Biography
Private First Class James Johnson Jr. was an African-American U.S. Army soldier stationed at Fort Hood, Texas in 1966. On June 30, 1966 he, with fellow soldiers Dennis Mora and David Samas, became the first U.S. service members to publicly refuse orders to deploy to Vietnam — a refusal they announced at a press conference in New York organized with the help of attorneys Stanley Faulkner and David Rein and read by Mora. They denounced the war as immoral, illegal and unjust. They filed a federal suit against Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to prevent their deployment, lost in the Second Circuit, and were court-martialed for insubordination at Fort Dix, New Jersey in late September 1966. He was sentenced to five years at hard labor; in July 1967 his sentence was reduced to three years on review. He was released in 1968.
The custody dates, corrected from contemporary sources: all three of the Fort Hood Three were arrested and confined by military authorities in New York on July 7, 1966 — not late September, which was merely when the early-September courts-martial were behind them — and remained confined through trial and imprisonment. The Militant, in a report datelined October 16, 1968, gave his release as set for October 23, 1968, and the NYU Daily Worker photographic archive records him appearing with Dennis Mora at a Fort Hood Three press conference on October 28 — two years, three months, and sixteen days after his confinement began.
