Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society Mission

PREAMBLE

"This man, [Vanzetti] although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions."

- Judge Webster Thayer
The trial and execution of radical Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti remain among the most infamous injustices in the history of the American criminal justice system. To read the impassioned writings of Sacco and Vanzetti is to understand why the United States government wanted the two agitators dead. However, when presented with a lack of any concrete evidence of their guilt in the matter of a robbery and shooting, Judge Thayer and the prosecution instead stirred up the rampant anti-Italian, anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist hatred of the era to convict the two men and eventually put them to death in the electric chair.

The Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society preserves the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti and their struggle to promote anarchism and a free society. We seek to raise awareness and action about the death penalty, state oppression, class persecution, politically persecuted prisoners, oppression of Indigenous peoples, and the scapegoating of immigrants. We seek to carry on the struggles waged by Sacco and Vanzetti and their comrades. We work to engage in the debate around historical memory and today's society, commemorating and centering the hopes, dreams, and lives of working-class and other dominated peoples, as a means of contributing to a future of justice, freedom, and equality.