The Army awarded Johnson the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously in 2002 — 83 years after his discharge.
The specific development that enabled the 2002 award was the discovery of a previously unknown communiqué from General John Pershing that commended Johnson’s performance. Pershing, who had been the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces and whose racial policies had determined that the 369th would fight under French rather than American command, had nonetheless documented Johnson’s valor in a document that was not discovered until researchers examined the records in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The irony of the Pershing document is specific: the general whose segregation policy had placed Johnson in a French rather than American context — had, in that context, formally acknowledged that Johnson had performed extraordinary service. The acknowledgment existed in the record. It had not been used to generate the award that it should have generated.
The Distinguished Service Cross award in 2002 was an important step, but historians and veterans advocates who had been researching Johnson’s record concluded that the action he had performed met the standard for the Medal of Honor — that the highest valor decoration should have been awarded to him in 1918 or 1919, that it had not been, and that the posthumous correction should go all the way.
## The Medal of Honor Campaign
The campaign for a posthumous Medal of Honor for Henry Johnson lasted years and involved multiple actors: historians, veterans advocates, New York state politicians, and members of Congress.
Senator Charles Schumer of New York was among the most prominent political advocates. The campaign required navigating the specific bureaucratic requirements for a Medal of Honor award: the standard requires a recommendation from the military chain of command, review by multiple levels of the military hierarchy, approval by the Secretary of the Army, and presentation by the President. For a posthumous award more than 90 years after the action, it also required a specific waiver of the time limits that normally apply to the award process.