The Shaw Community Center: A Living Memorial to Civil Rights Progress

The Shaw Community Center at 22 Mary Street in downtown Charleston embodies an important historical legacy: It arose shortly after the Civil War as a memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment who died in battle at Morris Island in 1863. Their comrades pooled money to establish a school for African-American children that flourished from 1867 to 1937, when it evolved into the present multipurpose youth hub. Long managed by the City of Charleston, the Shaw Center perpetuates a noble commitment to the advancement of civil rights.

The story of the genesis of the Shaw Center is rooted in the American Civil War, which commenced after South Carolina seceded from the union of United States in December 1860. Soon after the first shots of the conflict exploded over Charleston Harbor in April 1861, the United States military began planning a major offensive push into the rebellious Palmetto State. The large-scale amphibious operation known as the Battle of Port Royal in early November 1861 succeeded in capturing the town of Beaufort, South Carolina, and a number of sea islands in the vicinity of Port Royal Sound. For the remainder of the war, this area served as a staging ground for United States military operations in the South.

By decree of the United States military, the many thousands of enslaved people of African descent within Union-occupied areas around Port Royal became free during the winter of 1861–62. Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton (1824–1908) was appointed “military governor” of South Carolina in May 1862, though his jurisdiction was confined to the area around Port Royal. Eight months later, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 freed enslaved people in all other areas controlled by United States forces, and authorized the enlistment of free persons of African descent in the U.S. Army. Among the earliest Black recruits were freedmen in the vicinity of Boston who filled the ranks of a new unit designated the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Their commanding officer was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837–1863), the young scion of an affluent family that supported the abolition of slavery.

Numbering more than six hundred Black privates commanded by white officers, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment sailed from Boston in late May 1863 and disembarked at Beaufort at the beginning of June. There they fraternized briefly with members of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Regiment, a unit composed of local African-Americans freed and recruited after the Battle of Port Royal. The 54th Massachusetts Regiment participated in a raid along coastal Georgia later the same month, then returned to South Carolina and battled Confederate forces on James Island in mid-July. Exhausted and hungry, the men of the 54th then turned their attention to neighboring Morris Island in Charleston Harbor. On the evening of July 18th, Colonel Shaw and his men charged across a narrow beachhead to attack Battery Wagner, an irregular fortification constructed of sand and palmetto logs. Shaw and dozens of Massachusetts men were killed in the fighting, while scores more were injured and missing.

Although the Union Army’s assault on Battery Wagner in July 1863 was a military failure, the battle generated a wave of positive publicity in the Northern states. The bravery demonstrated by Colonel Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts, who charged headlong into near certain death, captivated the attention of millions of readers. It was not the first engagement between soldiers Black and white, but the widely-publicized battle on Morris Island provided indisputable proof that African-American soldiers were as brave and as committed to the war effort as any man in the nation. Their sacrifice at Battery Wagner inspired an effusion of memorial literature and poetry in Northern newspapers that continued long after the Civil War. The 1989 motion picture Glory, for example, portrayed a semi-fictional version of their story that continues to inspire audiences in the twenty-first century.

In the days after that dramatic battle in the summer of 1863, Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton in South Carolina initiated a plan to erect a granite monument honoring the sacrifice of Colonel Shaw and the fallen men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Saxton communicated his ideas to the Shaw family in New England and immediately began to canvass for donations within his limited jurisdiction. On July 27th, one week after the famous battle on Morris Island, Saxton issued an appeal “To the Coloured Soldiers and Freedmen in this Department,” copies of which were distributed throughout the Union-occupied territory around Beaufort. The appeal was motivated, said the general, by his belief that it was “fitting” for the formerly-enslaved people of the region “pay a last tribute of respect to the memory of the late colonel” of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, and encouraged them to “honour yourselves, and his glorious memory, by appropriating the first proceeds of your labour as free men, towards erecting an enduring monument to the hero, soldier, martyr,—Robert Gould Shaw.”[1]

By mid-August 1863, Saxton received a reply from Colonel Shaw’s father, Francis George Shaw, who expressed satisfaction with “the proposed plan of a monument to be built by the coloured people.” Saxton replied to inform the elder Shaw that “the people [around Beaufort] seem fully to understand its meaning, and will contribute generously out of their scanty means. . . . It has been suggested that a plain shaft of Quincy granite would be both enduring and appropriate; its size to depend upon the amount given by the people for the purpose. Your own wishes would, however, control entirely in this matter.”[2]

A touching scene in the early autumn of 1863 confirms the local popularity of the plan to erect a memorial for the fallen men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Frances Gage, a New England school teacher working within the Union stronghold around Port Royal, wrote to inform the Shaw family that the formerly-enslaved people in that area were contributing to the proposed monument in spite of their impoverished circumstances. At one large prayer meeting at Parris Island on September 5th, for example, freedpeople enthusiastically contributed pennies, nickels, dimes, fresh eggs, and sweet potatoes amounting to twenty-seven dollars.[3]

Confederate forces evacuated Morris Island in early September 1863, after which the Union Army immediately took possession of the island. Surviving members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment soon returned to camp at the site of Fort Wagner, where they had lost many comrades months earlier. Although Colonel Shaw had been hastily buried in a mass grave with enlisted men, the Shaw family sent firm instructions that his body was not to be exhumed or separated from his brothers-in-arms.[4] The Shaw memorial proposed by Brigadier-General Saxton in July was to be erected at the site of their shared grave, and by November he possessed an architectural plan of a granite monument and inscription. Informed of such progress, Francis Shaw wrote from New York with a suggestion regarding the planned tribute. “It seems to me, that the monument, though originated for my son, ought to bear, with his, the names of his brave officers and men, who fell and were buried with him. This would be but simple justice.”[5]

Saxton replied days later that that planned memorial would conform to the wishes of the Shaw family and honor all of the fallen men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. With obvious pride, he reported that the regiment’s surviving enlisted men and poor freedpeople in the Beaufort area contributed generously from their limited means: “The fund will be very large, considering the source from whence it is derived—not less than three thousand dollars. No man has received a nobler tribute. The spot where it is to stand is now in our possession. Although it would not yet be safe to place it there, I have entire confidence that it is destined to stand there, unmolested, to mark through all the future where a brave sacrifice was made for freedom.”[6]

In the middle of 1864, Sarah Shaw, mother of the famous colonel, observed that donations for the proposed monument on Morris Island accumulated admirably. Formerly-enslaved men forming the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, said Mrs. Shaw, had “contributed for this purpose about a thousand dollars,” and the freedpeople of the Beaufort area “have added from their little earnings three hundred dollars more.”[7] Although South Carolina civilians and military personnel donated to the campaign, the bulk of the contributions came from the humble privates of the famous black regiment. In October 1864, Colonel Edward Hallowell, Colonel Shaw’s successor, then stationed at Morris Island, forwarded to Brigadier-General Saxton in Beaufort the sum of $1,545, which he described as the contributions from “the enlisted men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.” Saxton acknowledged receipt of their contribution, which he added to the total collected for “the monument soon to be erected in memory of their former colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, and those who fell with him in the assault on Fort Wagner.” The total amount of the memorial fund was “about $3,000,” said Saxton in mid-October 1864, all of which had been invested in “Massachusetts interest-bearing bonds.”[8]

By the end of the war and the national abolition of slavery in 1865, Saxton was having second thoughts about the location of the proposed Shaw monument. Two years’ experience with Morris Island convinced him and other observers that its shifting sands would eventually undermine and topple the planned structure. Furthermore, as Saxton and members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment prepared to depart from South Carolina and leave the state in the hands of other military officials, they worried that the proposed memorial standing on an isolated island might be vandalized by unsympathetic locals. Rather than spend the donated funds to execute the plan already drafted, Saxton chose to leave the money in the bank and consider an alternative tribute to Shaw and his fallen comrades.[9]

In the meantime, the United States forces occupying Charleston after the Confederate withdrawal of February 1865 included civilians who immediately commenced the work of organizing and staffing schools for the children of formerly enslaved people. By the end of March, there were seven schools serving more than three thousand Black children within urban Charleston.[10] One of these new schools might have used the Shaw name at this time, just like the short-lived Shaw Orphan Asylum for African-American children, but these poorly-documented entities did not receive donations from the fund collected by Rufus Saxton. Charleston’s earliest post-war schools for black children were organized and supported by the federally-funded Freedmen’s Bureau in association with private entities like the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society. The money donated by black soldiers and others for a Shaw memorial remained in General Saxton’s custody for nearly two years after the end of the war.

In the early days of 1867, Rufus Saxton conferred with several colleagues interested in the creation of a fitting memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and fallen members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Five white men, all Northerners interested in the advancement of formerly-enslaved South Carolinians, agreed to act as trustees of what they called the Shaw Monument Fund. Besides Brigadier-General Saxton, the group included Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, Edward Needles Hallowell, colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, George William Curtis, a writer and brother-in-law of Robert Gould Shaw, and Edward W. Hooper, a lawyer and agent of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society. Although they described themselves as “self-constituted trustees of said fund, no corporation having ever been formed and no formal association having been made,” they became jointly responsible for the memorial fund of $3,500 in February 1867.[11] Following this change, Saxton published a press release that provides a valuable summary of the endeavor:

“To the Contributors to the Shaw Monument Fund. Shortly after the assault on Fort Wagner, a sum of money was placed in my hands for the purpose of erecting a monument to Col. Shaw and his comrades of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers who fell within the enemy’s works in leading the storming party in that attack. This money was equally contributed by their surviving comrades of the 54th, by the men of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, and by the freedmen and women of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The intention of the donors was to place a monument on the spot where these brave men fell. Plans were drawn and a corner-stone for a monument prepared, but circumstances have prevented me from completing the work, and it has recently been suggested that some other disposition should be made of this fund. Under the excellent care of the treasurer, Major E. W. Hooper, it is now drawing seven per cent. interest, and amounts to three thousand five hundred dollars. The only charges against it are the architects plans and the cornerstone above referred to, the cost of which Major Hooper has generously defrayed, that the sum originally contributed might remain intact. Anxious to fulfill my trust in a manner which shall be satisfactory to all interested, I have this day transferred the sole care and disposition of the Shaw monument fund to a board of trustees. . . . The design was to provide some fitting memorial of one of the heroic sacrifices of the great war for freedom, and, although the amount contributed is small, probably no equal sum was ever raised involving greater personal sacrifices. Given by those who had but little, it is a precious tribute of gratitude from a people seeking to do honor to the memory of brave men who died to deliver them from bondage, and who had vindicated the claims of their race to manhood.

R. Saxton, Buffalo, N.Y., Feb. 6, 1867.”[12]

At some point between 1865 and the spring of 1867, the Northern trustees of the Shaw Monument Fund decided to apply the money to the construction of a school for African-American children in urban Charleston. They engaged the services of a colleague on the ground in South Carolina, Reuben Tomlinson, whom the Freedmen’s Bureau had appointed Superintendent of Education in Charleston and who also served in the state legislature immediately after the war. With his assistance, the trustees partnered with the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, which already funded the operation of several Black schools in the city. Jointly they inaugurated a Shaw School in 1867, but details of its creation and location are now obscure.

In July 1867, Reuben Tomlinson purchased a lot of land on Charleston’s Rutledge Avenue for the privately-funded Shaw school. The trustees later determined this site to be unsuitable, however, and instructed Tomlinson to sell it and secure another location.[13] Despite not having a permanent home, the nascent institution was still growing. A report published in early March 1868 stated that the “Shaw School” operating at an unspecified location served 400 African-American pupils.[14] On March 25th of the same year, Tomlinson sold the lot he had purchased on Rutledge Avenue for $2,500 to Robert C. Gilchrist of Charleston, who, in turn, sold to Tomlinson a parcel of vacant land on the north side of Mary Street, slightly west of America Street, for the same price. The new site, measuring 112 feet wide and extending northward 163.5 feet, represents the southeastern-most corner of high land in the Village of Hampstead, and is situated five miles northwest of Morris Island as the crow flies.[15]

Construction of the school building commenced immediately after the purchase of the Mary Street property in late March 1868. The resulting structure, a two-story wooden-frame building atop a raised brick foundation, built in the shape of a Latin cross, was completed in mid-October. At that time, a Charleston newspaper published a brief description of the institution: “The Shaw Memorial School building . . . contains nine large rooms capable of accommodating seven hundred pupils. . . . At present there are furniture appliances for only five hundred children, most all of which are in use. The curriculum embraces the Readers from the first to the fifth [grade], those of the pupils who are able to do so paying a tax of twenty-five cents per month for the support of the school, and also purchasing their own books, save in exceptional cases where the books are given to children of merit who have not the means to buy them. In other respects the school is supported by a number of New England societies, each of which holds itself responsible for the support of one teacher.” The initial staff consisted of a principal, Arthur Sumner, and eight female teachers—seven white and one black. “It is worthy of note,” said the newspaper, “that the building, which will compare favorably with any similar one in the city, in point of architectural construction, convenience and elegance, was built entirely under the direction and control of two respectable colored men of this city, William J. Brody and S. W. Wigfall, of whose skill and mechanical ability it is an eloquent evidence.”[16]

Shortly after completion of the new building on Mary Street, an unidentified teacher wrote to a friend in Massachusetts to describe her satisfaction with the new facility. “After several changes the Shaw School has settled; or (as the people here say), got a stiddy place. And throughout its wanderings most of the present pupils have followed it faithfully. The new building is right in the centre of a dense population of colored people; and has a better situation, in that respect, than any which our school has occupied before. . . . Time would fail me to describe the glories of this structure. Let it be enough to say that it is a substantial wooden building, convenient and simple in plan. There is an ample play-ground for the boys, and another for the girls. Those who contributed to the Shaw Monument fund may rejoice that they helped to build this house; and they who projected and executed the plan have reason to be proud of their work.”[17]

The trustees of the Shaw Monument Fund apparently expended the entire sum on the purchase of the land and the construction of the building. From its beginning in 1867, the Shaw Memorial School relied on funding from the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society and other private donations to pay the staff, purchase supplies, and maintain the building. The dissolution of that New England society in the spring of 1874 created a crisis, however, that required action from the passive trustees. That summer, the four surviving men (Saxton, Curtis, Higginson, and Hooper) executed a ten-year lease of the Shaw Memorial School to the City of Charleston’s Board of Public School Commissioners. The city agreed to operate the institution as a public school according to several terms specified by the trustees, most importantly “that the said building . . . shall be perpetually devoted to educational purposes and that pupils shall never be excluded therefrom . . . on account of race or previous condition of servitude.”[18]

Reorganized as a public institution in the autumn of 1874, the segregated Shaw Memorial School continued to grow with the population of the surrounding neighborhood during the waning days of Reconstruction. The city’s ten-year lease of the facility was set to expire in the summer of 1884, but the Northern trustees who still held title to the property made a pre-emptive offer of renewal. In November 1883, they executed a ninety-nine year lease of the Shaw school to the City of Charleston’s Board of Public School Commissioners for the nominal sum of one dollar.[19] That arrangement, continuing the same covenants as the 1874 lease, endured well into the twentieth century, beyond the lifespan of the trustees. Additions to the original structure allowed the school to seat more students, but, by the mid-1930s, local officials planned to retire the building they described as “obsolete” and “unsafe.” In the autumn of 1937, young pupils attending the Shaw Memorial School transferred to the new Archer School building on Nassau Street.[20]

During the closing months of 1937, civic leaders Black and white worked together to organize a segregated “Community Club” in the old Shaw facility that commenced a new chapter in its history. Funded by the “Negro welfare” branch of the local Community Chest, a predecessor of the United Way, the old building on the north side of Mary Street quickly became a hub of youth-centered programs that included a kindergarten, an after-school Boys’ Club and Girls’ Club, and a small branch of the Charleston Free Library (now the Charleston County Public Library).[21] The city’s board of school commissioners, whose lease of the property was set to expire in 1982, subleased it in July 1938 to a board of white citizens identified as “Trustees of Shaw Memorial School and Welfare Center.” Under their management, the building hosted a wide variety of educational and recreational programs designed to empower Black youth and prepare them for lives as industrious adults.[22]

The entry of the United States into World War II led to a brief detour in the mission of the revitalized Shaw Center. Between the summers of 1942 and 1945, Federal funding for recreational activities allowed the small staff of the Shaw Center to welcome a reported quarter of a million African-American servicemen who relaxed, read, and danced while sojourning briefly in Charleston on their way to stations elsewhere.[23] A re-organized version of the Community Chest again embraced the Shaw Center in the summer of 1945 and resumed the ambitious after-school youth programs of the pre-war years. That funding relationship ended in the summer of 1952, however, when the white board of the local Community Chest terminated its financial support of the Shaw Center “for reasons of economy and efficiency.”[24] Recreational and community activities continued at the old school building for a further sixteen years, but with a significant difference. African-American citizens in the surrounding neighborhood organized, sponsored, and managed the after-school programs with little support from local government.

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial Boys Club, chartered in 1955 by a group of progressive Black leaders, served as the principal force sustaining community activities at Shaw Center during the building’s leanest years. The organization received a financial boost after 1965 when it became part of the newly-incorporated Boys & Girls Clubs of the Trident Area, Inc., but neither entity held legal title to the Mary Street property. In the spring of 1968, city and county officials announced their intention to convert the Shaw Center into a multi-million-dollar health facility for indigent citizens. The municipal leaseholders peaceably evicted the Boys Club and the branch of the Charleston County Public Library, both of which evacuated the premises at the end of the year.[25]

Plans to convert the old Shaw Center into a modern health clinic evaporated in early 1969 when officials learned of the restrictive covenant embedded in the city’s unexpired lease on the Mary Street property. Their 1883 contract with the trustees of the Shaw Monument Fund reserved the building and grounds for educational purposes only; failure to comply would terminate the lease and return the property to the custody of the long-deceased trustees. Rather than pursue legal avenues to clear the title, developers selected a new site on Meeting Street for construction of the Franklin C. Fetter Comprehensive Health Center. Meanwhile, the empty Shaw Center on Mary Street declined as neglect and vandalism sapped its historic strength.[26]

Over the next several years, former state representative Herbert Fielding (1923–2015) and other officers of the Robert Gould Shaw Boys Club raised money for the old building and hounded Charleston Mayor J. Palmer Gaillard for the city’s help.[27] The mayor and City Council finally agreed and, in the spring of 1971, concluded proceedings to condemn the property and assume full ownership.[28] Bolstered by its historic connection to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the property was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and added to the prestigious list on 11 April 1973.[29]

Plans to rehabilitate the century-old structure developed slowly at City Hall while Herbert Fielding and others continued to advocate for the complete rehabilitation of the old Shaw Center. Although City Council allocated $300,000 to the project, and although inspectors reportedly deemed the building “structurally sound,” city officials proposed a radical renovation. “We have been told,” said Mayor Gaillard in January 1974, “that it is not economically feasible to repair the entire building, We plan to take down the frame portion and rebuild a structure using the brick walls and the arches.” The renovated building, reduced from three stories to one, was projected to house a daycare center, boys’ club, community room, and a gymnasium—facilities that the mayor said were “needed very badly on the East Side.”[30]

In the wake of the mayor’s announcement, Clyde Johnson, a Black staff writer at the Charleston Evening Post, asked the community why no one was defending the historic Shaw Memorial School building. “Since the planned renovation was announced,” wrote Johnson, “I have listened for an outcry from preservationists. So far: nothing. The lack of action by local residents to stop the planned destruction of Shaw Center has been disappointing.” Days later, on 20 February 1974, workers hired by the City of Charleston demolished the wooden upper stories of the Shaw building, leaving only the brick raised basement erected by Black contractors in 1868. The dramatic reduction of the historic Shaw Memorial School, while not illegal, prompted its removal from the National Register of Historic Places on 1 October 1974.

The newly-renovated, one-story Shaw Community Center reopened to the public on 30 October 1974. At that time, the city government leased part of the building to the Charleston County Department of Social Welfare for a daycare center, and leased the remainder of the facility to the board of the Robert Gould Shaw Boys Club.[31] Similar leases continued into the twenty-first century, but the building’s principal tenant, the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Trident Area, dissolved in 2011. Since that time, the City of Charleston has taken a more active role in the day-to-day management of the Shaw Center, which continues to thrive as a welcoming hub for the residents of a vibrant and historic neighborhood.

Although the present community center at 22 Mary Street is not as evocative as Boston’s famous Robert Gould Shaw Memorial sculpture, unveiled in 1897, the older foundations of Charleston’s Shaw Center represent a more direct connection to the brave men they both commemorate. Black soldiers from Massachusetts and South Carolina, joined by formerly-enslaved civilians, contributed from their meager fortunes in the midst of Civil War to fund a lasting tribute to their fallen brothers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Their donations, entrusted to a group of officers, established the roots of a durable and resilient institution in Charleston that continues to perpetuate a noble cause.

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