## The Winston-Salem Origins
Henry Johnson was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The city is in Forsyth County, in the Piedmont region of the state, and was in 1892 or 1897 — by either birth year — a city shaped by the specific dynamics of the post-Reconstruction South.
Winston-Salem was the product of the merger of two towns — Winston, a manufacturing center that grew up around the tobacco industry, and Salem, a Moravian settlement that dated to the colonial period. The tobacco industry and its associated manufacturing were the economic foundations of the city, and they provided employment for both white and Black workers in a segregated system that assigned different roles and different compensation to each.
Johnson’s family left Winston-Salem and moved to Albany when he was a child or teenager, by the accounts. The specific reasons for the move are not documented in the sources consulted. The migration of Black families from the South to Northern cities was a common pattern in the early twentieth century, driven by the specific economic and social conditions of the Jim Crow South and the specific opportunities — limited, but greater than the South offered — of Northern cities.
Albany, New York, was not Harlem. It was not Chicago’s South Side. It was a mid-sized state capital with a Black community of a few thousand people, concentrated in specific neighborhoods, working in specific jobs — service work, railroad work, domestic work — that were the available positions in the early twentieth century. The redcap job at Union Station was Johnson’s specific place in this specific geography.