of the Black Veterans Project, praised the honor for Johnson but called it a small step by an institution with many miles to go.
“Base renamings are low-hanging fruit and [are] just the starting point,” Brookshire said Wednesday. “Changing the names on the bases is not going to change the military’s race problem in and of itself.”
From humble beginnings to wartime hero
Johnson, who went by his middle name Henry, was born in Winston Salem, N.C., in 1892, according to the Army, and moved as a teenager to New York. There, he held jobs including chauffeur, soda mixer, coal yard laborer and train station porter before enlisting in the Army in 1917. He was assigned to an all-Black unit, the 369th Infantry Regiment, that would become known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.”
They were ordered to Europe during the…
