Leroy Johnston
Racism is man’s gravest threat to man– the maximum hatred for a minimum of reason
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Leroy Johnston came from one of the most prestigious and successful middle-class families in Phillips County, Arkansas. His father was a prominent Presbyterian minister, his mother a school teacher, one of his brothers, Louie, a physician, and another, Elihue, a dentist and owner of a three-story office building in their hometown of Helena.
In November 1917, in response to President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to bring the United States into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” Leroy made his way to New York City to join what would eventually become the 369th Infantry Regiment. On July 25, 1917, he was assigned to Camp Whitman, New York, where he learned basic military practices, including how to address officers and march in formation. On October 8, he was assigned to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina to receive combat training. On December 27, Private Leroy Johnston was shipped out to France.
Johnston and his regiment went into the trenches on May 8, 1918. Planted in the cradle of war, he would spend the next 191 days under heavy enemy fire.
On September 25, the 369th Infantry regiment was dispatched to join the Meuse-Argonne offensive, an American-led campaign that lasted 47 days until the Armistice of November 11. The 369th performed well, capturing the important village of Sechault. At one point, the brave and hardened soldiers of 369th advanced faster than the French troops on their right and left flanks and risked being cut off. By the time the exhausted regiment pulled back for reorganization, it had advanced nearly nine miles through ferocious German resistance. But 1300 of the regiment’s 2,000 soldiers had been either killed or wounded in the opening days of the battle, the largest slaughter of any American regiment. Severely wounded in the fighting, Johnston survived long enough to crawl on his hands and knees to an aid station. He would spend the next nine months in French hospitals recuperating from his wounds. Leroy Johnston, bearing the physical and mental scars of war, returned home to Phillips County, Arkansas on August 8, 1919.
On October 1, after spending the day hunting for squirrels, Johnston and his three older brothers boarded a train for home. When they arrived in Helena, a group of men boarded the train and confronted the Johnston brothers. What happened next is unclear—one version of events has the posse forcing the bothers off the train at gunpoint to a waiting automobile; another report indicated that Louie Johnston grabbed a gun from one of the assailants and killed him. Regardless, minutes after being dragged from the train, Leroy Johnston and his three brothers were shot to pieces, their ravaged bodies left on the side of the road.
I buried important detail from this story.
Leroy Johnston was black.
The 369th Infantry Regiment, originally known as the 15th New York National Guard, was an all-black unit nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters. The nickname “Hell Fighters” was given to them by the Germans due to their toughness, along with the fact that they never lost a man through capture, lost a trench, or gave up even one foot of ground to the enemy.
Moreover, upon their arrival in France in January 1918, the soldiers of the 369th Infantry were assigned labor services such as unloading ships and digging latrines because many white soldiers refused to go in combat with black soldiers. Finally, on April 8, the US Army decided to assign the unit to the French Army for the duration of the war. The men were issued French weapons, helmets, and brown leather belts and pouches, although they continued to wear their green U.S. uniforms. The French didn’t care about their skin color; they cared whether they wanted to fight.
By the end of the war, 171 members of the 369th were awarded the Legion of Honor or the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honor. One of those was Leroy Johnston.
The American experience is rarely simple, and often not pretty.
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