>> We have a grand opportunity once this is restored to expand the narrative of American history.

>> BOWEN: I'm Jared Bowen, coming up on Open Studio, the story of how the Shaw Memorial depicting Black Civil War soldiers was made and now restored.

Plus, a museum traveling through the history of war, one tank at a time.

>> And you think about the crews at the time who were on these.

These were 18-year-old kids.

They weren't experienced.

They were young boys who were scared of being there.

>> BOWEN: Then, bewitched, bothered, and bountiful-- a trove of artifacts from the Salem witch trials.

>> This was a harrowing experience for everybody involved.

>> BOWEN: And the architect creating landmarks built on justice.

>> We have designed the plaza as a memorial to the 1965 Freedom March that King led with Ralph Abernathy and other great Boston civic leaders, civil rights leaders of the time.

>> BOWEN: It's all now on Open Studio.

♪ ♪ First up this Memorial Day weekend, we're revisiting memorials.

In a moment in which statues and monuments around the country are being removed for what they represent, the Shaw Memorial in Boston was recently fully restored, and with pride that the monument depicting Black soldiers marching off to join the Civil War stands the test of time.

For nearly 125 years, the Shaw Memorial has stood across from the Massachusetts State House.

It depicts Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the soldiers of the 54th Regiment-- one of the first groups of Black troops formed during the Civil War-- as they march off to battle.

>> I see men who are determined to have their freedom and the freedom of those who are coming after them and their families.

So for me, it is a, a walk to triumph.

>> BOWEN: L'Merchie Frazier, director of education for the Museum of African American History, is a consultant on the monument's current restoration.

For the moment, bronze has been replaced by photographic brawn.

Do you still make discoveries when you look at the pictures?

>> Oh, absolutely.

There's a reveal that happens almost every time.

That, you know, you find the mastery of the angel and components of the flight that she's taken to guard the men and to protect.

>> BOWEN: Right now, the real thing is taking the winter lying down.

Since August, the monument been at Skylight Studios, a wonderland of sculpture.

Here, statuary abounds, from a horse approaching the size of a Trojan one to the gold eagle normally perched atop Boston's Old State House.

But the pièce de résistance, of course, is the monument which Robert Shure and his team have been conserving for months.

>> We totally, um, stripped all the previous coatings that were on it, and refinished it, repatinated it.

>> BOWEN: This is a $3 million effort sponsored by the National Park Service, Friends of Boston's Public Garden, the City of Boston, and the Museum of African American History.

At Skylight, conservators take the project piece by piece, shoring up the seams of the monument's some 20 different parts.

>> A couple of nuts and bolts missing, but it was in structurally great condition for a piece that was over 100 years old.

>> BOWEN: The monument is the creation of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who originally intended to depict the colonel astride his horse.

But after Shaw's family of abolitionists asked the artist to also depict the men who elevated Shaw's fame, Saint-Gaudens turned the project into a 14-year endeavor, laboring over details, some which can never even be seen when the memorial is upright.

It's a monument to perfection, says Shure, who is also a sculptor.

What do you see when you get this close, especially further up in the statue?

>> Just the faces, really, of the infantrymen.

The way the sculptor rendered them with such emotion.

You could see in their faces fear, you could see the determination, you could see the dedication.

>> BOWEN: In July of 1863, under the cover of darkness, the 54th stormed Fort Wagner in South Carolina.

The regiment was defeated, with nearly half of the troops killed or wounded, including Shaw.

But that moment, the regiment's ferocious battle for liberty, would be memorialized-- in remembrances, testimonials, and even in Hollywood, in the 1989 film Glory.

>> Come on!

(gunshots, explosions) >> (screaming) >> BOWEN: Some 20 years after the battle, Saint-Gaudens began work on the memorial.

We first reported on the monument in 2014, when the National Gallery of Art and the Massachusetts Historical Society presented Tell It With Pride, an exhibition that told the stories behind the monument.

For Saint-Gaudens, an internationally known artist, the sculpture was a labor of love, said curator Anne Bentley.

Do we know why he was so obsessive about this?

>> That was just the way he worked.

After the monument was unveiled, he wasn't terribly happy with it.

He continued to tinker for several years.

>> BOWEN: It is a piece rich in detail, featuring 23 men marching off to battle, guns hoisted, packs tugging, and fabric folding.

But they are not the real soldiers.

Long after the war's end, Saint-Gaudens hired some 40 models for inspiration.

The exhibition introduced us to many of the regiment's real men-- well represented in photographs they themselves commissioned, said the society's librarian, Peter Drummey.

>> It's wonderful to see people who were proud of their uniforms and the accoutrements of their ranks as non-commissioned officers, their instruments as musicians.

Often, they paid to have the photograph hand-colored to bring out the, um, gold of their buttons or their belt buckle, or the different colors of parts of their uniform.

>> BOWEN: All so that they could remember their days.

But today, it's posterity and a monument that remember them.

And during this time of racial reckoning, L'Merchie Frazier says their valor can be even more deeply understood.

>> How would they have reacted to their names being, um, engraved in a monument in a permanent way in American history?

So, I think that we have a grand opportunity once this is restored to expand the narrative of American history.

♪ ♪ Next, one of the newest museums in Massachusetts is housed in a 65,000-square- foot building in Stow, a place large enough to exhibit some 50 fully restored tanks and armored vehicles.

It's an awesome array, but make no mistake, the American Heritage Museum has a mission of remembrance, not glorification.

Step onto the mezzanine of the American Heritage Museum and you survey what seems, from a distance anyway, like a sea of overgrown toys.

They are anything but.

>> These are the vehicles, the artifacts that have the chronology of how war came about.

>> BOWEN: Down on the floor, staring up at these behemoths, you find a hulking history of war.

Tank after towering tank-- tools of one of mankind's darkest trades.

♪ ♪ >> They were manned by humans, by men and women in the case of the Soviet tanks on the Eastern Front.

And all of these have a remarkable story of sacrifice, of perseverance and resilience.

>> BOWEN: Rob Collings is the president of the American Heritage Museum, which opened in 2019.

Most of the tanks come from the late private collector Jacques Littlefield and are housed in a custom-built, 65,000-square-foot facility spanning this country's war record.

In terms of tanks, it moves from 1917 and the first mass-produced American one, to the M1A1 in use today.

>> The collection is the best in the world of these artifacts.

There are at least a dozen, they're the only examples on display in the U.S., and a handful are the only one of their type in the entire world.

They're all restored and they're running condition.

>> BOWEN: So almost any of these tanks could roll out of here into the field behind us?

>> Not only can they, they do.

(vehicle rumbling in distance) In fact, you can hear one right now.

(chuckling) >> BOWEN: The source of the thunderous rumbling that interrupted our interview-- a Sherman tank from World War II making laps on a field behind the museum.

>> These could land on the beaches of Normandy and drive all the way to Berlin.

And you think about the crews at the time who were on these.

These were 18-year-old kids.

They weren't experienced.

They were young boys who were scared of being there.

But also they had these mechanical skills coming off the farm.

And it's a lot like a very large tractor.

>> BOWEN: In non-pandemic times, the museum typically offers demonstration weekends and World War II re-enactments.

Helping to make those happen is Dick Moran, whom we found nearing the end of a six-year-long restoration of a Panzer 1, produced by Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

>> It was maneuverable, it was small, two-man crew.

It was the best of the best at the time.

What's really interesting, if you want to look up inside the turret, you can see the machine guns in here.

The hatch, the sights, ammunition boxes.

>> BOWEN: And this is exactly where the museum often returns-- to the deadly reality of war.

To the fact that these were killing machines, not to mention literal death traps.

Tanks were the most obvious and often easiest targets on battlefields.

This Jumbo, which lumbered through the Battle of the Bulge, still bears the scars of bombs and bullets.

As mighty as they are, their crew rarely survived assaults.

>> One day we actually went to a lecture, and a this gentleman stepped up and he said, "Do you know the life expectancy of a tank crew?"

And he said, "If you go into battle, it was 25 minutes."

And we all sank into our chairs.

Wow!

>> BOWEN: Colin Rixon is the museum's lead docent and a veteran of the British Army who patrolled the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.

He and a host of veterans, doubling as docents, tour visitors through exhibition highlights like the Prime Mover-- an artillery vehicle later driven by actor Lee Marvin in the film The Dirty Dozen.

They visit the Higgins boat that delivered infantry onto the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and the so-called Churchill Crocodile, which incinerated anything and anyone in its path.

>> This is my father's uniform that he wore when he was commander on a troop of Churchill Crocodiles that went ashore.

>> BOWEN: The personal is paramount here.

Rixon says a steady stream of veterans now make pilgrimages to the museum with their families.

Is it good?

Is it it bad, as they remember all of these things, seeing all of these pieces?

>> So, many of them, it brings the story to... it helps them because they're able to talk about it now.

That's the way to get over it, because you bottle it up inside you.

>> BOWEN: And it's where the museum leaves us, with five men, part of a U.S. Marine tank crew, who saw their commander, Marine Sergeant George Ulloa, killed in an I.E.D.

explosion during the Iraq War.

In this video, they discuss the attack in front of his now-restored tank.

(explosion) >> That was an I.E.D.

>> (expels air) They blew up.

>> BOWEN: It's a very cut and dry reminder that everything here holds a history of horror, making this the rare museum that, in one regard, hopes to never expand.

>> A lot of people will say, coming in here, "Is this a museum that glorifies war?"

And by the time they get to the end, they realize it's an anti-war museum, because to totally understand war, you will never want it again.

♪ ♪ It may not be a total surprise that the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has a comprehensive collection of artifacts from the Salem witch trials.

From original testimony to a chilling death warrant, they reveal how times of crisis leave a community undone.

Centuries after its notorious witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, is still spellbound.

It's a brew of memorials, historic sites, and tourist trails.

It also doesn't shy away from being a cauldron of camp, from Bewitched to Hocus Pocus.

>> Hello, Salem!

My name's Winifred-- what's yours?

♪ I put a spell on you ♪ >> BOWEN: But as a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum reminds us, the history here is real and it is grim.

>> The people involved in this crisis had fears and emotions just like we do, and that...

This was a harrowing experience for everybody involved.

>> BOWEN: The show of fragile, rarely exhibited artifacts delivers us to 1692, when rapidly rising hysteria resulted in a torrent of accusations that brought down some 400 people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and led to the deaths of 25.

And it was all very diligently recorded, says co-curator Dan Lipcan.

>> These are pieces of paper that people wrote on by hand.

These are objects that the people involved owned-- a chair that someone sat in.

That helps us identify with the people that were involved in this crisis.

>> BOWEN: That crisis emerged from a set of events that have a chilling resonance today.

>> There was extreme weather.

There were really dry summers, very cold winters.

There had been a smallpox epidemic.

There was a war to the north.

And there were refugees coming into town from Maine and New Hampshire.

>> People begin to look for answers.

"Who's responsible for our problems?"

Basically becomes an issue of scapegoating, right?

Rushing to judgment, looking for someone to blame for your problems.

>> BOWEN: Historian Emerson Baker is the author of A Storm of Witchcraft.

He says the blaming was easy.

There was even this 15th-century book, the Malleus Maleficarum, that was a manual for taking down witches, something that had plenty of precedent in Europe.

>> What happened in Salem is really just the tip of a huge iceberg between the, about 1400 and 1750, which is generally called the great age of witch hunts in Europe and her colonies.

About 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft and about half of them were executed.

>> BOWEN: The accusations began to fly in Salem in January.

By June, there was this warrant for the execution of Bridget Bishop, the first woman to be hanged.

She'd initially been acquitted for a lack of evidence.

>> Witchcraft is a gendered crime.

About three-quarters of the people accused in Salem and elsewhere across time are women.

>> BOWEN: In Salem, they were subject to intense physical examinations that were neatly recorded.

>> A group of women and typically a male surgeon were instructed to inspect the accused for any skin abnormalities that might be seen as a sign of, you know, the devil's influence.

>> BOWEN: I know this is one of the few surviving remnants of a jail.

What were the circumstances in the jail like?

>> The jail was dirty, it was infested with vermin.

People were screaming.

Um, I think it was a pretty horrific place, um, to be.

>> BOWEN: The exhibition acquaints us with how Salem's villagers lived ordinary lives.

The accused embroidered, and they had arthritis.

>> George Jacobs was somebody who was accused and later executed.

And so he used two walking sticks to get around town.

And in the testimony of folks that, that accused him-- including his own granddaughter-- they mentioned as one of the ways in which he afflicted them was that his specter, or his ghost, would beat them with walking sticks and with his two canes.

>> BOWEN: By the spring of 1693, the hysteria faded.

Villagers began to stand up for their neighbors and the community collectively realized it had gone too far-- not that it would acknowledge as much, says Emerson Baker.

>> I believe that this is the first large-scale government cover-up in American history.

When Governor Phips ends the trials, he also issues a publication ban.

And basically says, you know, "It really wouldn't do "to have a lot of talk about this.

"And we have the one book here we want.

We have Cotton Mather," who is really the apologist for the government, "who's written this perfect book "describing how no innocent lives were lost, and we did everything right."

>> BOWEN: History, of course, would correct course.

And at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, days after the anniversary of when the final group of eight witches were hanged in September 1692, we found the victims were not forgotten.

How much does it strike you that people are still coming here placing flowers?

>> This story is very much alive with people today.

It resonates.

People know what it's like to be scapegoated, to be, to be victimized.

And they like to come here to pay their respects.

It's a pretty moving space.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: Compelled to think beyond big, shiny, attention-grabbing buildings, architect Michael Murphy has posed the question: what more can architecture do?

He is founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group, which has built schools in Rwanda, hospitals in Haiti, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

A look at the team's first decade in design is documented in the book Justice Is Beauty.

Michael Murphy, thank you so much for being with us.

Congratulations on the monograph.

>> Thank you, Jared.

Great to be here.

I really appreciate you taking some time.

>> BOWEN: Well, of course.

So in this monograph, we see ten years of MASS Design Group's work, buildings all over the world, big, small.

How do you, how do you distill what the essence, the spirit of your design is, especially harkening back to the title, Justice Is Beauty?

>> I think they all share a fundamental belief that the role of architecture is really to guide us towards spaces that deliver better health care, be that better air flow from, say, something like the coronavirus, inspire us to believe in something greater about ourselves and our community, a kind of spiritual awakening, and also sometimes address really fundamental problems in our countries, for example, around memorials or landscapes of injustice that we can actually address them through the built environment.

>> BOWEN: A lot of your projects, you go to a community, wherever it is in the world, sometimes places you've never been before.

You sit down in that community, you spend time, months there.

You get to know the community.

So in the end, who is the architect?

Or is there an architect, or is it the community?

>> I think that's a great question.

I think you see this in hospital design.

You know, if you don't talk to the nurses, you're never going to see, you know, who the real designers are.

These are the folks that are every day seeing that there's problems not only in the building, but in their, in their machines or in the tools that they have.

There is design happening everywhere.

And I think the role of the architect is really as a steward, as a listener, to try to find where those moments are and inspire them into something more dramatic and to also present not what people want, but what people need, to listen really intently and then to work with a team of folks who are trained in the built environment to say, "How does that translate to an infrastructure, "a spatial solution that addresses the needs "that we see being demanded, even nonverbally, from people within the community that we're serving?"

>> BOWEN: We've talked a lot about health.

Of course, we're in a health crisis now with the coronavirus, with this pandemic.

But you've already done work in communities and countries where there have there have been outbreaks of disease.

So, in a way, I guess you're kind of prepared for this, and as you take a step back, how well does architecture stand up, perhaps in places like the United States, against a pandemic?

>> Yeah, I mean, I think our experience in the past was a lot of times in pandemic-- you know, we worked with tuberculosis in Rwanda, we worked with cholera in Haiti, we worked with ebola in Liberia.

And I think in each of those cases, designing for the limit case condition of the surge, of the most problematic ultimate failure that we might see turns out to solve a lot of other problems as well.

Now, the whole world is aware.

Everybody in the world is aware that the buildings around us are keeping us from uncontaminated air and that that is a spatial awakening that I believe we're all undergoing right now that could radically transform not only our built environment around us, the buildings that are built, but what we demand of them.

>> BOWEN: Switching gears a little bit, you've designed some very indelible memorials worldwide, a Holocaust memorial and very, very notably here at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Other people know it as the memorial to victims of lynchings in this country.

How do you... looking at the lynching memorial in particular, how do you use space to, to begin to understand how to create something of that magnitude with all solemnity?

>> Well, first of all, you know, all credit for the Memorial for Peace and Justice goes to Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative.

I mean, they truly have transformed the way we understand our, our history of terrorism, racial terror, our history, the recreation and resubstantiation of racial difference.

And we took very seriously the journey that Bryan Stevenson, in his theory of change, talks about.

He talks about we must go through a transformation ourselves in order to understand the history of lynching.

And it's been really transformative for the way I understand buildings more generally, that they're... you know, they're not sculptures.

They're, they're experiences.

>> BOWEN: How much do you consider emotion with the memorials?

I'm, I'm desperate to get there myself.

I still haven't been there, but in the videos that I have seen, in photographs I've seen from your own book, you see the emotions on people's faces.

Is that something that you design around?

>> I think a successful memorial space allows you to connect directly to that individual, who in this case was brutally murdered, or in the public square, for example, connect to their name, try to find their history, understand them as a human being, and not just as a number, as a... as a someone listed on a spreadsheet, to try to see who they were as a human being, their dignity.

That's the hardest thing a memorial can do, but the other thing a memorial has to do is make us feel the weight of the infinite, that innumerable, unaccountable loss that we can't even fully reckon with.

And that's that sense of the hugeness of it, the volume of it.

And if it deals with both of those, you can connect directly and also feel that infinite sense, that innumerable weight, the overwhelmingness of it.

I believe the memorial is working on both planes.

>> BOWEN: Well, with that in mind, then take us through the experience that we will have right here in Boston with the memorial to Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King in the city where they met.

Your memorial will be on Boston Common.

>> Oh, I'm so glad you asked that.

We haven't really had a chance to talk about that.

But-- so let me do this.

I haven't done this before.

But, you know, first of all, what you're going to see when you come to the Common is this incredible sculpture by the amazing Hank Willis Thomas.

And the sculpture is gonna... is really, it's coming out of the ground, and it's two hands, two arms wrapped around each other.

And it's from an image of Coretta and Martin hugging and embracing each other after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, after it was announced.

And so you're going to see these arms, these elbows leaning on the ground, this huge sculpture that you can walk within.

It's going to be a beacon.

But as you get closer, we very, very deliberately designed the experience of the ground, and we have designed the plaza, which this sculpture sits upon, as a memorial to the 1965 Freedom March that King led with Ralph Abernathy and other great Boston civic leaders, civil rights leaders of the time.

And here we have a chance to say they hold us up.

And these great heroes are only possible because of so many of their voices and their activism.

And we give them reverence and give them space.

>> BOWEN: Michael Murphy, thank you so much.

Justice Is Beauty, it's a fantastic book.

Thank you for being with us.

>> I'm grateful for the time.

Thank you so much, Jared.

Thank you all.

♪ ♪ >> BOWEN: And that is all for this edition of Open Studio.

Next week, a family's dogged efforts to track down art stolen by the Nazis.

Plus, a peek inside a Boston mansion that is the last surviving home designed by Tiffany.

Until then, I'm Jared Bowen, thanks for joining us.

As always, you can visit us online at GBH.org/OpenStudio.

And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @OpenStudioGBH.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪