What the regiment did, consistently, was demonstrate that it could do what was required of it, and more. The 191 days of front-line combat was not what a regiment of soldiers who could not serve was supposed to accomplish. The Croix de Guerre given to the entire regiment was not an award for soldiers who did not meet the standard. The specific actions of men like Johnson and Roberts at Outpost 20 were not the actions of soldiers who lacked the capacity for extraordinary performance.
The gap between what the country said Black soldiers could do and what Black soldiers actually did is the central dynamic of the 369th’s history, and of Henry Johnson’s story within it.
## The Red Summer and the Veterans
The Red Summer of 1919 did not directly affect Henry Johnson in documented ways, but it was the context in which he and every other Black veteran of the First World War returned to civilian life.
The term “Red Summer” was coined by James Weldon Johnson, then executive secretary of the NAACP, to describe the wave of racial violence that swept through American cities from May to October 1919. At least 25 cities experienced race riots, defined in the usage of the period as mob attacks on Black communities by white mobs. In Chicago, in Washington, D.C., in Knoxville, in Omaha, in Elaine, Arkansas — Black Americans were killed, their neighborhoods burned, their property destroyed.
What made 1919 specifically explosive was the combination of several factors: the return of Black veterans who had served in France and who were less willing to accept the pre-war racial order; the economic competition between Black and white workers in Northern cities that the wartime migration had intensified; and the specific anger of white communities that experienced Black assertion of rights and dignity as a threat to the social order.