Army base in Louisiana sheds Confederate name for a Black war hero

© Crystal Stevenson/AP
The former Fort Polk Army base in Vernon Parish, La., formally became Fort Johnson, named for a Black World War I hero, on Tuesday, June 13, 2023. (Crystal Stevenson/AP)

Fort Polk, an Army installation in Louisiana that for decades bore the name of a Confederate general, was re-designated Fort Johnson on Tuesday in honor of Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a Black soldier whose battlefield heroics during World War I earned him the nation’s top military award for valor nearly a century later.

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.”

© U.S. Army/AP
U.S. Army Pvt. William Henry Johnson was one of two World War I Army heroes who received the Medal of Honor on Tuesday, June 2, 2015, nearly 100 years after bravely rescuing comrades on the battlefields of France. (U.S. Army via AP)

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 closing months of World War I in 1917. Johnson and his unit initially performed mostly manual labor, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, until being loaned to the low-on-troops French Fourth Army “to bolster an ally and preserve racial segregation in the American command.”

The men were sent to the front lines on the edge of the Argonne Forest in France’s Champagne region, arriving on April 15, 1918.

The battle that would make Johnson a hero came just a month later.

Johnson, who stood at 5-foot-4 and weighed 13o pounds, was credited by his commanding officer, Col. William Hayward, with warding off more than a dozen German soldiers while standing sentry one night. In the darkness, the Germans tried to drag away his fellow soldier, Needham Roberts, who was badly injured in the fighting, according to an account that documented in a letter to Johnson’s wife, Edna, and read into the congressional record a few months later.

Johnson was wounded three times, and Roberts twice, but kept fighting. As The Washington Post reported in 2015: “Johnson concussed one German with the butt stock of his rifle, and then sunk a heavy bolo knife he was carrying into another’s head, killing him. He stabbed to death at least one more attacker who was beating Roberts, allowing the Americans to toss hand grenades that prompted the rest of the Germans to flee.”

Johnson was humble in his own recollection.

“There wasn’t anything so fine about it,” he said later, according to a Department of Defense record. “Just fought for my life. A rabbit would have done that.”

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Johnson returned from the war a hero. He was in the lead car for a 1919 parade of the Harlem Hellfighters in New York City, waving a bouquet of lilies an admirer had handed him, according to news accounts from the time. The unit had been denied a parade when they left for the war. Now, the men marched along Fifth Avenue, with thousands of fans craning for a view. Some called out, “Oh you Black Death” — the nickname given to Johnson for his actions when the Germans attacked.

He set out on a speaking tour, said genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who researched his story for the Army. But after he discussed the racism he had faced in the Army, she said, “all the sudden he’s not speaking anymore.”

Although France awarded Johnson the Croix du Guerre for heroism, his own country did not give him similar recognition until decades after his death.

“Henry was one of the first Americans to receive France’s highest award for valor,” President Barack Obama said during his 2015 posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony. “But his own nation didn’t award him anything — not even the Purple Heart, though he had been wounded 21 times. Nothing for his bravery, though he had saved a fellow soldier at great risk to himself. His injuries left him crippled. He couldn’t find work. His marriage fell apart. And in his early 30s, he passed away.”

Johnson was destitute when he died in 1929, with his death certificate listing myocarditis as the cause. Some accounts say he did not receive the medical benefits he had earned. But Smolenyak said records show he drew monthly compensation and had been hospitalized at Walter Reed, the Army medical center.

He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with military honors.

Naming a base in his honor “feels long overdue,” Smolenyak said.

“He was exceptional,” she said, “the right man at the right moment. And now, he’ll be known.”

Slow progress on ‘shifting the status quo’

Brookshire, of the Black Veterans Project, said the renaming of Fort Johnson “puts a stake in the ground” and shows the military is conscious that it needs to change. He called the change a relatively easy one since the Pentagon has “clear-cut dominion” over how it names its installations.

“If you read accounts from Black soldiers during World War II, you read accounts of them being offended having to go through training at bases named after Confederate generals; same thing with a whole new generation in the Vietnam era,” Brookshire said.

More difficult, Brookshire said, is changing the ingrained practices that yield a “diminutive presence of Black folks” in the armed forces, ranging from enrollment at military academies to entrance into special operations units.

“Of course they’ve made strides, but the numbers are still abysmal,” he said of the Pentagon’s efforts.

Another major issue that faced many Black veterans of Johnson’s generation and those that followed is the racial gap in veteran benefits.

Last year, advocates for Black veterans sued the Department of Veterans Affairs alleging decades of racial discrimination, including a disproportionately higher rejection rate of service-connected disability claims compared with White applicants and the unfair deprivation of housing and education benefits for Black veterans and their families.

Meanwhile, even swapping out Confederate names at military bases is not without pushback.

Last week, two GOP presidential contenders, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence, vowed if elected to reverse the recent name change of Fort Liberty in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg, named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.

Former president Donald Trump in 2020 also rejected calls to rename bases whose names honor Confederate figures, but the Senate passed a provision in the annual defense bill mandating a naming commission by a veto-proof majority, defanging Trump’s threats to reject the measure.

Brookshire notes that while stripping Confederate names from military posts is a hot political topic of the day that the military is finally taking action on, Black service members had been calling for that very change for more than a century.

“It’s a commentary on how slow the DOD can move on things,” he said. “But also a commentary that they’re open to shifting the status quo.”