Rededicating the Shaw-54th Massachusetts Memorial for a New Generation

The story of Civil War monuments over the past few years has been one of removals. Since 2017, well over 200 Confederate monuments have been removed—roughly 114 since the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. I thought about this yesterday during the rededication of the Robert Gould Shaw-54th Massachusetts Memorial in front of the Massachusetts State House on Boston’s Beacon Hill.

Source: WBUR

I’ve stopped to reflect at this memorial countless times since I moved to the city in 2011. I have had the pleasure of introducing it to students and the general public on my many tours of Boston’s Civil War history and memory.

The memorial forces you to stop and reflect. Augustus Saint-Gaudens captured more than just a moment in time—namely the regiment’s march through Boston on May 28, 1863. There is purpose in the determination of Shaw and his men as they march forward to a fate that we know awaited them on that sandy beach outside Charleston Harbor on July 18, 1863.

These men embodied the very question that the war eventually forced the nation to confront: Would the United States continue to exist free or slave. Would a reunited nation include African Americans as citizens now that hey had fought and died to help save it?

Monument dedications (and rededications) often tell us more about how and why communities choose to remember than anything about history. This was certainly the case yesterday.

In 1997 General Colin Powell delivered the keynote address for the centennial commemoration of the memorial’s dedication. It may be surprising to hear, but even at this late date many Americans had never learned the story of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment along with the broader story of Black United States soldiers.

Powell spent much of his address recounting the history, filling in the gaps in his audience’s collective memory. He recounted Black participation in the Revolution and the War of 1812 before offering a vivid overview of the recruitment, training, and military service of the regiment. His speech framed the 1897 dedication around Jim Crow, lynching, segregation, poll taxes and the “denial of justice.”

All of this was couched in a firm belief in progress and hope:

And so the struggle continued. One hundred summers after Battery Wagner, Martin Luther King Jr. would stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, praying for the day once again when the content of a person’s character would be the sole measure of that person’s worth. It was the same prayer that had inspired the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. It is a prayer that still must inspire us today.

This theme was given voice during yesterday’s ceremony, but it was much more rooted in the present moment and a more explicit acknowledgement of the current challenges we face as a nation, none more so than the issue of racial justice.

The theme of hope was certainly present in yesterday’s rededication speeches, but it rested, uncomfortably at times, next to a palpable sense of caution and uncertainty. Historian David Blight delivered a stirring address that captured this feeling:

We have a republic today in trouble. We have a democracy in great peril. What are we giving up for the republic? We’ve all lived through recent years and the removal of a number of Confederate monuments. This monument has always been here, for 125 years, saying ‘The Confederacy did not win this war.’

In closing, Blight urged the audience to take the time and look closely at the memorial.

Walk up here. Stand near it. Get inside these faces that Saint-Gaudens captured…Go stand right up there with them. And then back away a little bit and feel the movement of this monument. Feel the movement of the men’s legs. Hear their fee in the pavement as they march. Hear the clanging of some of those rifles behind them as they move forward, forward toward their deaths.

This monument tells a story like no other monument about that war. It says African Americans had to die to be counted as people and from that, maybe, just maybe the American Republic could be reinvented, reimagined, and maybe still preserved.

Blight was followed later in the program by Ibram X. Kendi, who now oversees the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He offered a powerful reframing of the memorial’s legacy around the continued fight to abolish racism.

Kendi recounted the story of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and the birth of the narrative of the “Great Emancipator,” but urged the audience to see the 54th Massachusetts, and eventually themselves, as central actors in this story.

But the Black soldiers of the 54th were as much the Great Emancipators as Abraham Lincoln. White abolitionists like Robert Shaw were as much the Great Emancipators as Abraham Lincoln. Enslaved Black people were as much their own emancipators as Abraham Lincoln. It was the resistance of enslaved Black people, who in the 1850s and Northern abolitionists, who were a critical factor in Southern secession from the Union. It was the running away of enslaved people, early in the Civil War, that undermined the fierce Confederate war machine. It was Black spies like Harriet Tubman feeding Union soldiers intelligence that were crucial in Union battle victories. And it was the Black people rushing into the 54th, into a Union army starved for troops that helped turn the tide of war in the Union’s favor.

The 54th are a testament to, ‘We freed us’. There was not a single person who abolished slavery. It was a communal affair. It was a national affair. It was something we did together, Black people and white people, enslaved and free, North and South. Most of the monuments in this city, across the Commonwealth, and throughout the United States honor a single person.

But this monument, the Shaw-54th Memorial honors a community, marching courageously, what it is going to take to abolish one of the great evils of our time: Racism. All that inequality and justice, and inequity that the 54th warred against remains in our time in a new form. The antislavery cause is now the antiracist cause. But we need courage and when I say courage I don’t mean the absence of fear, but as the philosopher said, the strength to do what is right in the face of it. You see the 54th, they were not thinking about what would happen to them if they resisted, if they fought the slavepower. They were thinking about what would happen to them if they did not resist. If they did not sign up. If they did not fight what is now the racist power.

It is going to take us all, people of all racial backgrounds to show the courage of the 54th, embattled against the Confederates in our time, the rebels against multiracial democracy in our time, the white supremacists in our time, the defenders of the unequal status quo in our time. This memorial is a testament to the fact that we did the impossible: abolished slavery. And it is also a testament that we can do the impossible again: abolish racism.

Both Blight and Kendi received standing ovations—a good day indeed for the work of historians.

It was a moving ceremony. Afterwards I had the opportunity to lead a group on a tour of the Black Abolitionist community on Beacon Hill that began at the Shaw-54th Memorial. All the while I had the words of Blight, Kendi, and the other speakers ringing in my ears.

What a wonderful day.

Thanks to everyone who helped organize the rededication ceremony.