using trademark/copyright symbols in struts

I've got a textarea that can take html as input, some of which include the special characters mentioned above. Everything works fine until our users try and use ™ and ® (imagine the symbols are hardcoded like #153; and #174;). All the other html tags work fine, except when mixed with those special codes. When the action form is submitted, I use StringEscapeUtils to escape the HTML. This seems to work okay until I try and render the input on another screen by running the string through the unescapeHTML method. Any html hardcoded into the string after one of those codes displays wrong. Does anyone ever parse input w/those codes correctly? If so, did you use some other API, aside from StringEscapeUtils?

Thanks to anyone for help.