Black soldiers monument faces scrutiny amid racial reckoning

BOSTON (AP) — The white Union Army commander sits rigid atop an imposing horse. His Black men, rifles to their shoulders, march resolutely alongside on their way to battle.

For L’Merchie Frazier, the towering bronze relief in downtown Boston captures the stirring call to arms answered by Black soldiers who served in the state’s famed Civil War fighting unit, which was popularized in the 1989 Oscar-winning movie “Glory.”

But the longtime Boston artist says she understands how the imagery of the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial can conjure mixed feelings as the nation takes another hard look at its monuments and memorials in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“Whose story is being told with this monument?” said Frazier, who is the education director at the nearby Museum of African American History. “The hierarchy is very evident. White commander out front; Black soldiers in the background. It’s the first thing you see.”

Amid the national reckoning on racism, the Shaw memorial is the latest and, perhaps, one of the more curious to receive scrutiny.

Unlike other felled monuments, the work by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens isn’t a paean to the Confederacy. It doesn’t have explicit ties to colonialism, such as the Christopher Columbus monuments that have been toppled in Boston and elsewhere.

Instead, the creation of the memorial in the aftermath of the Civil War was championed by prominent Black Bostonians of the day.

It was originally envisioned as a traditional equestrian monument to Shaw, but the colonel’s family, a wealthy Boston clan strongly opposed to slavery, requested that it also honor the Black men who served and died alongside him during their famed charge on Fort Wagner...