The critical evidentiary development was the Pershing communiqué — the document that showed the commander of the AEF had formally recognized Johnson’s valor. Combined with the existing French documentation, the eyewitness accounts that had been preserved in historical records, and the extensive research into the specific details of the action, the Pershing document gave the Army’s review process the evidentiary foundation it needed.
The campaign also drew on the broader historical context of the Army’s systematic under-decoration of Black soldiers in the First and Second World Wars. Studies had demonstrated that Black soldiers from both world wars had received fewer high decorations than their actions warranted, and that the disparity was not a function of the quality of their service. The Army had commissioned studies on this question, most prominently a 1993 study by Shaw University that examined Black Second World War veterans and found that none had received the Medal of Honor despite documented valor that should have qualified many of them. That study led to the posthumous Medal of Honor awards to seven Black Second World War veterans in 1997.
The pattern was clear and documented. The campaign for Johnson’s Medal of Honor was part of the larger effort to correct it.
## June 2, 2015: The White House Ceremony
On June 2, 2015, President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Honor posthumously to Henry Johnson at a White House ceremony.
The ceremony honored two World War I soldiers simultaneously: Johnson and William Shemin, a Jewish American soldier who had also been passed over for the Medal of Honor despite documented valor. The dual presentation was itself a statement about the patterns of exclusion that the Army’s decoration practices had embodied: Black soldiers and Jewish soldiers, both passed over in the early twentieth century, being recognized together in the twenty-first.