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This man probably suffered from PTSD. Before the war he was a Pullman Redcap. An excellent job for an unskilled black man a century ago and also one that required a sort of background investigation by the Pullman Co. After the war he couldn't stop hitting the bottle.

Jim Crow....in Albany NY?

Good article.

He should have stayed in France or Denmark. Why don’t we hear about African American heroes like this? Why aren’t there school textbooks that can tell the stories of heroes like this man and so many others like him.

Never mind, I know why.

Henry Johnson was where the Parisian's infatuation with American black people (which they called "Negrophilia") began.

One of Woodrow Wilson's chief objectives in entering WWI was to put the US at the head of the family of nations. So to reduce the dilution of the significance of America's role in the fighting, he directed Gen. Pershing to keep American units integral, that none should be seconded to any foreign commanders. And to keep the focus on the fact that these were "American" soldiers, news from the front generally only mentioned the units involved, rarely the names of any individual soldiers or Marines.

Then Pershing found himself facing mutiny because white soldiers were refusing to fight along side blacks. So his on-the-fly solution was to loan the black units to the French. The French numbers were so depleted they didn't care what color their reinforcements were, and were grateful to get them.

Which is how Henry Johnson came to find himself on sentry duty in the French lines, where the French press had the freedom to print names of individual soldiers.

By 1918 the Parisians were starving for good news from the front, and up comes this story about the extraordinary bravery of Henry Johnson, a black American, fighting off a dozen or more Huns with nothing but a bolo knife. Which was reprinted in every newspaper across the continent, complete with his photo. And from this the Parisians in particular developed a fondness for black people and their exotic culture, especially jazz music.

So after the war, Paris became a magnet for black entertainers; musicians, dancers, writers and painters. And Paris' "Luminous Years," which had been on the simmer since about 1905, exploded. And Paris continued to luminescence until the Great Depression jumped the Atlantic and put out its flame.