Attack by 'Glory' regiment commemorated in SC - SouthCoastToday.com

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CHARLESTON, S.C. — Re-enactors portraying the black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry gathered on a windy beach Wednesday where they fired a rifle salute and placed a wreath honoring the black soldiers who fell in the ill-fated 1863 attack on Confederate Battery Wagner on Charleston Harbor.

Wednesday was the 149th anniversary of the attack commemorated in the movie "Glory." The attack failed, but it put an end to a Civil War myth that black soldiers could not or would not fight.

"People believed that at the first sight of battle they would cut and run. But they proved otherwise," said Joe McGill, a member of Company I of the 54th Massachusetts re-enactors.

The most honored soldier in the regiment's ranks was a New Bedford man, Sgt. William Harvey Carney, a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his bravery in holding the American flag aloft to rally the regiment in its charge on Fort Wagner, S.C.

McGill's company of re-enactors is based in Charleston but there are several others elsewhere and re-enactors from four states and the District of Columbia were among the 20 who attended Wednesday's observance.

About 25 other people, including gospel singers, were at the ceremony on the island reachable only by boat.

A color guard carried a wreath about 100 yards from the shore and placed it atop a sand dune in the direction where Battery Wagner, long since washed away by time and tides, once stood.

The other re-enactors sounded a rifle salute in honor of the fallen. Not all were men. Ramona La Roche portrayed Susan King Taylor who, as a girl of 14, helped teach members of the 54th to read and write and served as a nurse to the troops after Wagner.

The first major engagement for black troops in the war was bloody. Of the 600 troops who charged the battery, 218 were killed, wounded or captured. After Wagner, the 54th, which was formed in Boston, served in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida before returning to Massachusetts after the war ended in September 1865

The re-enactors return to the island every year to commemorate the battle and McGill said a larger event is expected next year for the 150th anniversary.

Re-enactor Ernest Parks said the story of 54th wasn't mentioned during the centennial observance of the Civil War 50 years ago.

"We're talking about the representation of what happened in America. So we as African-Americans want to tell our particular story now so we can be all-inclusive in telling the story," he said.

James Brown, who lives only a few miles from Morris Island, asked "who else is telling the story of African-Americans? Nobody. And I feel honored to do such a thing because I'm standing on the shoulders and the backs of guys who enabled me to be free and who enabled me to do something like this."

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