The mettle of the Harlem Hellfighters made U.S. military history. Heroically, the black unit fought for their country in the Great War – shamefully, they also fought racism from their own countrymen.
May 1918 and World War I was raging across Western Europe. U.S. Army privates Henry Johnson, 21, and Needham Roberts, 17, were on night-time sentry duty in the Forest of Argonne, Northern France, when they came under heavy enemy attack. At least a dozen German soldiers, and possibly as many as twice that number, opened fire. However, the pair were members of the Harlem Hellfighters and mounted a heroic counteroffensive. Eventually, Roberts lay seriously injured and a grievously wounded Johnson found himself out of ammunition. Nonetheless, the private drew his bolo knife and continued to fight. He could have been forgiven for asking how he – an African-American from New York City – had found himself in rural France fighting Germans.