The Army’s willingness to conduct and act on the Shaw University study was an institutional acknowledgment that the problem existed. The subsequent extension of similar reviews to First World War records was a continuation of that acknowledgment. The specific awards — the 1997 World War II Medal of Honor ceremonies, the 2002 Distinguished Service Cross for Johnson, the 2015 Medal of Honor — are the concrete products of the reckoning.
What the reckoning cannot do is restore to the men themselves what they were owed. Henry Johnson died in 1929. The Medal of Honor he should have received in 1919 was given in 2015, to a room containing his family’s representatives but not him. The disability compensation he should have received in 1919 was never given. The recognition that might have changed the conditions of his post-war life came too late to change anything about his post-war life.
The reckoning is for the record, for history, and for the soldiers and veterans of the present and future who carry the same institution’s identity. It is not, and cannot be, for the man.
## The Fort Polk Renaming in Context
The renaming of Fort Polk, Louisiana, as Fort Johnson in June 2023 was part of a broader process of removing Confederate names from Army installations.
Fort Polk had been named for Leonidas Polk, an Episcopal bishop who resigned his position to serve as a Confederate general in the Civil War. Polk was not a distinguished military figure — his performance as a general was widely criticized, and he was killed in 1864 by Union artillery. The naming of a U.S. Army base for a Confederate officer who had fought against the United States Army was a specific anomaly that the Naming Commission was established to address.