MOH Henry Johnson Died Destitute And Alone In VA Hospital

With Medal of Honor Award, Family Learns WWI Hero Wasn't Kin
Associated Press
by George M. Walsh
Jun 03, 2015

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Two days before President Barack Obama announced a posthumous Medal of Honor for black World War I soldier Henry Johnson, a family got staggering news about the legacy of heroism that had inspired them for generations and through three wars. They weren't related to Johnson by blood after all.

An Army general visited Tara Johnson last month with word that Henry Johnson was not her grandfather, and that her father, World War II Tuskegee airman Herman Johnson, was not the hero's son.

"Dad's birth certificate didn't have Henry on it," she told The Associated Press in an interview this week. The name of the man listed on the document found by Pentagon researchers vetting Johnson's lineage was one relatives had never heard mentioned as the father.

Henry Johnson was a railroad porter in Albany before the war. He enlisted in the Army and won acclaim for rescuing a comrade despite suffering grenade and gunshot wounds in a ferocious hand-to-hand battle with German raiders in 1918. Returning from France, he was honored with parades and glowing newspaper stories about his exploits with the 369th Infantry Regiment, a unit known as the "Harlem Hellfighters." But while France awarded him the Croix de Guerre for heroism, Johnson was given no medals by a U.S. military mired in Jim Crow-era racism.

Hobbled by his wartime injuries and unable to work, Johnson took to drinking. He died destitute in 1929 at age 32 at an Illinois veterans hospital.

On Tuesday, the president handed the Medal of Honor to New York National Guard Command Sgt. Maj. Louis Wilson because the military found no known blood relatives of Johnson.

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