On Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw And The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (Volunteers)-Take One 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

…he had walked pass that blessed muddied- unattended frieze across from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston it seemed half his life. Anytime he cadged a hooky day from high school back in the early 1960s in order to head into downtown Boston and check out the day life on the Common, grab an off-beat movie at the many big house theaters on lower Washington Street, or just hang out he would circle around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station. Walked head down right by the marble. Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school in that same downtown Boston and had to work trucks to make his daily meat he would pass the memorial on his way to school. Still later when he lived on the hill (Beacon Hill) in splendor or rut the same thing.

Passed it like it was just another in a long line of historic ornaments in a town filled with memorials to its ancient arrival long continental history. Bloody battle number one here, bloody battle number two there, statute of some fire-breathing Puritan divine here or some furious bearded abolitionist there, some-battle-hardened general there, some corruption-filled over-fed civic leader here. The town was a tribute to all that went down in the cold American East when west, real west, was someplace around the Hudson River and dreams were of making it along the Eastern seaboard and not having to trek inland to face the unknown, natural or man-make.   

Had too passed blinkered that monument to some pretty important history going on right before his eyes down in bloody Birmingham/Selma/Greensboro/Philadelphia (MS that is)/Montgomery/Oxford (MS again) and one thousand other later to be   storied locales after the dust cleared (and the fight reined in). Yet with all that civil rights let-them-vote-sent-books-to Alabama-ride-the-freedom-bus was clueless to that aspect of his history, those places Fort Wagner above all, where his people, his black proud Massachusetts 54^th (and later 55^th) had made righteous stand for freedom, had filled the ranks, had arms in hand confirmed the worst planter’s nightmare, had bled rivers of blood, and had not waited on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom…