The Naming Commission, created by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, identified nine installations named for Confederate officers and recommended new names for all of them. Fort Polk was among them, and the Commission recommended renaming it after Henry Johnson.
The choice of Johnson as the namesake was specific: a Black soldier from the First World War, whose service had been extraordinary and whose recognition had been systematically delayed by the same racial system that had produced Confederate monuments and Confederate-named Army bases. Renaming Fort Polk as Fort Johnson was not simply replacing one name with another; it was replacing a name associated with the Confederacy and with the racial order it defended with a name associated with the service and sacrifice of a Black soldier.
The renaming was contested politically — the same debates about Confederate monuments that had been ongoing since the Charleston church shooting of 2015 applied to base names — but was eventually completed, and Fort Johnson, Louisiana, became the name of an installation covering approximately 198,000 acres in Vernon and Sabine parishes.
## The Persistence of the Story
Henry Johnson has been the subject of a range of commemorative and educational efforts since the Medal of Honor ceremony in 2015. The Albany monument predates the ceremony; subsequent efforts have included educational materials, documentary films, and the specific publicity around the Fort Johnson renaming in 2023.
The story persists because it contains the elements that make historical stories durable: a specific dramatic action, a specific person at its center, a specific institutional failure to acknowledge it, and a specific eventual correction. The 97-year gap gives the story a structure that is easy to grasp and hard to forget.