The gap between what duty required and what Johnson actually did is what the citation addresses. The Army’s formal language in 2015 acknowledged what the French Army had acknowledged in 1918: that the standard of performance on that night was exceptional by any measure.
## The Demographic Reality of the 369th
The 369th Infantry, while known as the Harlem Hellfighters, drew its soldiers from a broader geography than the nickname suggests.
New York City contributed the largest share — Harlem and other Black neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx — but the regiment also drew from communities across upstate New York, from Albany (where Johnson and others enlisted), from smaller cities and rural areas. The specific composition reflected the geography of Black New York in 1917: concentrated in New York City, with significant communities in Albany, Buffalo, and other upstate centers.
The men who marched up Fifth Avenue in 1919 were therefore not all Harlemites. They were New Yorkers in a broader sense, from communities that ranged from the urban density of Harlem to the specific working-class context of Albany’s train station.
The regiment’s command under Colonel Hayward was predominantly white at the senior level, Black at the company level in several instances. The officer corps of the regiment included Black officers who had trained at Des Moines, men like Charles D. Fillmore Jr. and others who represented the generation of Black officers that the First World War produced.
The demographic range of the regiment is relevant to Johnson’s story because it places him in a community — not just an institution. The men around him at Camp Wadsworth and in France included people from his city, Albany; from his broader New York world; and from the specific network of Black New Yorkers who had decided to serve in 1917.