Redcap work was steady and physically demanding. Johnson was not a large man — the accounts describe him as five feet four inches tall, weighing approximately 130 pounds. The job required patience, agility, and the specific social skill of managing passengers who saw the porter as an invisible function rather than a person. Albany in the early twentieth century was a city where the economic and social positions available to a Black man from North Carolina were circumscribed in specific ways; redcap work at a train station was one of the respectable and sustainable positions within those constraints.
He married Georgia Edna Jackson of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in September 1917. By that point he had already enlisted. The marriage placed him at a specific biographical moment: a young man, recently married, working a service job in a northern city, who had decided to volunteer for a war that many Americans were still debating whether to enter.
## The 15th New York and the Question of Race
The United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Johnson enlisted on June 5, 1917, in Company C of the Fifteenth New York Infantry — the 15th New York (Colored) Infantry, as it was formally designated, a National Guard unit organized before the war that had been recruiting and training in New York City and upstate New York.
The 15th New York was one of only a handful of Black military units that existed in the American military structure at the time of the declaration of war. The structure was the product of the specific history of racial segregation in the American military: since the Civil War, the Army had maintained segregated units, with Black soldiers assigned to their own regiments under predominantly white officers. The 15th New York was a National Guard unit, which meant it was organized and controlled by the state of New York rather than by the federal Army, but it was subject to federal call-up in time of war.