Black veterans in uniform were sometimes specifically targeted, the uniform being read as an assertion of citizenship and military service that the racial order could not tolerate. The specific dynamic was noted by Du Bois and other observers of the period: the country had asked Black men to serve in its military, and when they returned having served with distinction, the same country’s white citizens attacked them in the streets.
Johnson returned in February 1919, before the worst of the Red Summer violence. His decline through the 1920s occurred against this backdrop. The Albany context was different from Chicago’s South Side or Washington’s Black neighborhoods — less populated, less the site of the specific urban racial violence of 1919 — but it was the same country.
## The Specific Significance of the Argonne
The Argonne Forest had a larger significance in the fall of 1918 that places Johnson’s earlier service there in context.
The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918, was the largest American military operation in history. More than 1.2 million American soldiers participated. The offensive lasted 47 days, until the armistice on November 11, 1918. The American sector was specifically the Argonne Forest and the Meuse River valley — the terrain that the 369th had been fighting in since the spring.
The American soldiers who fought the Meuse-Argonne were fighting, in many cases, through terrain that the 369th had already defended. The specific outpost where Johnson and Roberts had their stand in May 1918 was in the same forest that the American Expeditionary Forces’ largest operation would later move through.