Colonel Shaw v. North Carolina

Joseph L. Rauh Jr. rides a bus through the still-segregated South. He’s been doing civil rights work for years now: general counsel of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights since 1964; member of the national board of directors of the NAACP; attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). All that work—and still so much to do. National Guardsmen patrol the aisles, the stuffy air swelters. Signs flash by: Stuckey’s, Phillips 66. Behind Rauh sit Colonel Shaw’s bronze black soldiers.

“Bronze black soldiers” is of course a metaphor. Colonel Robert Shaw fought in the Civil War, at the head of the first black regiment in the United States Army, the 54th Massachusetts volunteers. Shaw, a Boston Brahmin, died, age 26, leading the volunteers in an assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Twenty years later, Boston erected a monument to his memory. Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed it; Robert Lowell mentioned it in a poem, Charles Ives described it in a piece of music. And so Colonel Shaw stands today on Boston Common, in bronze, with his bronze black soldiers at his back.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Joseph L. Rauh Jr. rides a bus through the still-segregated South. He’s been doing civil rights work for years now: general counsel of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights since 1964; member of the national board of directors of the NAACP; attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). All that work—and still so much to do. National Guardsmen patrol the aisles, the stuffy air swelters. Signs flash by: Stuckey’s, Phillips 66. Behind Rauh sit Colonel Shaw’s bronze black soldiers.

“Bronze black soldiers” is of course a metaphor. Colonel Robert Shaw fought in the Civil War, at the head of the first black regiment in the United States Army, the 54th Massachusetts volunteers. Shaw, a Boston Brahmin, died, age 26, leading the volunteers in an assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Twenty years later, Boston erected a monument to his memory. Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed it; Robert Lowell mentioned it in a poem, Charles Ives described it in a piece of music. And so Colonel Shaw stands today on Boston Common, in bronze, with his bronze black soldiers at his back.