## The Interwar Period: What Was Lost
The interwar period — the 1920s and 1930s — was not a period in which Henry Johnson’s story was entirely forgotten, but it was a period in which the specific institutional follow-through that his service warranted did not happen.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s produced an enormous amount of literary, artistic, and intellectual work. The 369th’s story was part of the material that writers and historians of the period worked with. The regiment’s experience — fighting under French command because the American Army would not integrate them, earning the highest French combat honors, marching up Fifth Avenue — was a compelling story for the cultural moment of the 1920s, which was concerned precisely with the relationship between Black Americans and the country that had used their labor and their service without fully acknowledging their citizenship.
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were not primarily military historians, but the military experience of the First World War was part of the larger context their work inhabited. The specific disillusionment with American racial promises that is a thread in the literature of the period had the experiences of veterans like Johnson as one of its sources.
Johnson himself was not part of the cultural production of the 1920s. He was declining through the decade while Harlem was flourishing. The arc of his life and the arc of the Harlem Renaissance moved in opposite directions during the same years.
## The Army’s Reckoning
The process of correcting the Army’s historical decoration record for Black soldiers is not complete. It has been underway since the 1990s, it has produced specific corrections in specific cases, and it has been accompanied by institutional acknowledgments that the patterns of under-decoration were the product of racial discrimination.