The connection between the original 369th of 1917-1919 and the current unit is institutional and ceremonial rather than personnel — no one who fought in France is still alive — but it maintains a form of continuity that is specific to military organizations: the same unit designation, the same lineage, the same honors on the unit’s campaign streamers.
The renaming of Fort Polk as Fort Johnson in 2023 added a geographical marker to this institutional continuity: a base named for a man who had served in the regiment that continues to exist.
## What the Medal Meant in 2015
The Medal of Honor ceremony on June 2, 2015, took place in a specific American political context. The ceremony was 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, 97 years after the action it recognized. The country that presented the medal in 2015 was not the country of 1918, and the distance between those two moments was part of what the ceremony acknowledged.
President Obama was the first Black American to present a Medal of Honor — the award had been given to generations of soldiers by presidents in a line that had never included a Black man. The specific coincidence of the first Black president presenting a Medal of Honor to a Black soldier whose award was 97 years overdue was not lost on the people in the room or on the people who watched the ceremony.
Command Sergeant Major Louis Wilson, who accepted the medal on Johnson’s behalf, represented the New York National Guard that traced its lineage to the 15th New York Infantry in which Johnson had enlisted in 1917. The specific institutional continuity — the same unit, different century, one of its soldiers finally receiving the recognition he had earned — gave the ceremony a specificity beyond the symbolic.