The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration the United States government can award. It requires that a recipient distinguish themselves by acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty, at risk of their own life, in action against an enemy of the United States. As of January 2025, ninety-seven Medals of Honor have been awarded to ninety-six Black recipients across every major American conflict from the Civil War to the present. The number is both a record of extraordinary courage and a documented indictment — because the gap between what Black service members did and when, if ever, they were recognized for it is one of the most consistent and damning patterns in American military history. Black soldiers fought in every American war. They were denied the Medal of Honor in proportion to their service for over a century. When the record was finally reviewed, the reviews confirmed what the absence of awards had already suggested: racial discrimination, systematic and documented, had determined who received the nation’s highest honor.
The first Black person to perform an action that would earn the Medal of Honor was Sergeant William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, who carried the regiment’s flag across five hundred yards of open beach at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863, and held it aloft despite being shot multiple times. He received his Medal of Honor in 1900 — thirty-seven years after the action. Andrew Jackson Smith, also of the 54th Massachusetts, performed his qualifying action in 1864 and did not receive his Medal of Honor until 2001 — one hundred and thirty-seven years later, the second longest delay in the history of the award. In both cases the delay was not bureaucratic accident. It was the product of a military and political environment in which Black military service was officially recognized as necessary but was not accorded the same institutional respect as white service.
In World War I, Corporal Freddie Stowers of the 371st Infantry led an assault on German trenches in France on September 28, 1918, continuing to advance and encourage his men after being wounded twice, dying of his wounds after the attack. His company commander submitted a recommendation for the Medal of Honor shortly after his death. The recommendation was never processed. It sat in Army files for seventy-three years. In 1991, the Department of the Army conducted a review, found the recommendation, and approved the award. Stowers received his Medal of Honor posthumously on April 24, 1991 — seventy-three years after he died earning it. Sergeant Henry Johnson, who single-handedly fought off a German raiding party in the Argonne Forest in 1918, killing or wounding approximately a dozen enemy soldiers while severely wounded himself, received the French Croix de Guerre. He received no American medal. His Medal of Honor was presented on June 2, 2015 — eighty-five years after his death.
No Black soldier received the Medal of Honor during World War II. This was not because Black soldiers failed to perform acts of valor. The 92nd Infantry Division fought in Italy. The 761st Tank Battalion, the first Black armored unit to see combat, fought across France, Belgium, and Germany for 183 consecutive days. The Tuskegee Airmen flew over 15,000 sorties. In 1993, the United States Army commissioned an independent study — conducted by Shaw University, the oldest HBCU in the South — to examine whether racial discrimination had affected Medal of Honor awards in WWII. After four years of research, the study concluded that ten Black soldiers deserved the Medal of Honor for their WWII service. On January 13, 1997, President Clinton awarded the Medal to seven of these men. Only one — First Lieutenant Vernon Baker, who had destroyed multiple enemy positions and killed numerous German soldiers near Castle Aghinolfi, Italy, in April 1945 — was still alive to receive it. The other six had spent decades or died without the recognition their country owed them.
The pattern of delayed or denied recognition is not only a historical injustice. It has direct consequences for how Black Americans understand their relationship to military service and to the institutions that govern their lives. A 2016 study found that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study’s 1972 exposure was directly correlated with increased medical mistrust and decreased physician interaction among older Black men — a measurable legacy of institutional betrayal. The pattern of Medal of Honor denial operates similarly: it documents, across 160 years of evidence, that the United States military required Black valor and then systematically failed to acknowledge it through the same institutional processes applied to white valor. That pattern does not exist in isolation. It exists alongside the segregated barracks, the white-only officer clubs, the denial of GI Bill benefits to Black veterans, and the mass incarceration system that disproportionately imprisons the descendants of men who carried the American flag at Fort Wagner. The Medal of Honor record is a mirror. What it reflects is the Two Americas.