Johnson’s story is part of this larger story. He was not unusual in his unit for performing under impossible circumstances. He was unusual in the specific extremity of what he faced at Outpost 20 on the night of May 15, 1918.
## The 97 Years: What the Gap Represents
The gap between Johnson’s action on May 15, 1918, and the Medal of Honor ceremony on June 2, 2015, was 97 years. The prompt headline specifies this number, and it is accurate: 97 years between the action and the award.
The 97 years is not primarily a story about bureaucratic failure. It is a story about what the American government in 1918 and 1919 was willing to officially acknowledge about the service of Black soldiers, and how long it took for that acknowledgment to be corrected.
The Purple Heart in 1996 was 77 years late. The Distinguished Service Cross in 2002 was 83 years late. The Medal of Honor in 2015 was 97 years late. Each step in the correction required specific work by specific people — historians, advocates, politicians, Army officials — who took the documented record and pushed the institutional machinery forward through each stage of a long process.
The cumulative picture is of a country that used Black soldiers — that depended on their service, used their images for recruiting and bond sales, marched them up Fifth Avenue in victory parades — and then failed in systematic and specific ways to honor the obligations that military service creates.
Johnson was not the only Black soldier whose awards were inadequate to his actions. The 1993 Shaw University study found the same pattern for Black soldiers of the Second World War. The subsequent reviews of World War I records found the same pattern. The specific harm to Johnson — the discharge papers without documentation, the life of disability without compensation, the death in poverty — was an instance of a system-wide failure rather than an individual oversight.