A Salute To Freedom's Soldiers (Washington Post)M

By Benjamin Forgey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 18, 1998; Page E01

A long-ignored chapter of American history will finally get lasting recognition at 2 p.m. today with the unveiling of "The Spirit of Freedom," the striking sculptural centerpiece of the African-American Civil War Memorial at Vermont Avenue and U Street NW.

Unfortunately, the memorial as a whole will not be completed for several months. Prominently missing at today's celebration will be the plates of somber gray steel bearing the names of more than 208,000 African American soldiers and their mostly white officers who served in the Union Army during the war.

Yet it is possible to gauge something of the final effect. The 11-foot-high bronze statue by Louisville sculptor Ed Hamilton, featuring life-size relief figures of three soldiers and a sailor on one side and of a family on the other, fits neatly in a semicircular niche created by Washington architect Edward D. Dunson Jr., the memorial's chief designer.

The niche is formed by a series of gradually rising walls, one behind the other, each about three feet high and each designed to bear the metal plaques with names etched in black. The walls with the names and the high sculpture with its individuated figures promise to reinforce each other in form and meaning.

One can imagine someday soon coming up the escalator of the 10th Street exit of the U Street/Cardozo Metro station: The scroll-like statue will lure visitors directly ahead, and the rows of names on their gray steel plates will beckon. The sounds of busy U Street will fade as viewers, surrounded by names, ponder the powerful evidence of a powerful story.

The story certainly deserves memorialization in the nation's capital. Slavery was not the official cause of the Civil War, but it was the soul of the matter, the key contradiction in a nation founded on revolutionary precepts of human freedom.

At the beginning of the war even free blacks were not permitted to serve in Union forces, with a few notable exceptions. By war's end there had been a significant mobilization. Black men, many of them recently freed slaves, served with honor in the face not only of a determined enemy but also of frequent misunderstanding or active hostility on the part of their superior officers, fellow soldiers and fellow citizens.

Noah Andre Trudeau's recent book on the subject, "Like Men of War," authenticates many accounts of bravery and extraordinary travail. Like their white counterparts on both sides, many black men distinguished themselves in battle. And they fought against greater odds.

If captured, black soldiers were more likely to end up dead than their white compatriots. If wounded, they were less likely to get adequate medical attention. For much of the war they were paid less than white troops. They were much, much less likely to become officers. And at the end of the war black regiments were not invited to participate in the great victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

That final insult was symptomatic of the national attitude toward the valuable service of African American soldiers. Basically, the nation forgot about it and sometimes even denied that it happened. Excepting the great Boston monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the troops of his 54th Massachusetts Regiment (also memorialized in the film "Glory"), there have been no notable memorials to such service.

Until now. The new memorial's unusual but appropriate location in one of Washington's historic black neighborhoods (named after Col. Shaw) is due to D.C. Council member Frank Smith. Upset by the devastation wrought by Metro's Green Line construction, Smith years ago pestered the transit agency to make this station something special -- a "destination point" to draw outsiders into Shaw.

This was an excellent idea. The memorial is sure to become a destination for many, and is likely to exert a beneficial influence on the surrounding neighborhood both symbolically and economically (although parking may turn out to be a problem). It should be noted that Smith thereby anticipated one of the key recommendations of "Extending the Legacy," the National Capital Planning Commission's vision for Washington in the 21st century.

The planners' notion is to take advantage of the impact of future memorials on the life of the city by placing them in city districts other than the Mall. In effect, the Civil War Memorial -- costing about $2.6 million, paid for mainly by Metro and the city, and to be maintained by the National Park Service -- will become a test of this promising proposal.

The idea of listing the names is copied from Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Smith envisions that this memorial, in a sense, "will belong to the descendants" of the Civil War soldiers. Research was accomplished by historians of the National Park Service, working in partnership with the Mormon Church and the Federation of Genealogical Societies as part of a continuing effort to assemble a list of all soldiers in the war.

There are quite a few duplications on the memorial's walls. According to Park Service historian John Peterson, the generally accepted estimate for African American troops is about 185,000 -- "but we decided to err completely on the side of not eliminating a single person who served." Good thought. The names are arranged alphabetically by regiment; there will be master lists at the site to help visitors find a particular name.

Despite its obvious appropriateness, the complicated, rather chaotic site presented the memorial designers with significant problems -- they had to provide a service road for row houses abutting the site on the west, design around Metro's escalators, and somehow negate the effects of three large exhaust grates that Metro in its wisdom had placed in the most prominent place possible, at the very corner of Vermont Avenue and U Street.

Architect Dunson, working in collaboration with the Washington architectural firm of Devrouax Purnell, made sense of the site by carefully centering the major elements -- the curved sequence of walls right in the middle, making a place for the sculpture. A consistent, geometric paving pattern of gray and pink granite further unifies the site. The edges were landscaped in a simple, direct way that reinforces the central elements.

Sculptor Hamilton, for his part, came through handsomely. The scroll-like configuration of his bronze piece clearly derives from Dunson's curved walls, and the two very different sides of the sculpture tell a moving story with concision.

Of course, the walls will have to be completed and the construction dust cleared before we will be able to assess the memorial with complete certainty. The construction effort, under the supervision of the city's Department of Public Works, leaves much to be desired -- disconcertingly, a sequence of walls on the eastern edge of the site, designed to line up in military precision, is crooked. Clearly this job needed a construction supervisor -- or simply a sergeant -- who cared enough to get the formation right.

A larger question has to do with the small size of the names -- to accommodate the number of troops, the letters had to be engraved at a mere one-eighth-inch height (compared with the half-inch-high letters on the Vietnam wall). En masse, the names undoubtedly will make their impressive point; on an individual basis they may present problems, particularly to visitors who are aged or infirm. An even larger question has to do with places to sit: There are none. Benches in the original plans were removed out of fear that homeless people would take over the space -- a sad commentary.

In most major respects, however, the memorial is off to a promising start. The location is good, the design solid, and the story important and well told.

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