Word: 54th
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...freemen and runaway slaves of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment were not given anything in 1863: certainly not victory. The blacks of the 54th were actual men who died actual deaths in a redemptive violence that they sought. The lesson that Glory teaches -- and it is finding an audience -- is this: it was not the Great White Paternalist alone who freed the slaves and made them American citizens. It was also blacks who freed themselves. These were the blacks who enlisted, trained, suffered, endured condescension and insult, disciplined themselves, fought for the right to fight and the opportunity...
...July 18, 1863, the blacks of the 54th Massachusetts led a virtually suicidal assault upon Fort Wagner, a massive Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston, S.C., harbor. At a critical moment in Glory's version of the attack, Trip, the runaway slave-soldier played by Denzel Washington, seizes the American flag and runs forward with it to his death. His death says this: "I did not want your white man's flag; earlier I refused the 'honor' of carrying it. But I will do it now, dying with other black men, because, understand me, we are citizens...
...Martin Luther King Jr. told some black college students about the Aristotelian bigot. This bigot, said King, constructed a syllogism: All men are made in the image of God; God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro; therefore, the Negro is not a man. The black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, and 180,000 other blacks who served in the Civil War, took that syllogism and burned it to ashes...
...entirely. For the specific historical events the film narrates -- the formation, training and terrible blooding in battle of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black fighting unit enlisted in the Union cause -- are little known yet resonant with high symbolic significance. The 54th, led by an idealistic 25-year-old white man, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick skillfully blending shyness and tenacity), had to fight to fight. Their white comrades-in-arms were full of contemptuous prejudice against them, and the high command was afraid to arm black men who had their own bitter racial grievances (many were runaway...
...best when it shows their proud embrace of 19th century warfare at its most brutal. Director Edward Zwick graphically demonstrates the absurdity of lines of soldiers slowly advancing across open ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the face of withering rifle volleys and horrendous cannonade. The fact that the 54th finally achieves respect (and opens the way for other black soldiers) only by losing half its number in a foredoomed assault on an impregnable fortress underscores this terrible and brutal irony...