In Boston, history and solidarity
My take from the Bay State’s rally against hate
In early 1863, just months the Battle of Antietam — the bloodiest single day in American history — the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was established and hastily began recruiting. It was commonplace to expand the army and create new military regiments as the war intensified, but the 54th was unique from the other regiments. It was something entirely new: the 54th Massachusetts would be a regiment dedicated to the recruitment and training of free black Americans, authorized in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The regiment, under the command of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the son of prominent Bay State abolitionists, trained for a few months outside Boston before being deployed in the South. Their service culminated in the failed siege of Fort Wagner, outside of Charleston. Leading the charge, The 54th Massachusetts lost nearly half of their men in the assault, including Shaw, who was shot to death while urging his soldiers to push on into the fort.
Shaw was buried in a mass grave among his men, a decision intended to disgrace to colonel for leading black soldiers. According to Confederate Gen. Johnson Hagood, “Had [Shaw] been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the niggers that fell with him.”
The intended insult, however, had the opposite effect among those close to Shaw. His father wrote in a letter to the regiment on retrieving his son’s remains that, “We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave & devoted soldiers… Please to bear this in mind & also, let it be known, so that, even in case there should be an opportunity, his remains may not be disturbed.”
Despite some objections by Shaw’s parents for depicting the white colonel on horseback, elevated from his black infantrymen, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial was erected in 1897 directly across the street from the Massachusetts Statehouse, on the edge of the Boston Common.
On Saturday, in the vicinity of that same memorial and a week after right-wing protesters rallied around a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia — a demonstration which turned violent and ended in a deadly attack on counter protesters — roughly 40,000 people came out in Boston to rally against the racist “alt-right” movement which has dominated the American discourse since the 2016 presidential campaign. At the base of the Shaw memorial were two signs. One featured arrows pointed up. It read, “Freedom Fighters Here.” The other, adjacent to the first with arrows point to the right, toward a bandstand blocked off for right-wing protesters, read, “Nazi Scum Over There.”
A counter protest primarily in technicality — it had been called to rebuke a so-called “free speech” rally which garnered maybe 40–50 people at its peak — Saturday’s gathering at the Common turned into more than a repudiation of a few fringe conservatives. It resembled an event closer to the Women’s March, the worldwide demonstration against Donald Trump the day after his inauguration, as groups and people with varying specific agendas took broad aim at the most repulsive elements of the Right. “We don’t have to agree on everything to unify and fight nazis,” a Black Lives Matter organizers said, according to DigBoston’s Chris Faraone.
Two rows of metal barricades and about 200 feet stood between the right-wing-occupied bandstand and the thousands of protesters on all sides, with any “free speech” being drowned out by droning taunts of “We can’t hear you” coming from the masses.
The most prevalent sect represented in Boston on Saturday was the Left. Signs and banners for groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Black Lives Matter (BLM), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) littered the sea of protest.
“I’ve never seen the Left united like this,” the ISO’s Khury Petersen-Smith told a large gathering away from the bandstand. “The Left is united to defeat the Right.”
Members of the antifa movement marched through the Common, chanting, “A, anti, antifascista! A, anti, anticapitalista!”as “Black Lives Matter!” echoed through the 50-acre greenspace.
One attendee at the rally was a 91-year old World War II veteran named Lenny who’d never been to a protest before.
“My daughter said I shouldn’t come, she thought it’d be too dangerous for me,” he said. “I enlisted when I was 17. I had more to lose then than I do now.”
By 1 p.m. the gathering at the bandstand had dispersed, “driven out,” in the words of Boston City Council candidate Alex Golonka.
“The white supremacists all disappeared or didn’t show up, so I’d say we won the day!” wrote Massachusetts Rep. Mike Connolly.
While an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration, rife with folk songs, drum circles repeated whiffs of cannabis smoke through the hot summer air, some confrontation was reported, with nearly 30 arrested, primarily in the process of the police (roughly 500 cops were called in from the greater Boston area) escorting the right-wing protesters to protected exits.
At one point, protesters swarmed a right winger being escorted to a van parked behind the Shaw memorial. Protesters told me that he had left the bandstand as the rally dispersed, moved into the crowd, and began “causing a ruckus” before the police intervened. After the police shut him in the van, aggressive protesters began shaking the vehicle and slapping at the windows. I got around front to get a look at the right winger. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to blink. He just stared blankly, emotionless, into the distance. Police then began shouting to get away from the van, shoving people and ripping others from the vehicle, before it could make a hasty exit. Chants of “Who do you protect?,” “Shame, shame,” and “Get the fuck out,” grew louder as the police vacated, followed by “Whose streets? Our streets!”
But apart from few melees and confrontations, significant as they were, Saturday was a day of positivity in Boston.
“We have victory in Boston,” Lori Mattheiss said exuberantly. “We did it, we got them out. It’s a beautiful day.”
The events in Charlottesville will always carry a dark, tragic tone, at least in certain circles, in our history. The Confederate rebellion, its defense of slavery and the ensuing bloodshed it cost shares a similar, though magnified, legacy. But the legacy of the 54th Massachusetts, of the abolition movement, of leaders like Robert Gould Shaw, Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison, and the masses who made those movements come to fruition, is one of objective benevolence. And that, it appears, is the tone some 40,000 brave folks set on Saturday in Boston.
