Family learns hero wasn't kin
ALBANY, N.Y. — Two days before President Barack Obama announced a posthumous Medal of Honor for black World War I soldier Henry Johnson, a family got staggering news about the legacy of heroism that had inspired them for generations and through three wars. They weren’t related to Johnson by blood after all.
An Army general visited Tara Johnson last month with word that Henry Johnson was not her grandfather, and that her father, World War II Tuskegee airman Herman Johnson, was not the hero’s son.
“Dad’s birth certificate didn’t have Henry on it,” she told The Associated Press. The name of the man listed on the document found by Pentagon researchers vetting Johnson’s lineage was one relatives had never heard mentioned as the father.
“All we have ever known is Henry Lincoln Johnson,” she said. “My family is going through an identity crisis; this shocked our foundation.”
She said they’re at a loss to explain what had been a given for so long. Her father spoke warmly of Henry Johnson, recalling his sense of humor and trips to the park as a boy before the life of the man he knew as his father began to fall apart and the family broke up.
Henry Johnson was a railroad porter in Albany before the war. He enlisted in the Army and won acclaim for rescuing a comrade despite suffering grenade and gunshot wounds in a ferocious hand-to-hand battle with German raiders in 1918. Returning from France, he was honored with parades.
