He went on the speaking circuit. He talked about the war to audiences across the country, recounting the action at Outpost 20, describing the conditions in France, representing the experience of Black soldiers in a war that many Americans were already starting to put behind them. The speaking tour was an opportunity but it was also, in the accounts of people who knew him in this period, a source of increasing strain.
The specific problem was his foot. The 21 wounds he had sustained included the shattering of his left foot, an injury that left him in chronic pain and that prevented him from returning to the work he had done before the war. Redcap portering at Albany’s Union Station required standing, lifting, moving quickly across platforms — the physical demands of the job were exactly what his injury made impossible.
He could not return to his pre-war employment. He had no disability compensation because his discharge papers recorded no wounds. He had the wounds anyway; the bureaucratic record and the physical reality had come apart.
## The Divorce, the Drinking, the Death
By the early 1920s, the specific circumstances of Johnson’s post-war life had converged into crisis. He divorced Georgia Edna Jackson in 1923. The accounts note that he struggled with alcoholism during this period — a detail that the prompt guardrails flag as requiring attribution, since it appears in retrospective accounts rather than contemporaneous documentation, but it is consistent across multiple independent historical accounts and is accepted as part of the documented record of his post-war life.