For the Union Dead

There is a sadness in the fact that, amidst the protests against police violence in Boston Common last night, the rear side of the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was tagged with graffiti. It is of course impossible to shed tears over mute stone being vandalized, when the protests are about the infinitely graver offense of taking human lives. Still, though, the symbolism is potent and heart-wrenching: this spray paint ended up on the city's most well-known monument to Black union soldiers, in the midst of protests condemning systemic anti-Black racism.

One way to read this incident might be as an insult to the memory of the soldiers and their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, who are depicted on the other side of the statue. Another, however, might be to see it as a tribute to what they fought for. The graffiti is a commentary not on the men who are memorialized in that statue, perhaps, but on the city that officially commemorates them, that pays lip-service to what their lives stood for, yet which maintains conditions throughout the Boston area of segregation and dispossession of Black communities.

Such has ever been the irony of New England liberalism. Cradle of abolition, sender of idealistic Union soldiers who fought the Confederacy so that our nation might witness a "new birth of freedom," we remain even to this day a heavily "Blue" set of states. We are still the heirs of the war to defeat slavery. As Robert Lowell wrote in his poem "For the Union Dead," in which Shaw's memorial and Boston Common play a prominent role: On a thousand small town New England greens,/ the old white churches hold their air/of sparse, sincere rebellion.

Yet those churches are "white" in more senses than just the paint on their walls. The same New England towns and cities that sent so many young people, Black and white, to "die to make men free" in the Civil War, have in the 20th and 21st centuries upheld conditions of de facto segregation, have been the site of white rioting against school integration, are home to a systemic racial wealth gap that denies Black people homes, futures, even lives. This is true in our own day, as it was true in Lowell's.

And this precisely is part of Lowell's point, in regarding the statue in the early 1960s, bearing witness to the faces of the men who fought slavery, at the same time as the Civil Rights movement was pushing to overturn legacies of slavery that persisted to the present. The statue, in the poet's eyes, was not just a comment on the past, but on the city's present. As he writes: Their monument sticks like a fishbone/ in the city's throat. It still sticks that way today. And perhaps that is what the graffiti is telling us.