A Profoundly Unserious Way of Dealing With the Past

There is, near a state capitol, statuary of a dominant white man on horseback, surrounded by African Americans. He is clearly in charge, and they are held together by an externally imposed discipline of a particularly tough kind. A white woman hovers over all. Dedicated in 1897, it is about as racialized a piece of bronze as the era of the Lost Cause could produce. Should it be taken down?

Of course not. The statuary in question is the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, opposite the statehouse in Boston, which commemorates Colonel Shaw and the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, only the second black regiment raised in the North. Shaw famously led the 54th in the desperate but failed assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863, where it sustained 40 percent casualties. The victorious rebels threw Shaw’s body into a pit with his fallen soldiers. Shaw’s family later refused to let him be exhumed for separate burial, preferring that his bones be forever mingled with theirs.

However, at the end of May 2020, the memorial was vandalized with some of the slogans of this moment.