ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080020
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
SOURCE: STEVE SILK THE HARTFORD COURANT
Walking in Boston is like strolling through the pages of a history book full of familiar stories. Who hasn't heard of the Boston Tea Party? Or of Paul Revere and the Old North Church? Or Faneuil Hall, where revolutionaries such as Sam Adams gave rousing speeches?
Those moments from America's past seem to live on in Boston, where not even the bustle of business and the crunch of commerce can obscure the settings for the epochal events that happened here more than 200 years ago.
There's another piece of the past that springs vividly to life in Beantown.
Those who would learn about an often missing piece of history gather several times a day on the north side of Boston Common, under the shade of massive elms, to sit at a somber bronze monument to the Fighting 54th, a regiment of black soldiers who fought heroically in the Civil War. Their struggle to be accepted as first-class soldiers was the subject of the stirring film ``Glory.''
But the true story is more moving than the Hollywood version.
That's just one of the surprises in store for those who embark on Boston's Black Heritage Trail, a walk through the Beacon Hill neighborhoods that were once home to the nation's most vital community of free black Americans.
``This information you're going to get today is not in our history books,'' says Tammy Young, a National Park Service employee and sometime tour leader.
Start with the ``Glory'' story, which Young tells at the foot of the Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial.
Those who saw the film are familiar with the basics - the members of the first black regiment undergo many demeaning trials in their attempt to be accepted as worthy soldiers. For the first 18 months of service they refuse to accept lower pay than white men, and instead they serve for free. (Congress later voted to pay them the going rate retroactively.) After a series of slave-like labor details, the 54th - eager to prove its fighting mettle - volunteers to make a suicidal attack on the Confederate stronghold of Fort Wagner near Charleston, S.C. They are nearly all killed. Fade out.
What really happened is this: The Fighting 54th took the nearly impregnable Fort Wagner and held it for 14 hours. Promised reinforcements never arrived. The soldiers ran out of ammunition and beat a retreat. On the way back to Union lines, one black soldier, Sgt. William Carney, saved the Union flag from capture, even though he had been shot three times and had to crawl nearly 11/2 miles to safety. He was later awarded the Medal of Honor.
``That's the way you [should] end the movie,'' Young says. ``Reality is better than fiction.''
And on the rest of the two-hour tour, Young demonstrated just how exciting the truth can be. After her account of the 54th, the plucky Atlantan leads a charge through the North Slope of Beacon Hill, telling stories of heroism, hard choices and harder times.
Richard Soderberg of Uppsala, Sweden, heard about the Black Heritage Trail from some Canadians he had met at a Boston youth hostel. Soderberg, who plans to spend six months studying in Minnesota, says he considers the story of 19th century Boston's black community ``part of what everybody should know about the history of this country.''
That sentiment was echoed by Katharine West of Dublin, Ireland. West joined the tour, she says, in part because the story of history is too oriented to the accomplishments of white males, and too little attention has been paid to minorities.
Whether it rights those or a thousand other past injustices, the Black Heritage Trail is part history lesson, part walk in the park.
Following the trail with or without a guide is a worthy pastime. It winds down Beacon Hill's brick sidewalks and beneath the cooling shade of maple and ash. Here on Boston's highest ground, the world of three- and four-story brick buildings represents the big city at its most human scale. There are window boxes bursting with flowers, walls covered with ivy and climbing hydrangea, wrought-iron balconies cantilevered over the sidewalks, and buildings with richly paneled entryways.
In more recent years, the onetime epicenter of the black community - located mostly to the north side of Pinckney Street (the unofficial boundary between black and white) - has since been co-opted by Boston's Brahmins.
But 200 years or so ago, it was pasture, dotted with stables. A small gray clapboard home on Pinckney Street - the oldest house built by a black person on Beacon Hill - was the home of George Middleton, a hero not of the Civil War but of the American Revolution. He was one of the Bucks of America, the supposed leader of the all-black company that fought the British for America's freedom.
The trail also goes by some of the schools that figured in the city's earliest battles for integrated education, and stations on the underground railroad. And here in Boston it really was underground; parts of Beacon Hill are riddled with tunnels that escaping slaves used to make their way from one house to another while avoiding capture by the bounty hunters and slave catchers who roved the city.
Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the Phillips Street home of abolitionist and escaped slave Lewis Hayden in 1853 and remarked that she had never seen so many fugitive slaves in one place.
Slavery was outlawed in Boston, but the federal Fugitive Slave Act permitted slave owners to retrieve runaways. Hayden responded by keeping a couple of barrels of gunpowder by the door and threatening to drop his candle and blow up the house when slave hunters came calling.
The black community fought slavers in other ways, too.
In Holmes Alley, a twisting passageway barely wide enough for two to walk abreast, the locals kept their doors and windows open so runaways fleeing bounty hunters could find ready refuge. Then, when slave catchers and their dogs slipped into the alley in hot pursuit, they were sometimes surrounded by angry black men and women who put frying pans and rolling pins to use on the intruders.
Finally, the alley spills out near the entrance of the African Meeting House, the oldest surviving black church in the nation. The church opened in 1806 and became known as the Black Faneuil Hall for its impassioned abolitionist meetings.
This is the only building on the tour visitors can actually enter, and inside the tiny sanctuary one can only wonder about the stories its walls have heard.
The Black Heritage Trail doesn't begin to tell them all. But it's a start.
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Boston tour guide Tammy Young (above) points out aby CNBmonument engraved with the names of 62 black soldiers - members of
the country's fist black regiment - who died in a Union attack onn
the Confederate stronghold of Fort Wagner, S.C., in 1863. 2. Every
week, fresh flowers (right) adorn the monument. color.