Their motives included adventure, patriotism and pride. Some were porters, doormen, or elevator operators, some teachers, night watchmen or mailmen.
Others came from Brooklyn, towns up the Hudson River, and New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The majority of the enlistees actually came from Harlem, which was home to 50,000 of Manhattan’s 60,000 African-Americans in the 1910s. prepared for possible entry into World War I. After years of lobbying by civic leaders from Harlem, Manhattan’s celebrated black neighborhood, Governor Charles Whitman finally formed the all-black unit, first known as the 15th New York National Guard Regiment, in 1916, as the U.S. They were mostly New Yorkers, the first black troops in their state’s National Guard. (Their nickname’s origin is unclear: it was possibly coined by enemy soldiers, the American press, or both.) Like their predecessors in the Civil War and successors in the wars that followed, these African-American troops fought a war for a country that refused them basic rights – and their bravery stood as a rebuke to racism, a moral claim to first-class citizenship. The Hellfighters, the most celebrated African-American regiment in World War I, confronted racism even as they trained for war, helped bring jazz to France, then battled Germany longer than almost any other American doughboys. Days later, Johnson and Roberts became the first Americans to receive the French Croix de Guerre – the first of many honors awarded to the 369th Infantry Regiment, better known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Army captain estimated that Johnson had killed four of at least 24 German soldiers. Reviewing the carnage the next day, a U.S. Another German shot Johnson in the shoulder and thigh Johnson lunged with his knife and slashed him down. Two enemy soldiers tried to haul Roberts away, until Johnson drove his nine-inch knife into one of their skulls. Johnson shot one German in the chest, point-blank, then swung his rifle to club another. The German forces rushed into the Americans’ dugout. Roberts, bleeding from his head, threw grenades of his own back over the parapet. The grenades exploded behind him, and pain struck his left leg and side. Johnson fired an illumination rocket into the sky, then ducked as German grenades flew toward him. They heard it again: the snip of barbed wire being cut. He heard a sound and turned to his partner in their tiny observation post, Needham Roberts, who gestured toward the direction of the noise. Under French command, he manned the front line of the Great War about 115 miles east of Paris on the early morning of May 15, 1918. Johnson was a 25-year-old railroad baggage porter, the son of North Carolina tobacco farmers. Beyond the parapet, he could make out shapes and shadows under the waning moon. Private Henry Johnson of Albany, New York, held tight his French Lebel rifle and stared into the darkness of no-man’s-land, listening for German raiders.
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