Johnson’s return was part of this larger moment. The Fifth Avenue parade in February 1919 was a celebration; the country it led into was hostile in specific and documented ways. The transition from the parade to the conditions of the following years was not simply a matter of personal decline; it was an individual experience of a collective political reality.
## The Harlem Context
The 369th Infantry has been associated with Harlem since its formation, but the specific geography is more complex. The regiment recruited from across New York — from Harlem, from Brooklyn, from Albany, from smaller upstate communities. Johnson himself was from Albany, not Harlem.
Harlem in the late 1910s was undergoing one of the most significant demographic and cultural transformations in American urban history. The Great Migration — the movement of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that accelerated during and after the First World War — was reshaping New York’s neighborhoods. Harlem, which had been a predominantly white neighborhood until the early 1900s, had become by 1919 the largest Black urban community in the United States.
The cultural production associated with the Harlem Renaissance — the literature, the music, the visual art, the political thought — was just beginning to emerge in this period. The 369th’s parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem was an early event in a decade of extraordinary cultural activity. James Reese Europe’s murder in May 1919 removed one of the central figures from that emerging scene; Noble Sissle’s work in musical theater with Eubie Blake through the 1920s was one of the continuing threads.