## Memory, Commemoration, and What Gets Passed Along
The NPS maintains biographical pages for Robert Smalls and for at least two of the other participants in the escape. South Carolina observes Robert Smalls Day on May 13 — the anniversary of the escape — as of 2023. There is a statue at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. There is a monument at his grave at Tabernacle Baptist Church. A 2024 bill signed by the governor authorizes a statue at the South Carolina State House.
The naval vessel USS Chancellorsville was renamed the USS Robert Smalls in 2023, a naming that put his name on an active United States Navy ship for the first time since Camp Robert Smalls, the World War II training facility for Black Navy recruits, operated under his name in the 1940s. A United States Army vessel, the USAV Major General Robert Smalls, commissioned in 2004, was the first Army ship named for an African American.
His escape has been the subject of several books. Cate Lineberry’s Be Free or Die (2017) is among the recent accounts drawing on original research. Andrew Billingsley’s Yearning to Breathe Free (2007) covers Smalls’s full life. Andrew Dray’s Capitol Men (2008) situates him within the broader story of Black congressional leadership in the Reconstruction era. Historian Miller’s Gullah Statesman (1995) offers focused treatment of his political career. Uya’s From Slavery to Political Service (1971) is an earlier scholarly account.
Harper’s Weekly ran an illustration of Smalls in June 1862, making him a recognizable figure in the Northern public’s understanding of the war’s Black participants. The Charleston Courier, the New-York Tribune, and the New York Herald all covered the escape in its immediate aftermath. The story was not suppressed in his lifetime. What happened to its place in public memory is more a reflection of broader patterns in how American history was taught and commemorated in the century following Reconstruction than of any single act of erasure.