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SVCS 33 Harrison Av. 5th. Floor Boston, MA 02111 Postal address: P.O. Box 381323 Cambridge, MA 02238-1323 |
Memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston The next meeting of the SVCS is scheduled for Tuesday, May 26th, 2009, 6:00 pm. at the Democracy Center, 45 Mt. Auburn, Cambridge, near Harvard Square. 08/24/2007 [DOCUMENTS] - (Speech delivered by Jennifer Dowdell on behalf of Dorotea Manuela of the Boston May Day Coalition who couldn't attend the rally of 8/23/07 due to illness) ... A reporter for the Boston Transcript commented, “theres no story… just a couple of wops in a jam”! Some jurors, during the trial, openly expressed hostility toward the defendants.
08/24/2007 [DOCUMENTS] - (Text of the speech delivered by Pasqualino Colombaro on 8/23/07 at the memorial rally held at the Langone Park in the North End of Boston.)
08/23/2007 [DOCUMENTS] - Op-Ed by ANDREA CAMILLERI, Published by the New York Times, August 23, 2007.
by Joseph E. Mulligan
The Community Church of Boston is proud to have one of three existing castings of the Sacco-Vanzetti memorial bas relief by noted sculptor Gutzon Borglum, creator of the Mount Rushmore presidential sculpture in South Dakota. The sculpture is on display in Lothrop Auditorium on the second floor of the Community Church Center at 565 Boylston Street in Copley Square, Boston. To read the story behind this sculpture written by Carol Adams and Rev. David Carl Olson click on the title of this article. The following organizations (in alphabetical order) endorsed the actitivies to commemorate Sacco & Vanzetti's 80th anniversary of their wrongful execution:
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‘WHO WERE THOSE PEOPLE?’ historian Howard Zinn asked a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society in November 2008. Zinn had just delivered a lecture for the benefit of the Society on ‘The Meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti’ to a crowd of at least 250 people overflowing the Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was taken aback that interest in the case was still alive. ‘I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, how many people are still interested in Sacco and Vanzetti? Maybe seven? Ten? Fifteen? I can’t even—but this place is full!’ Accustomed to smaller crowds composed of all the same familiar radical characters of Greater Boston, I, myself, was surprised at the size of the diverse and intergenerational crowd.
On November 7, 2008, the noted historian and activist Howard Zinn offered a lecture on “The Meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti” at the Dante Alighieri Society Italian Cultural Center, in Cambridge, MA. Nearly 250 people attended the event, sponsored by the Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society (SVCS) and graciously hosted by the Dante Alighieri Society.
On Saturday, August 23rd, Boston remembered the 81st anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and committed anarchists whose trial is widely regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history. Calling attention to the continued repression of immigrants and radicals, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society (SVCS) gathered in Copley Square at 1PM, followed by a march to the North End at 3PM, which concluded with a rally at 5PM at the Paul Revere Mall, 416 Hanover Street featuring a number of speakers, including Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, Pasqualino Colombaro, Dorotea Manuela, and Molly Adelstein.
We are glad to present (space permitting) music dedicated to the memory and the struggle of Sacco and Vanzetti. We encourage musicians to send us their original work regarding this matter. In the case of published and available material for distribution we might include a few representative songs from the album and point the reader to the place where they can obtain the album, if available. The struggle and the ultimate assassination by the state of Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 has inspired musicians to write songs about them throughout the world. We know that they continue to inspire musicians today.
The primary sources for this bibliography have been the WorldCat database, Anne Folger Decker's extensive bibliography, and the Anarchist Archives Project collection. Other sources have included bibliographies from a number of books and searches on the internet. Source(s) for entries are available upon request.
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and anarchists. They were accused of the murder of a shoe factory paymaster and guard and were convicted in 1921 in an atmosphere of antiradical an racist hysteria. In 1927 they were executed in Boston despite widespread belief in their innocence and a huge movement protesting the sentence.
The year 2007 marked the 80th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 2006, a dedicated group of activists carried out a parade from the Stony Brook Park in Jamaica Plain to the Forest Hills Cemetery where the bodies of Sacco & Vanzetti were cremated after their execution. (To watch a 5-min clip prepared by RAI TV Italy 
12/02/2007 [NEWS] - Nearly 40 people braved the Boston cold on Saturday, December 1st. 2007, to unveil and rededicate a historical marker for Sacco and Vanzetti in the North End. The plaque was reinstalled at 256 Hanover Street, the place where the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee functioned from 1925 to 1927. An original plaque had been installed there in 1976, during the bicentennial of the U.S. independence, as part of the Freedom Trail. Early in the 80s, however, the plaque disappeared. The Sacco and Vanzetti Society formed this year to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti decided to correct this situation and now there is a new plaque in place with the original wording and marking as it was in 1976.
On November 5, 2007 the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park, built on top of the "big dig", was officially opened to the public. The opening ceremony was attended by Governor Deval Patrick and Senator Edward Kennedy. According to the note in The Globe, "The North End park opened on Monday during a ceremony, which took part on the south side of Hanover Street between Cross Street and the Surface Artery.
A low-definition video of the march in Boston to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti is available now on this website. This video is in windows media player format only. If you would like to have a copy of the video in DVD please email info[@]saccoandvanzetti.org (don't use the brackets in the address). Please be adviced that the size of the file is 53 megabytes.
08/30/2007 [NEWS] - Amidst a seeming wave of domestic terrorism, the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, exploded into what could arguably be described as the trial of the century. Earlier that year, a plot had been exposed in which thirty bombs, disguised as free samples from the Gimbels department store, had been sent to such pillars of American capitalism as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, as well as to U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer was responsible for the prosecution and deportation of thousands of radicals, including labor organizers, peace advocates, and other “undesirables.” Although the plot had not succeeded for lack of sufficient postage, in the resulting atmosphere of shock, fear, and repression, two working-class Italian Americans with anarchist connections, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, were not only accused of the crime, but also became scapegoats in the reaction to the supposed threat of the combined forces of labor unrest, new waves of immigration, and the advance of the “red menace” that followed the end of World War I.
08/25/2007 [NEWS] - Continuing with the program designed by the Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society a group of talented artists presented their work in homage to Sacco and Vanzetti, executed by the State of Massachusetts 80 years ago. The event took place at the Community Church of Boston, at its main room where the bas-relief of Sacco and Vanzetti is proudly displayed. ...
08/24/2007 [NEWS] - A group of about 70 people marched through the streets of Boston yesterday to the chants of "Sacco and Vanzetti: We Will Not Forget!". Carrying banners that made the historical links between the repression and judicial murder of these two anarchist workers in 1927 and the repression today we could see the banners that carried the messages: "You can kill us, but you cannot kill the Idea!, "Stop the raids and deportations!", "Arab workers are not our enemy!", "No worker is illegal!", "Sacco and Vanzetti live!".
The Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty (MCADP) marked the eightieth anniversary of the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, on August 23, 2007 with a program that begun at 11:00 a.m., in front of the Paul Revere statue (in the Prado) at the Paul Revere Mall, Hanover Street in the North End.
At the initiative of Boston City Councillor Felix Arroyo, and co-sponsored by Stephen Murphy and Chuck Turner, the Council passed a resolution declaring "that the Boston City Council does hereby extend its admiration and congratulations to the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society, and in honor of its many contributions, does hereby declare August 23, 2007, Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day in the City of Boston". The original, sealed document was presented to the Society during the rally at the Langone Park in the North End of Boston.
08/21/2007 [NEWS] - Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the writer Bruce Watson presented his book "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind", published by the Penguin Group, from New York. Watson is an award-winning journalist whose articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, and Yankee magazine. The writer currently lives in Leverett, Massachusetts, although he prided during his talk to "have been born in California".
Erich Mühsam wrote Reasons of State: A Memorial to Sacco and Vanzetti on the first anniversary of their execution. CR Edmonston has sent us his recent English translation of the play and we are happy to have the opportunity to make it available to you.
There is a selection of independent videos posted on YouTube in memory of Sacco and Vanzetti in different languages. The fact that people around the world still remembers the injustice of the so-called judicial murder of the two anarchists is evidence that they didn't die in vain.
The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti moved many, including the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and novelist John Dos Passos, to express their sense of outrage at the injustice done to these men in verse. A number of these poems were collected by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney and published in 1928 as America Arraigned! This slim volume included poems penned either during the seven years the two men spent behind bars or in the months after their "judicial murders." All the poems selected, with the exception of one, are taken from America Arraigned! We've limited our selections to those written either on the day the executions or soon after. And while Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, "Justice Denied in Massachusetts", also appeared in the Trent and Cheyney collection, the version reproduced here is from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, where it first appeared in book form. To see our selection of poems 
Boston, July 15, 2007. In 1997 (exactly August 23) a 10-years younger Thomas Menino received as Mayor of Boston a relief of Sacco and Vanzetti sculpted by the famous author of the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial depicting the first 150 years of independent history of the U.S. with the likeness of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. The artist's name was (John) Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. The massive project in Mt. Rushmore sharply contrasts with the 7-foot size of the Sacco and Vanzetti relief that reads:
Until sometime in the 1980s, a plaque to the right of the entrance to 256 Hanover Street in Boston's North End indicated the former site of the offices of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee. The plaque was one of a number of historical markers put up by the City of Boston in 1976 and was located along the Freedom Trail.
Fifty years after the executions of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts set up a panel to judge the fairness of the trial, and the conclusion was that the two men had not received a fair trial. This aroused a minor storm in Boston.