For Johnson and the 369th, the French attachment meant they were fighting in a system that recognized their performance. For the 92nd’s soldiers under American command, the system was less forthcoming. Both experiences were products of the same fundamental structure: Black soldiers serving in a country that did not recognize them as full citizens, in a military that reflected that non-recognition in every aspect of its organization.
## The World Johnson Returned To
The America that Henry Johnson returned to in February 1919 was not the same as the one he had left in 1917. It was specifically worse in some ways.
The Red Summer of 1919 — the name historians gave to the wave of racial violence that swept through American cities in the summer and fall of 1919, beginning in May — was the immediate domestic context into which the soldiers of the 369th returned. White mobs attacked Black communities in dozens of American cities. Black veterans, some still in uniform, were attacked and in some cases lynched. The specific anger of white rioters was often directed at Black men who had served in the military — the same service that some Black leaders had hoped would demonstrate citizenship and earn civil rights was, in the immediate aftermath of the war, a provocation to white violence.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in the NAACP’s journal *The Crisis*, wrote one of the most cited editorials of the period in May 1919, titled “Returning Soldiers.” He wrote that returning Black soldiers would not be silent: they had seen democracy in France and they intended to have it in America. The editorial articulated the specific political consciousness of Black veterans who had served in France and were returning to a country that was making clear it was not going to extend the promise of democracy to them without a fight.