2015: Medal of Honor, presented by President Obama on June 2. Ninety-seven years after the action.
2023: Fort Johnson. The installation in Louisiana named for him.
Each step in this sequence required specific work by specific people. None of it happened automatically. The Purple Heart required research to establish the wound documentation that the discharge papers had omitted. The Arlington confirmation required archival work. The Distinguished Service Cross required the Pershing communiqué. The Medal of Honor required the entire accumulated record plus Congressional pressure plus Army review plus a Presidential waiver of time limits.
The 97 years is not a measure of forgetting. It is a measure of how much sustained effort it takes to correct a systematic wrong within an institution that is resistant to acknowledgment of its own failures.
## The Albany Union Station
The specific job that Johnson held before the war — redcap porter at Albany’s Union Station — is worth describing in its own right, because it places him in a specific economic and social context that is part of his story.
Albany’s Union Station was opened in 1900, designed by the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge in the Beaux-Arts style that was then fashionable for major railroad terminals. It served the Delaware and Hudson Railway and the New York Central, handling passenger traffic between Albany and New York City and between Albany and points north and west. The station was a substantial building by the standards of a mid-sized upstate New York city, reflecting Albany’s role as the state capital and a regional rail hub.