The Harlem Hellfighters and Henry Johnson

In WWI, a black U.S. Army unit became one of the most decorated of the war. When these soldiers returned home, they were greeted as heroes, but were still targets of segregation, discrimination and oppression.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Pretty recently
we talked about Maccario Garcia, and we talked in that
episode about how World War Two often comes up as

(00:24):
one of the factors of many that led to the
United States Civil rights movement. So told very simply, soldiers
who had put their lives on the line to serve
their country and to fight against oppression abroad came back
home to fight against depression where they actually lived. And
this story is usually told as it related to African
American soldiers and World War Two. And in this particular

(00:47):
case of the episode we already did. Maccario Garcia was
a Mexican national, so after he returned from World War Two,
his experience being denied service at a Texas restaurant contributed
to a social movement for equal rights for Mexican Americans
and other Hispanics and Latinos who were living in that
part of the United States. So when we did that
episode on Maccario Garcia, we hinted that World War Two

(01:10):
was not the only time that's happened that the subject
of that was going to be in an upcoming episode,
and that is two days episode. We are going to
tell this story about World War One's effect on civil
rights in the United States by talking about the Harlem
Health Fighters. This was a segregated regiment that served in
combat in World War One, So we're going to start

(01:30):
by talking about the regiment itself. Then we are going
to talk about one of its most decorated members as
an example of the just really exceptional valor and courage
that the Health Fighters exhibited while they were serving in
World War One. And lastly, we're going to talk about
why World War One does not come up very often
when we're talking about things that inspired civil rights activity

(01:54):
in the United States. It's much more overshadowed by World
War Two. And whenever we talk about segar dation on
the podcast, we make it a point to note that
the practice was not something that was confined to the South.
That sort of rumor sort of persists. Yeah, somebody emailed
us about it the other day. Even though I feel
like we keep saying it, we're gonna stay it again
today very directly. Not just the South, although formalized legally

(02:19):
enforced segregation persisted in the South longer than it did
than it did in many other parts of the United States,
and in a lot of ways it was most obvious there,
which is also here where we are, uh. Segregation really
existed all over the nation. For example, President Woodrow Wilson,
who had promised in his campaign to treat African Americans
fairly if he was elected, instead started taking steps to

(02:42):
allow segregation of federal government positions almost immediately after his
inauguration in n Many many black federal workers all over
the country were segregated or flat out dismissed as a result.
The United States armed forces were segregated as well, and
years leading up to World War One, the Marines did

(03:02):
not accept black soldiers at all. The Navy did accept
a few, although most of them were restricted to support
and manual labor roles, so most black soldiers who served
in the military wound up survey in the army, which
was segregated. There were also almost no black army officers,
and the black Army officers who did exist were not

(03:23):
ever placed in command of white soldiers. They were only
placed in command of black soldiers. In addition to being
restricted to segregated units. Black soldiers serving in World War
One faced violence while still in the United States before
being sent overseas. These men were sent into the South,
sometimes the Deep South, to be trained, and large numbers

(03:45):
of armed black men were often explicitly not wanted in
the Southern States, and the sudden influx of so many
black soldiers led to some very real hostilities and on
more than one occasion, riots and murders. The Army has
also been fairly canned it and acknowledging that it discriminated
specifically against black soldiers during this time, apart from just

(04:06):
placing them in segregated units, which, as we have talked
and many other podcasts before, segregation based on races inherently discriminatory.
So command at this point did not think that black
men were suited for combat. They were viewed as untrustworthy
and lazy and complacent. So overwhelmingly black soldiers were assigned

(04:27):
to work as manual labors. So most of the two
hundred thousand black soldiers who went overseas in World War
One wound up working as stevedors. They dug ditches, they
dug latrines, and to be clear, this was absolutely essential
work it needed to be done, but it was also
often backbreaking and degrading, and overwhelmingly being assigned to only
the Black soldiers. Black soldiers were also the ones who

(04:50):
were frequently tasked with burying the dead. Only about forty
two thousand Black soldiers saw combat in World War One.
These men served in the ninety two and nine D
third Combat Divisions. The nine mostly comprised men who had
been drafted along with their officers, and was part of
the muse Ugon offensive in nineteen eighteen. This offensive did

(05:10):
not go as well as hoped, and the ninety two
wound up being a scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong.
Their time in combat was brief. On the other hand,
was made up primarily of National Guard units, including the
fifteenth New York Colored Regiment. About seventy percent of the
men in this regiment were from Harlem in New York,
and these were the men who would go on to

(05:32):
be nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. The ninety three Combat Division,
under the command of Colonel William Hayward, wound up essentially
being loaned to France to fill a labor shortage in
their own army, and this was in spite of the
fact that when the United States entered the war, the
President had assured the population that US soldiers would not
be on loan to other armies. They would be fighting

(05:53):
as American units under American command. So when it went overseas,
the fifteenth New York Colored Hedgment was renamed the three
hundred sixty ninth Infantry, and the three hundred sixty nine
served a hundred and ninety one days in combat. This
was longer than any other American unit in World War One.
Contrary to the American military's assumption that black soldiers were

(06:16):
not fit for combat and for their expectations for how
black soldiers would perform, the three sixty ninth Inventry became
one of the most decorated units to serve in the war.
Much like German forces named Russia's all female night bombers
the night Witches in World War Two, they nicknamed the
three hundred sixty nine the Blueterstick Shvartza Mana or the

(06:39):
Bloodthirsty black Men in World War One, and this nickname
was eventually translated into the Hellfighters. In addition to their
consistent valor and high performance in combat, the three d
and sixty ninth Infantories marching band was also a skilled
and talented one and was one of the ways that
jazz music made its way from the United States It's

(07:00):
to France. During the war, the Harlem health fighters time
in combat was so prolonged and it touched so many
actions on the Western Front that it's actually difficult to
get a sense of their remarkable heroism in valor. So
to get a glimpse of it, uh, we are going
to talk about one of their most incredible members who
really exemplifies what we're talking about. But first we are

(07:21):
going to have a word from one of our great sponsors.
So we're going to tell the story of how the
sixty ninth Infantry was pretty incredible in their service by
talking about specifically the story of Henry Johnson. Henry Johnson
was born William Henry Johnson in Winston Salem, North Carolina,
and he moved to New York when he was a teenager.

(07:42):
Once he got there, he worked at a variety of jobs,
most of them involving manual labor, until he eventually became
a red cap porter at the Albany, New York train station. Later,
he joined the National Guard unit that would become part
of the Harlem Health Fighters. In May of nineteen eighteen,
Henry Johnson and Need Roberts, both of them then privates,

(08:02):
were acting as centuries at a lookout post in the
Argon Forest on the Western Front. Johnson heard the sound
of someone snipping through barbed wire. Concluding that this was
a German advance, he sent Roberts to go for help,
called for help himself, and then lobbed grenades at the
source of the sound. It was indeed a German advance,
and the Germans returned fire with both grenades and bullets.

(08:26):
Roberts turned back to try to help Johnson, and both
men were hit. Roberts was actually hurt so badly that
he was not able to continue fighting, so he passed
grenades to Johnson, and Johnson threw them at the approaching
Germans until he ran out, and then Johnson got his
rifle and he fired upon the advancing German soldiers until
his weapon jammed after he accidentally tried to use an

(08:49):
American clip with a French rifle. At this point, the
German soldiers closed into hand to hand range, and so
Johnson tried to fight them off, basically by swinging his
rifle like a club until the butt of it literally splintered.
And Johnson, we should point out, was not a large man.
He was only about five ft four you ate about
a hundred and thirty pounds, and once his rifle was destroyed,

(09:10):
he was struck in the head and knocked down. But
then he saw that the German soldiers were trying to
take the injured Private Roberts prisoner, so Johnson managed to
get to his feet. He pulled out the only weapon
he had left, which was his bolo knife, and he
fought back with that while trying to drag Roberts to safety. Fortunately,
at this point, the sounds of gunfire and grenades and

(09:31):
their calls for help had brought other soldiers to their aid,
so Johnson continued trying to drag Roberts away from the
fighting until he lost consciousness. Fortunately that was when reinforcements
arrived and the German soldiers who were still upright fled.
In the morning, it was revealed that then Private Johnson
had single handedly killed four enemy soldiers and wounded somewhere

(09:53):
between ten and twenty more, all while he was injured
himself with twenty one wounds sustained in his combat and
refusing to allow his compatriot to be taken captive. So
both men were awarded the quad A gear, which is
the French military decoration for valor and heroism. This made
Johnson and Roberts the first American privates of any race

(10:16):
to earn this recognition, and Johnson and Roberts were not
the only members of the Harlem Hell Fighters to ultimately
be awarded the Quada gear for their valor. All in all,
a hundred and seventy one individual members of the Harlem
Hell Fighters received the Quadi gear, and the unit as
a whole was awarded one as well for capturing, say
Show while advancing ahead of French and other American lines.

(10:38):
The Harlem Hell Fighters were the first to reach the
Rhine after the armistice, and they were commended again and
again for their valor. So basically, they performed above and
beyond the call for any combat unit, and especially in
a way that flew in the face of what the
American command was expecting of them. Yeah, I don't think

(10:59):
you could get a much more um kind of poignant
portrait of heroism. Right. So, roughly eight hundred Harlem Health
Fighters lost their lives in Europe. About three thousand others
returned home from the war in February of nineteen nineteen.
They had a welcome home parade in which they marched
up Fifth Avenue in New York and into their home
neighborhood of Harlem. And this parade was in part to

(11:22):
make up for the fact that on their departure from
New York in December of nineteen seventeen, they had not
been permitted to take part in the New York National
Guards farewell parade through New York City. The New York
National Guard was known as the Rainbow Division because it
included members from twenty seven states, and the reason for
the fifteenth New York Regiment's exclusion was black is not

(11:42):
a color of the Rainbow. On their return, however, the
Harlem Health Fighters received a legitimate heroes welcome. Accounts very
wildly about how many people were there for the parade.
You will find news sources that sight anywhere from two
hundred thousand people to more than two million. Johnson was
riding in a car for injured veterans, and in spite

(12:03):
of the fact that he had a shattered foot that
was held together with the metal plate, he stood up
to wave at them, and people called him black Death.
The response from both white and black onlookers at the
parade was so a brilliantly positive that too many it
was a symbol of hope for improved race relations to come.
And this was bolstered by the fact that President Theodore

(12:23):
Roosevelt called Johnson one of the five bravest Americans to
serve in the war. That's high praise. And the army
used his image on recruitment posters and to sell victory
war stamps. I couldn't find a picture of this actual advertisement,
but reportedly what it says I it is Johnson licked
a dozen Germans. How many stamps have you licked? I

(12:44):
looked for I because, yeah, that's some copy, right, na ha.
So all of this Johnson's fame is a war hero.
The overwhelming tide of support for the returning black veterans,
this overall theme that the war had been fought in
a to make the world safe for democracy gave a
lot of people hope that this signaled a major change

(13:06):
in the social and legal status of African Americans and
the United States. Sadly, this was not to be true,
and we were going to talk about why and how
after another brief word from a sponsor, So when he
was committing American troops to World War One, Woodrow Wilson
very famously said that quote, the world must be made
safe for democracy. We alluded to that just before the break,

(13:29):
But when African American soldiers returned home to find that
they were still the targets of segregation, discrimination and oppression,
it really seemed like there was an unspoken for white
people at the end of that sentence. Hoping to tie
the fight for civil rights to the ideals that had
underpinned the United States very involvement in the war, and
the fact that so many black soldiers had returned as

(13:50):
highly decorated heroes, black civil rights leaders called for action.
The idea of making the world safe for democracy came
up again and again in art, coal speeches, pamphlets, and
other materials about equal rights for black citizens. In May
of nineteen nineteen, for example, W. E. B. Du Boys
wrote quote, returning soldiers, we return, we returned from fighting.

(14:14):
We returned fighting make way for democracy. We saved it
in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save
it in the United States of America. Or know the
reason why. But this is not the war that winds
up being referenced in terms of how it affected civil rights.
That distinction always, as we've said, goes to World War Two.
The biggest reason for this is that it's much easier

(14:36):
to frame World War two as a more positive story.
Following World War Two, returning black veterans added their voices
to a growing grass grassroots movement all over the nation,
which coalesced into what we know is the civil rights
movement today. And although there was definitely a violent backlash
and lots of resistance that was a hallmark toward part

(14:57):
of this movement, it did eventually lead to civil rights
legislation that was meant to help put Black Americans on
more equal footing. That's an oversimplified way to look at
World War two, but no amount of oversimplification can put
the years following World War One into such a positive light.
World War One ended on November eleventh of nineteen eighteen.

(15:18):
The following summer, violence broke out all over the United States,
driven by a number of social and economic factors. One
was a backlash against advocacy for equal treatment of African Americans,
especially as others began to view this movement as militant.
But also in play was the return of soldiers who
had fought in the war, colliding with what's known as

(15:40):
the Great Migration. So in the Great Migration, which peaked
between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty, huge numbers of African
Americans living in the South moved north. Many of them
were fleeing up poverty and social and political oppression. People
who had been living as sharecroppers in the South moved
north to get industrial jobs, many of which were tied

(16:01):
to the war effort, in the hope of getting better
incomes and more freedom. So this dramatically shifted the racial
landscape and many northern cities. This also meant that many
white veterans in the North returned home to find that
their industrial jobs had been filled by black workers who
had moved up from the South. Returning soldiers of all

(16:21):
races and ethnicities wound up in competition for a shrinking
supply of jobs. As a result of these and many
other factors, the summer of nineteen nineteen was so violent
and so deadly that it came to be known as
Red Summer. Eighty three people are known to have been
lynched in nineteen nineteen up from sixty four in nineteen eighteen.

(16:41):
Ku Klux Klan activity also spread, especially in the South,
and then there were what is often described as race riots,
which broke out in Washington, d C. Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville,
and many other cities. However, as we discussed in our
episode on the Tulsa race riot and Black Wall Street,
the term race riot is often a misnomer because it

(17:04):
suggests racial violence in which the races involved are equal aggressors.
It was a misnomer during the destruction of Black Wall
Street in Tulsa, and it was a misnomer during Red Summer.
Overwhelmingly the instigators in Red Summer were white citizens, and
overwhelmingly Black people, along with their homes, businesses, and entire neighborhoods,
were the victims. One of the most dramatic moments in

(17:27):
Red Summer took place that July when a riot broke
out in Chicago after a black teenager drowned. He had
been using a customarily whites only beach and people did
not like that and they stoned him, so he drowned
after being stoned. As a result of this particular riot,
almost forty people were killed five hundred were injured, and

(17:48):
about a thousand black families were left homeless after a
white mob burned their homes down. The last major event
in Red Summer actually took place in October and he
in Arkansas, black sharecroppers, attempting to organize themselves to advocate
for better treatment, were massacred by a white mob. Somewhere

(18:08):
between one hundred and two hundred black sharecroppers were killed.
In the aftermath, many more black share croppers were arrested
and jailed, many were put on trial, and some were
sentenced to death by all white juries even though they
had actually been the victims and not the instigators. So
that's why even the World War One inspired a ground

(18:29):
swell of organized advocacy for equal rights for black citizens,
it doesn't come to the forefront very often, and it's
also not a particularly good place to end this episode.
So we're going to turn back to the story of
Henry Johnson for a moment. So there's widespread belief that
Johnson received no disability compensation from the government because of

(18:49):
the clerical error in his discharged papers, and that he
died in obscure poverty. So while the last part of
that is actually sadly mostly true. The first part does
not hold up under examination of the records. News articles
and military records from the time indicate that Johnson was
a patient at Walter Reed Hospital, that he received a
disability statement stipend of about ninety dollars a month, which

(19:13):
would not have been a lot of money, but was there.
Most of this misinformation stems from the fact that Herman Johnson,
who served with the Tuskegee Airmen, seems to have mistakenly
genuinely believed that Henry Johnson was his father. He gave
interviews about his father's life that were based on his
own knowledge, which was actually incomplete. And Johnson did die

(19:36):
at a sadly young age of myocarditis, after having had
a series of complications with the many injuries he sustained
in combat, along with tuberculosis. He was buried in Arlington
National Cemetery with full military honors on July five. The
sight of his grave was actually lost until two thousand two.

(19:56):
In the intervening years, his family had believed that he
was actually buried in an anonymous grave in Albany, in
part because they had lost touch with him, and in
part because the Army made a clerical error in the
name of who was buried in the grave. Henry Johnson
was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart, which is for soldiers
who were wounded or killed in action in it didn't
actually exist yet when he was wounded. In two thousand three,

(20:21):
after the location of his grave was found, he was
also awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and he was posthumously
promoted to sergeant. After finding a memo from General John J.
Pershing describing Johnson's valorous deeds in a database, Senator Charles
Schumer of New York started a petition to have imposthumously
awarded the Medal of Honor. Sergeant Henry Johnson was awarded

(20:43):
the Medal of Honor on June two. It was accepted
on his behalf by Command Sergeant Major Lewis Wilson of
the New York National Guarden. His official citation ends quote
Private Johnson's extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the
call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions
of military service, and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit,

(21:06):
and the United States Army. And there's also a cool
graphic novel about the whole thing. I think it is
probably cool. It's by Max Brooks, who has done a
lot of other graphic novels, some of them not historically
related at all. I did check it out from the library.
I have not yet had time to read it before
recording this episode, but it looks really good. Ah, So

(21:29):
that is that's rough one. It is well, it's kind
of a meandering story through. I think I might have
said this in the show before. We have three categories
of sad episodes. Right. We have the ones that we
know we're going to be sad, and then we get
into it and we realize it's a lot sadder than
we thought. And then we have the ones that we
know we're gonna be really sad, but we are doing

(21:49):
them because we think it's important or maybe a lot
of people have asked us to do it. And then
we have the ones that are like today, which is
that I picked something because it sounds cool, and then
I get into it and I go, oh, this is
this is hurting me. So I had picked the Harlem
hell Fighters based on probably a uh like a blog
post or a tumbler post or something somewhere that was

(22:11):
about this really amazing all black fighting regiment in World
War One and how great they were and how much
valor and bravery they exhibited and how awesome. And I
was like, well, yeah, I want to talk about those guys.
And then I was like, oh, dear, this sad, Oh
sad things are happening. Yeah. History is full of those
surprise little pop upside. You have listener mail that's maybe

(22:34):
not quite as tear jerkey it is. Actually, it's not
tear jerky at all. It is about an episode that
was a little creepy, but its content is not sad.
It is from Ellen, and Ellen says, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
I love to listen to your podcast during my daily commute.
I was too so stoked two years ago when you
used my suggestion of encephalitis lethargica as a spooky Halloween topic.

(22:55):
I still brag about it. I'm gonna take appause for
a second. That was one that turned out a scarier
than we thought it was going to. Yeah, it scared
me a lot. It's very terrifying. Yeah. So to get
back to the letter, I was excited to hear Ivra
Hagland mentioned during your recent spooky episode on Linda Hazard
and Starvation Heights. You wondered why Iver's restaurant was always mentioned.

(23:18):
Was it the irony that he is famous for starting
a restaurant when his mother is famous for dying of
hazard starvation treatment? Or was it just that it's a
famous Seattle place. Having grown up a fourth generation Norwegian
immigrant of Seattle, I think I can help with that.
And Ivor himself was such a character that I just
wanted to share a little trivia about it. Ivor Hagland

(23:38):
is a Seattle legend. Billed as the Patriarch of the Waterfront.
He established the first Seattle aquarium, as well as a
chain of seafood restaurants famous for their delicious clam chowder
and my personal recommendation of fish and chips. But Ibor
is also such a beloved and sometimes controversial figure because
of his hilarious local pranks, my favorite of which includes

(23:59):
the time he took a baby seal to visit a
department store Santa Claus and the time he made the
most of a sticky situation. Following a thousand gallant syrup
spill in downtown Seattle, he quickly picked up some pancakes
and ran out to the spill for a fresh spoonful
of syrup because I were stayed at the back of
my mind. Throughout my dinner time commute home. I ended

(24:21):
up with a ridiculous craving for Iver's fishonships while listening
to this strange and cruel story. Thanks a bunch for
making my commute so interesting and educational. Best Ellen, I'm
so glad somebody wrote in to give us some more
about that. I had. I have seen some of their
ads and things, mostly because I was trying to figure
out how Iver pronounced his name. I was a little

(24:42):
shocked that that it says Iver's and all of the
ads and I said, Okay, that sounds fine. But the
the ads for it were very funny, a lot of them.
So I'm so glad somebody with local knowledge wrote in
to tell us more about it. I feel super lazy.
I have two siblings living in Seattle. Didn't think to
ask them well. I also, I also have family in Seattle.

(25:08):
I did not ask them either. Oh well, we're both
lazy and no, your family in Seattle has a brand
new baby. You don't have time to be answering your
question well. And I also took the much harder route
of looking for video of someone from the restaurant pronouncing
the name of the restaurant rather than just asking someone

(25:29):
who lives there. I made it hard for myself but
also fun, but also kind of fun because I got
to watch very silly ads for a zepoog restaurant. So
if you would like to write to us, you can
were a history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss
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tumbler is at missed in History dot tumbler dot com.

(25:51):
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the word word world War into the search part, you
will find lots of stuff about both both World War
One and World War Two. If you want to come
to our website, which is missed in History dot com,
you will find show notes for all of the episodes

(26:13):
Holly and I have ever worked on. You will find
an archive of all of the episodes ever laugh of
cool stuff. So you can do all that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
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