On the night of May 13, 1918, Pvts. Henry Johnson and Neadom Roberts of the 369th Infantry, a unit that would come to be known as the Harlem Hell Fighters, were on watch in a five-man outpost in northeastern France. Johnson was in his 20s, a wiry little man only 5-foot-4, originally from North Carolina, in civilian life a Red Cap at the Albany railroad station. Roberts was 17 – a Trenton bellhop who had run off with the cash that was to have paid his father’s poll tax, and lied about his age when he enlisted. In the middle of the night they heard cutters at work on their wire – a German raiding party out to capture prisoners for interrogation. Johnson fired an alarm flare. The raiders lobbed grenades into their position, Roberts and Johnson were wounded by the explosions and the three men off-watch were trapped in their dugout. Johnson saw heads pop up over the parapet of his trench, and he banged away with his rifle, hitting two. The Germans fired down at them and threw more grenades. Roberts went down with shrapnel wounds, and German gunfire homed on Johnson. Shots grazed his head, bit his lip, hurt his hand, smashed his left foot. But he was going on adrenalin, temporarily immune to pain. His rifle jammed, and suddenly there were German soldiers in the trench, grappling with him, trying to take him prisoner. “There was nothing to do but use my rifle as a club and jump into them. I banged them on the dome and the side and everywhere I could land until the butt of my rifle busted. They knocked me around considerable and whanged me on the head, but I always managed to get back on my feet.” He beat two Germans to the ground, then an officer with a luger rushed him and Johnson swung his rifle like a baseball bat and clubbed the man down.
Freed of attackers, Johnson turned and saw a pair of Germans trying to drag Roberts off. Johnson dropped his rifle and drew his bolo knife -- a heavy double-edged weapon some 9 inches long -- and struck one of the Germans with such force that the bolo was driven through the top of the man’s skull. The second German fled. But the officer with the luger had roused himself, and shot Johnson twice in the body. Johnson dropped to his knees with a cry, and when the officer came close to finish him off, sprang to his feet and rammed the bolo into the officer’s body. By now the surviving raiders were scrambling back through the gap in the American wire. Johnson heaved a few grenades to chase them along. The relief came up at daylight to find Johnson and Roberts seriously wounded, and rescue the men trapped in the dugout. They counted five German corpses (one an officer) and tracked the retreat by following the blood tracks left when the Germans dragged off their wounded and dead. The commander of their regiment later wrote Mrs. Johnson that the two soldiers had probably inflicted as many as a dozen casualties.
On June 2, 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Medal of Honor. The award was the culmination of a long campaign to do justice to the memory of a soldier whose heroism had gone unrecognized in his own country, largely because of the Army’s deliberate policy of racial defamation and discrimination that stole honor from the dead and inflicted shame where it should have rewarded valor.
To do justice to Johnson’s memory, we need to understand not only the details of his heroism in combat, but also the context of that heroism. Henry Johnson was a hero of two wars.
In May 1918 Henry Johnson became the first American soldier to win the French Croix de Guerre, a combat decoration for heroism in action. For a time he was the only American infantry soldier known by name in the national press, the first identified hero of the war that was supposed to “make the world safe for democracy.” He was also, for a while, perhaps the most famous black man in America, hailed on both sides of the color line as a race-hero – a role whose stress would contribute to the postwar breakdown of his mental health. Thus he was also the hero of a war within The War – the long, dark and increasingly bloody struggle against the system of racial oppression and humiliation known as “Jim Crow.” In 1917 and 1918 that struggle centered on the question of whether black Americans would be allowed to serve their country as combat soldiers, and the event the papers called “The Battle of Henry Johnson” was a powerful argument in favor. But after the war there would be a strong and violent racial reaction against the wartime gains made by African-Americans. In 1925 the Army would declare that black Americans, as a race, were generally unfit for combat service. The memory of Johnson’s heroism would be buried, along with the record of effective combat by the two divisions of black infantrymen (92nd and 93rd) who served in France. To honor Henry Johnson, we need to recall the whole story of his service, and recognize how every aspect of that story – his enlistment in the Army, the conditions in which he fought, his courage in action, the public acclaim that made him a political symbol and exposed him to ruin – was shaped by his country’s obsession with “the race problem.”
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According to President Woodrow Wilson, the purpose of American intervention in the Great War then raging in Europe was to “make the world safe for Democracy.” Yet the nation Wilson led had failed to resolve the most basic questions of its own organization: Who qualifies for national citizenship, and what rights must be guaranteed to all who do?
For 40 years white Americans in the South had systematically deprived black Americans of the civil rights they had won during Reconstruction, creating the system of segregation, subjugation and lynch-law known as Jim Crow – a movement tolerated, when not actually approved, by Northern whites. Although Jim Crow was a unique form of oppression, the ideas and beliefs that justified the racial exclusion of blacks were applicable to other racial and ethnic minorities. Legal and customary discrimination restricted the citizenship rights of Mexican-Americans and Asian immigrants. Since 1881, millions of new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe had entered the country, people whose language, religion and ways of life seemed repellently alien to white Americans of predominantly British and German origins. In the vocabulary of American culture, such differences could only be interpreted by reference to color-based racialism: The new immigrants were seen as being in some way more like Negroes, Indians or Asians than like “real” white people. In the mid-1890s a powerful anti-immigrant movement began, led by the Immigration Restriction League. One of its founders, President Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, stated its core doctrine: A nation can only thrive, and enjoy freedom with safety, if its people descend from “a single race, with substantially the same social and political instincts, the same standards of conduct and morals, the same industrial capability.” It followed that “Indians, Negroes, Chinese, Jews and Americans cannot all be free in the same society.”
But the war transformed the debate over race and citizenship. It was simply impossible to raise an army of millions without the active cooperation of minority communities. African-Americans and other non-Whites comprised 15-20 percent of the population. Roughly a third of the white population was either foreign-born, or had a foreign-born parent. If these groups were excluded from full citizenship, why should they be willing to serve the nation in war? Almost overnight, the nation’s leadership rediscovered the traditions of egalitarian liberalism out of fashion for a generation. Instead of insisting that race defined nationality, a vast outpouring of official government publications, training manuals and public propaganda now described the United States as a “vast, polyglot community” in which “common ideals have transformed men and women of all these races, and kindreds, and tongues, into ONE nation.” American patriotism was said to appeal to a law “higher than race loyalty, transcend[ing] mere ethnic prejudices, more binding than the call of a common ancestry . . . [an ideal] to which every citizen, of whatever race, may rally.” That invitation was explicitly extended across the color line: “Black men, yellow men, white men, from all quarters of the globe, are fighting side by side to free the world from the Hun peril. / That’s the patriotism of equality!” The official ideologists of America’s Great War were offering the minorities a new social bargain: full recognition as Americans in exchange for loyal service in wartime. It was a bargain acceptable even to a militant advocate of equal rights like W.E.B. DuBois, who urged blacks to enlist in the Army with the slogan “First your Country, then your Rights!”
The African-American community of Harlem was well-prepared to seize the bargain. Five years earlier the Equity Congress, a Harlem civic organization, had persuaded New York state to create a black regiment of the National Guard, the 15th New York. At the time the unit was chiefly desired as an acknowledgment of the community’s civil equality. The right to participate in the common defense by membership in the militia is a basic right of citizenship, and one that most states denied their black citizens. The presence of a National Guard unit in a local armory was also a guarantor of civil peace – especially precious to a black community in an age of recurrent racial violence. The sponsors wanted the officer cadre to be entirely African-American, as was the case in other states (notably Illinois) that had “Colored” Guard units. However, the state insisted that the colonel, lieutenant colonel and majors be white men; and in 1916 the community accepted this compromise after the prospective commander – socialite and politician William Hayward – promised to appoint blacks as company officers. The sponsors were also moved by the belief that with whites in command their regiment would have a better chance of being called up for combat duty in the war they knew was coming. They thus made their peace with a classic paradox of American racism: to gain an opportunity to prove their race’s theoretical equality, they had to accept the fact of racial subordination.
Circumstances ultimately led to the creation of a racially integrated officer cadre in the 15th New York, in which white lieutenants reported to African-American captains – a situation unprecedented in both the Army and the National Guard,. Among the regiment’s black officers were several men of note, including the lawyer and civil rights activist Napoleon Marshall and James R. Europe, the noted jazz pioneer and theatrical entrepreneur. Lt. Europe led the regimental band, which introduced American jazz to the Continent – but he also commanded the machine-gun company.
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At the heart of the idea of civil equality is the assumption that the individual is entitled, self-evidently and by nature, to dignity and respect. It is that presumption that compels his fellow citizens and his government to treat with respect his suits, petitions, appeals for justice. But slavery had created, and Jim Crow had perpetuated, the identification of citizen-dignity with racial “whiteness.” The principle was embedded in the American idiom. When a Midwestern draftee wanted to characterize the good treatment he and his buddies were receiving, he told an interviewer, “the people of Atlanta treat us white.” When Theodore Roosevelt wanted to express his contempt for Germany, he remarked that he had shaken hands with the German emperor before the war, “when [the Kaiser] was a white man.”
If whiteness implied the entitlement to dignity, blackness implied the opposite: a presumptive entitlement to disdain, ridicule and humiliation. W.E.B. DuBois had spoken of it in "Souls of Black Folk": “that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil.”
It was the declared mission of Col. Hayward and of the entire 15th New York to defeat the politics of ridicule by a military display of “intelligence, manliness, cooperation.” But the double-bind of racial politics made that goal extremely hard to achieve. Pride and the angry resentment of insult are marks of “manliness.” But blacks were expected to bear the insult of inferior status without open resentment. Black regular Army units that had broken that rule had been disgraced and barred from service overseas. The 15th New York was immediately put to the test by being sent to train in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a Jim Crow town whose mayor warned that if the soldiers expected to be treated “like white men” they might suffer “the most tragic consequences” – an open threat of lynching. If the men defended themselves against insult they could be charged with rioting, and barred from combat service. If they passively accepted abuse they might become too demoralized to fight effectively; and they would confirm the stereotype of Negroes as “serfs and sycophants,” and such (a Harlem newspaper noted) “do not win battles.”
Hayward asked for and got the troops’ consent to be patient in the face of provocation. But the mere existence of black officers enraged local whites, and caused “incidents.” The men defied Jim Crow simply by their manners, by the coolness with which they faced down insults; and when threatened with violence, they showed a willingness to retaliate. After only two weeks the War Department sent them back north to avoid further trouble. At Camp Mills on Long Island, they bivouacked next to an Alabama regiment who hurled insults and threatened violence. A white captain, Hamilton Fish, informed his Alabama counterpart that if his men approached the picket line, the 15th would not hesitate to shoot. Shortly thereafter the War Department put the regiment on a tramp steamer to France, so fast they not only failed to complete basic training, they had not yet been taken into federal service. The 15th New York was the only regiment to land in France flying its state flag. But eventually they were federalized as the 369th Infantry.
The regiment had to fight for the right to fight. At first they were relegated to unloading ships and loading trains in St. Nazaire along with black labor battalions. Assiduous politicking and cultivation of the press by the influential Col. Hayward and Capt. Hamilton Fish, grandson of Grant’s secretary of state and a prominent Republican politician, plus a spectacularly successful tour by Lt. Europe and the regimental jazz band, eventually got them out of St. Nazaire. A German offensive in March strained the depleted French army to the breaking point, and among the troops Pershing sent to aid them was the 369th Infantry. It was then the only African-American combat unit in France, and by turning it over to the French Pershing avoided the embarrassment of having to mingle black and white regiments in the same brigade. This set the pattern for the deployment of other black infantry units as they arrived: Three other regiments were detailed to the French, and four were organized in the all-black 92nd Division.
Col. Hayward’s men were sent for on-the-job training to a relatively quiet sector, and it was there that Henry Johnson fought his bloody little fight. Hayward and his second, Maj. Arthur Little, saw Johnson’s heroism as an opportunity to advance their larger cause, which was to convince the American Army and people that black soldiers were combat-worthy, and black people worthy of civil equality. In response to their report, the French army awarded Johnson and Roberts the Croix de Guerre with Gold Palm, the highest level of that award. But their application for an American medal was refused by Pershing’s headquarters, ostensibly because Johnson’s regiment was not serving with the American Army.
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After reporting the action to their French divisional HQ, Hayward and Little made contact with every American correspondent in range, and within a day or two had conducted several interviews and a press tour of the battleground. For once the regiment’s pariah status worked to their advantage: They were exempt from the censorship that forbade reporters to mention by name persons or units serving with the AEF. On May 21 the story, now called the “Battle of Henry Johnson,” hit the front pages of the New York papers. With the exception of William Randolph Hearst’s American – always hostile to black interests – every paper presented the story as vindication of the Negro race’s soldierly aptitudes. There were follow-up stories on Johnson’s family, on public celebrations held to honor him, and on the praises sent by famous Americans – Theodore Roosevelt prominent among them. Johnson became the first American soldier of the Great War known by name to the American public.
The African-American press was eager to read Johnson’s story as evidence of racial valor, and proof that they had kept their part of the social bargain. DuBois’ magazine, the Crisis, reprinted a letter from a black lieutenant in the 369th:
[N]ow is our opportunity to prove what we can do. If we can’t fight and die in this war just as bravely as white men, then we don’t deserve equality with white men ... But if we can do things at the front; if we can make ourselves felt; if we can make America really proud ... then it will be the biggest possible step toward our equalization as citizens. The whole [regiment] has the same spirit.
A black newspaper in Richmond likened the “Battle of Henry Johnson” to the Revelation of John as a vision of the world redeemed: “Old things passed away when Roberts and Johnson on the field of No Man’s Land shed their blood in the cause of Liberty . . . – and when they return this nation must understand that ‘old things have passed away.’” Thanks to Henry Johnson, national newspapers and magazines like the Outlook – an important Progressive journal with a religious focus – now came out strongly for passage of a federal anti-lynching statute, and condemned Southern mobs as implicitly pro-German: Black soldiers were fighting heroically, and “It is treason to the country to do anything that will take the heart out of these men.” That sentiment was echoed by a wide range of publications, including the conservative New York Times and the magazine Literary Digest – at the time a widely circulated publication and one of the leading advocates of American intervention and Theodore Roosevelt-style Progressivism.
Even some Southerners were impressed. The most notable convert was Irvin Cobb, a novelist well-known for his ridiculous Negro stereotypes, who was in France as a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post. After a tour of Henry Johnson’s battlefield, Cobb was moved to write:
I am of the opinion – and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all of the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices . . . that as a result of what our black soldiers are [doing] . . . a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness – but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart – is going to have a new meaning for us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will be merely another way of spelling the word American.
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Henry Johnson’s comrades would live up to the promise Cobb had seen in Johnson himself. The 369th built a public legend as the “Harlem Hell Fighters,” compiling a superb combat record and winning a unit citation of the Croix de Guerre for its role in the grand offensive of September 1918.
But on the larger issue of racial tolerance, Cobb was whistling Dixie. The black man remained the root figure of all American racialism. When government propagandists wanted to show just how horrible was the character of the German enemy, they resorted to the iconography of Jim Crow and its fantasies of racial rape. The most popular war poster of the period shows the German enemy as a giant gorilla – an image stereotypically associated with blacks -- in a spiked helmet, with glaring fangs, and a ravaged half-naked white woman draped over one arm. From the start of the war, Southern congressmen and Northern conservatives had opposed the training of black men as combat troops, on the grounds that the attitudes inculcated and the skills learned would lead to active resistance to Jim Crow – not only the assertion of an equality claim, but armed resistance to lynch law.
As the war increasingly disrupted American society -- as white Americans contemplated the changing attitudes and expectations of blacks and immigrants in war industries and the military -- a racial reaction set in, led by conservatives in the South, abetted by Northern anti-immigrant groups. News of the Battle of Henry Johnson coincided in the New York papers with reports of one of the most atrocious lynchings of the period – the torture, mutilation and burning-to-death of a pregnant woman named Mary Turner, for the crime of protesting her husband’s murder by a white mob. There would be 62 other reported lynchings in 1918.
Pershing and his generals took a prominent part in the racial reaction. Their most immediate concern was to maintain clear lines of racial subordination in their segregated Army. Their need for riflemen had forced them not only to use black troops, but to allow black officers to hold commissioned rank and command at the company level – a situation that, with negligible exceptions, had never occurred in any previous conflict. Moreover there were some black National Guard regiments and battalions all of whose officers, from colonel down, were black. This raised the specter of a battlefield situation in which a white officer might have to take orders from a black superior. There had been one or two black West Pointers in the peacetime Regular Army, and their commanders had occasionally to deal with white officers who refused to salute them. The solution? “You salute the rank, not the man.” But the AEF was an army of civilians in uniform, whose values and sense of identity had been shaped by a Jim Crow culture. Pershing’s generals thought it unwise and detrimental to discipline to confront them with the anomaly of a black superior. They therefore relieved from command all black officers ranked major and above and replaced them with Whites. The 369th was a special case: its higher officers were white, but the cadre of company officers was integrated. To avoid any situation in which whites might have to take orders from blacks, the black officers of the 369th were transferred out en masse, and replaced by inexperienced white officers while the regiment was under fire.
But the generals were concerned about matters larger than racial manners and military protocol. As a matter of principle, the Army command believed in the propriety of Jim Crow rules, within the Army and in the society for which they were fighting. Pershing’s staff therefore concerned itself with the possible effects of wartime experience on race relations back in the States. The French tended to treat black Americans simply as “Americans,” and made no great fuss about “fraternization” between black soldiers and French women. In August 1918, the American general staff asked their French liaison, Col. Linard, to issue a “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” Linard was to teach his countrymen that Americans were deeply offended by displays of interracial friendship – especially when French women were involved. White Americans feared such experiences would encourage “intolerable pretensions to equality,” that would pose a danger to America’s civil peace when the troops came home.
It was vital, therefore, that French soldiers and civilians “Make a point of ... not spoiling the Negroes ... We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service.” The French were also enjoined to avoid praising black troops in the presence of Americans or in documents intended for American officers.
So much for “n-i-g-g-e-r” being another way to spell “American.” The high command’s official policy was to discredit the combat and command capabilities of black soldiers, in order to preserve Jim Crow hierarchies during and, especially, after the war. Thus, despite the award of the Croix de Guerre with Gold Palm to Henry Johnson and Neadom Roberts, the American Army refused even to grant them the Purple Heart.
When Henry Johnson and the Harlem Hell Fighters rejoined the American army for shipment home after the Armistice, the high command went out of its way to reeducate them in the meaning of that word. The troops were given inferior quarters, abused with impunity by Military Police, denied the off-base leaves and Christmas dinners given to white troops, denied the right to parade with the rest of the Army in Paris. White officers and enlisted men on the post were instructed that they did not have to salute or obey orders given by white officers commanding Negro troops.
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In February 1919, Johnson rode in an open car in the Hell Fighters’ homecoming parade, and as he drove up Lenox Avenue black crowds called out, “Oh, you Henry Johnson! Oh, you Black Death!” Back home in Albany, Gov. Al Smith hosted a dinner for Henry Johnson, promised to name a street for him, promised him a financial bonus and a new house. Johnson was asked to address the Legislature on a bill to give preference to veterans in the civil service. He was for it: the government ought to “take care of the boys who did their bit.” It seemed possible he might become a respected spokesman for his fellow black veterans and for his race.
But what Johnson felt about the war was not “respectable.” The praise he had received only served to heighten his sense of grievance for the way he and his buddies had been treated during the war – the way his people had always been and still were being treated. In March, he went to St. Louis as the star attraction of a program celebrating Negro contributions to the war effort. A series of “Colored preachers” began by calling for a new age of “equanimity” between the races -- equanimity as distinguished from equality. Then Johnson stepped up and delivered a “barrage.” War propaganda was a lie. There was no racial comradeship at the front. White troops refused to fight alongside blacks, not only because they were bigots but because they were cowards. “When it came to real fighting the Negroes were sent in,” not just because of their courage or skill, but because white officers wanted them dead: “Send the niggers to the front and there won’t be so many around New York.” The accusation may have been excessive and inaccurate, but the grievance it expressed was well-founded. The war had made Henry Johnson a hero, but it wasn’t his war, and it wasn’t a black man’s war. Look at what white men made out of it, he said, and see what little was conceded to black men: “If I was a white man I would be the next governor of New York.”
The reaction in the hall was fierce. Some of the preachers apologized for Johnson’s “bitter and vindictive” speech. But “More than 5,000 negroes cheered, kissed, and fairly carried ... Sergt. Henry Johnson, negro hero, around the Coliseum.” The black press endorsed Johnson’s speech. The New Orleans Crusader printed a piece on the Hell Fighters titled “Fighting the Savage Hun and Treacherous Cracker ... [The] ‘Hell Fighters’ might as well have been fighting the [American Army] for all the support they received from it.”
The response to Johnson’s diatribe exposed the double-bind in which the leadership of the civil rights movement and the black community were caught. Angry polemics and armed resistance were assertions of community pride, determination and courage. No movement for civil rights could succeed without the sense of solidarity these expressions produced. Yet they frightened or antagonized the white liberals whose support was essential in the legislative war against Jim Crow.
The strongest rhetorical counter to the apologists for Jim Crow was the war record of the black regiments, and of soldiers like Henry Johnson. But starting in 1922, that record was deliberately and systematically disparaged and effaced by the Army itself, which wanted to preserve segregation and the racial hierarchy of command by permanently limiting the role of black officers and troops in the peacetime Regulars and in any future war. In 1925 a report to the Army General Staff titled “Employment of Negro Man Power in War” declared: “The negro does not perform his civil duties in times of peace in proportion to his population. He has no leaders in industrial or commercial life. He takes no part in government. Compared to the white man he is of admittedly inferior mentality. He is inherently weak in character ... As a fighter he has been inferior to the white man even when led by white officers.” After 1925 most black regulars were trained only as labor and service troops. Blacks would have a harder time getting into combat in World War II than they had had in 1917.
It was impossible for Henry Johnson to bear the strain of symbolizing black manhood in postwar America. As “Black Death” he symbolized the “manhood” proven in battle – but to what end? Was he proof of the Negro’s Americanism, his fitness for a place in a white America? Or was he proof that the black race is brave and strong enough to fight its own way to freedom?
After St. Louis, things went bad for him with terrible speed. The white press condemned Johnson, and citizens complained to Secretary of War Newton Baker: “may we not look for some relief from this highly inflammatory tirade? ... The fertile mind of the weak and vacillating brother of his race will accept ... the unbelievable lies he has uttered against the decency of all manhood.” Baker forwarded the complaint to the “Negro Subversion” section of Military Intelligence Division, an FBI-forerunner at the Justice Department, which put Johnson under surveillance for “inciting to riot.” The War Department disgraced him by forbidding him to wear his uniform in public. Interference by MID killed his prospects as a platform speaker. The promised house was never provided, no street was named for him. The measure he had advocated, for giving veterans privileged access to civil service jobs, was rejected by the Legislature. His wounds made it impossible for him to return to his Red Cap job – most of the bones in his left foot had been removed. He had to support his wife and child on whatever he could make from occasional employment, supplemented by a very small disability payment. (In general, veterans of the First World War received very few benefits.) His wounds plagued him; he numbed the pain with drink. In 1923 his wife divorced him, and he lost contact with his family. He did remarry, which suggests a possible recovery – but he died of heart disease in 1929 at the age of 32.
Eighty years later, in a nation and an Army transformed by the civil rights movement, Henry Johnson was recognized for his valor. As Americans we can be proud that justice was done, albeit after long delay. But our pride is unjustified if we remember only what Henry Johnson did to our enemies, and forget what America did to Henry Johnson.
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