In Honor Of The Heroic Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment….  To Defend One’s Own    

 

In the wake of the travesties of justice in the Michael Brown murder case where a grand jury refused to indict a Ferguson, Missouri police officer and the Eric Garner stranglehold murder case in New York City where the same thing happened (and which has happened repeatedly over the years these two cases being egregious and the cause of blacks and their supporters saying enough) during Black History Month (hell, all year) it is appropriate to talk about the right of black self-defense (and necessity at times). And when we talk about that issue the heroic struggles of the Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment easily come to mind.     

While there is no obvious link between the cases today and the heroic actions of black volunteers to defend their own by enlisting in the battle to eradicate slavery during the Civil War that is a matter of failure of imagination. From the very beginning of slavery in America which means from the very beginning of the settlements whites have feared, feared beyond reason at times, blacks, black men armed, or posing any kind of physical threat. In the case of the 54^th the Southerners during the Civil War went crazy when confronted with the idea of armed black men fighting for their freedom and treated any black captives brutally and not as prisoners of war. No better example of that hatred thinking there was no greater dishonor came after the battle before Fort Wagner when the rebels buried the white commander of the regiment, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who had fallen there with the dead black soldiers he commanded in a mass grave.         

And so it has gone throughout the last one hundred plus years from black sharecroppers defending themselves during Jim Crow times, Robert F. Williams down in North Carolina calling for armed self-defense against the marauding white racists during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, the Deacons for Justice down in Louisiana, and later the Black Panthers from Oakland to Boston. All standing for their right to defend their own by any means necessary. And all getting the eternal hatred of those whites who fear militantly political blacks who wish to defend the community. And that is where the current uprising being formed mostly by the young under the general title Black Lives Matter should think about history and about all the options.

[One hundred and fifty years later there is no more fitting memorial to those heroic defenders of the 54^th than the frieze on Beacon Street in Boston across from the State House commemorating their valor. Every time I go by the frieze, usually when we are demonstrating for or against some social policy of the day I stop and look at the determined faces of the soldiers as they march toward their destiny. Look particularly at the righteous grizzled old soldier by the head of Shaw’s horse marching with the “kids.” Yeah, that was the place for old men to be during those times. Today too. ]