How Pride Month Began at Stonewall on the Night the Queers Fought Back

  

The Stonewall was a dive bar operated by the Mob in New York's Greenwich Village.  It's patrons were outcasts and the most flamboyant of a rough streets scene--young hustlers, drag queens, butch lesbians.  It was also an inter-racial scene that attracted police attention.  Wealthier and more respectable Gays gathered and partied more discretely in posh clubs that authorities usually ignored.

Fifty-seven years ago on the night of June 27, 1969 something snapped when New York City Police made one of their regular raids on a Gay bar.  Instead of meekly submitting to arrest, the denizens of the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar operated by the Mafia and patronized by the most marginalized of folks—homeless street kid hustlers, drag queens, butch dikes, and others—resisted when police started to arrest them. 

The raid was conducted by a small team of detectives and uniformed officers including women led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine of the Public Morals Squad.  

 

                                                      The Stonewall Inn in 1969 looked just as seedy as it was.

For some reason patrons refused to follow the familiar procedure of such raids—allowing restroom inspections of individuals in women’s clothing to determine if they were men and providing identification upon request.  Dumfounded by resistance, police called for backup and patrol wagons.  There was some scuffling inside. 

Meanwhile, some patrons who had been released were joined by passersby outside the bar.  The crowd quickly swelled.  Taunts and jeers were exchanged between the police and crowd.  The crowd began to interfere as drag queens were led to the wagons.  When Betty, a lesbian made several unsuccessful attempts to escape, she was beaten and cried out to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?” 

 

When a lesbian named Betty repeatedly tried to break away from custody and was roughly handled by several cops she famously pleaded, "Why don't you guys do something?"  It became the Remember the Alamo battle cry of a movement.  

That ignited the crowd which began pelting police with beer cans, coins, and rubble from a nearby construction site.  They attacked the wagons, freeing some of those arrested.  Police retreated into the bar and barricaded themselves.  They grabbed some members of the crowd as they went, including folk singer Dave Van Ronk who was playing at a nearby club and came out to investigate the ruckus, and Howard Smith, a writer for the Village Voice.

Observers reported that the most aggressive members of the crowd were the young street kids.  They used an uprooted parking meter as a ram to try and break down the doors of the bar and crashed through the plywood covered windows.  When they got in police drew their pistols and threatened to shoot while rioters used lighter fluid to start a fire.  

 

 Drag queens and transgender women of color played leading roles in the resistance in the nights that followed the police raid. 

The Fire Department responded as the crowd outside grew to hundreds.  The Tactical Police Force (TPF) arrived in riot gear to rescue the besieged officers in the saloon.  They formed a phalanx and moved up the street being blocked and taunted by an impromptu kick line of drag queens and “sissies.” 

We now know that one of the drag queens was Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a formerly incarcerated Transgender Black. who was featured in a recent documentary.   

Rioters and police played a brand of violent tag around the narrow streets of the Village until after 4 AM. 

Later that morning the riots were front page news. 

And they were not over.  The next night even larger crowds gathered in front of the building and the fighting continued.  Despite heavy rain there were sporadic eruptions over the next two nights. 

Meanwhile the Gay community, which had been largely unorganized except for the small Mattachine Society which advocated a campaign to educate the public that Homosexuals were “normal,” began to meet and debate tactics.  Thousands of fliers were printed for a Wednesday march. 

The original rebellion, which had been entirely spontaneous, was already laying the groundwork for a new, open and defiant Gay movement.  Taking cues from the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, which were also confronting authorities with a new militancy, and taking advantage of the traditional anti-establishment radicalism of the Village, the beginning of a new movement was taking place.  

 

Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender Black woman, is now being recognized and celebrated as the person who threw the first brick at police on the night of the Stonewall uprising.  

On Wednesday the Village Voice—the most liberal paper in New York—carried a harshly critical piece on the riots describing participants as “forces of faggotry.”  Angry demonstrators descended on the Voice office that night and threatened to burn it down.  Other violent confrontations erupted in the neighborhood as police tried to stop marchers, this time for the first time carrying signs and “making demands.” 

That was the last night of disturbances, but things changed quickly over the next year.  Two new militant Gay organizations emerged in New York, the Gay Liberation Front, which allied itself with the broader radical movement, and the Gay Activists Alliance which advocated a focused campaign demanding an end to police harassment and for broader rights for Gays. 

Similar or allied groups sprang up in major cities and college towns across the country.  New Yorkers founded three new newspapers, Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power which soon had press runs of 2,000 to 2,500.  Again, similar publications were started across the country. 

 

The Christopher Street March on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion is considered the founding event for the Gay Pride marches now held internationally. 

On June 28, 1970, the anniversary of what was being called the Stonewall Rebellion was marked by Christopher Street Liberation Day and a 51-block march from the Village to Central Park with thousands of marchers filling the streets.  Marches were also held in Chicago and Los Angeles. 

These became the Gay Pride Marches and annual events across the country. An indication of how accepted and mainstream Gay rights have become, at least in big cities, is that there are official floats sponsored by city sports teams. Politicians galore and all of the major media turn out to court the potent Gay vote and consumer demographic. 

But by 2019 Gay Pride Parades also reflected a community increasingly under siege by a well-oiled and funded backlash led by religious zealots and abetted by the radicalized Republican Party eager to pander to a big part of its base.  With Republicans in complete control of many governorships and State houses rafts of anti-Gay legislation have been enacted or proposed.  

 

This Rainbow Flag update by Danial Quasar is one of the more popular versions that add recognition to the transgender community and People of Color.   

The Supreme Court smiled on so-called religious liberty grounds for refusing service to Gays, lesbians, and transgender folk but it pleasantly surprised many by affirming the legality of marriage equality. 

The Court, moved to void Roe v. Wade guarantees for the right to abortions.  Although Chief Justice Roberts tried to assure everyone the decision, which argued there is no Federal right to “equal protection under the law,” Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called for the same standard to be used to strike down Marriage Equality, transgender rights, and a slew of other long-established protections.

So, it was not a surprise that the LGBTQ community which enthusiastically joined in the BLM marches or that the debt owed to Black transgender women, drag queens, and butch dikes in the original Stonewall uprising was finally recognized and celebrated.  

In 2022 after the disruptions of the Coronavirus pandemic, parades rallied for abortion rights and body autonomy for all.  Trump 2.0 has launched a broad attack under the guise of its anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy, threatening and black mailing corporate supporters, schools and colleges, and local government to cancel sponsorships.  Federal agencies scrubbed web page content and the MAGA man himself pointedly issued no Pride proclamation. 

 

2023 Pride events took the fight for transgender rights with a new militancy.  This year that emphasis will be ramped up.  Will corporate sponsors like Nordstrom'sshown here knckle under to MAGA pressure?  Stay tuned.

As a result, 56 years after the fact Pride Month has returned to its roots—Resistance!

 

Six Years Ago Today—To Matilda Motoko Holmes on Her Birth

  

Matilda, you were brand new. 

Note—Granddaughter Matilda was born on Sunday, May 31, 2020—traditional Memorial Day that year—at 10:40 am.  That was just in time for me to make the exciting announcement in the virtual coffee hour following Tree of Life UU Congregation Coronavirus Zoom services.  How could I forget. 

To Matilda Motoko Holmes on Your Birth

May 31, 2020

I understand you can’t read this.  You have been very busy getting born, learning how to breathe and such.  Hopefully your mother will keep a copy of this to share with you on some appropriate birthday a few years from now.

On the day you were born the sky was crystal blue and everything was lush green bursting with young life to greet you like the young ducklings on the pond and bunnies in their burrows.  The Web of All Existence greeted you.

 

Your Mom and Dad were there, of course.  

It couldn’t have happened without them.  And frankly you were a lot of work to get born.  It was even a little scary but your new life prevailed.  You were welcomed in the arms of love.

A whole tribe waits anxiously to greet you—two grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, and an odd old Papa.  And there is your second Cousin Sienna who is just one year older than you and will be your playmate and guide for years of coming adventures.  And did I mention the dogs Piper and Ginger who will protect you from marauding pirates and Piper at least will curl up to sleep with you.

                         Some of your clan--Papa, your Mom, Aunt Heather, Grandma, and Aunt Carolynne.  There are lots more.

You will come home in a couple of days or so with your Mom to Grandma Kathy and Papa’s little house.  It will be your first home.  You will have others, but that first one is very special.  Grandma will spoil and play with you.  Papa will take you on his walks—the stroller is ready to be your carriage into the world—and looks forward to singing strange lullabies to you and reading books with you when you are a little older.

The day you were born used to be Memorial Day before that holiday got moved.  And in a way that connects you to two great grandfathers, Papa Art Brady and Papa Willard Murfin who were soldiers in World War II which will be 100 years past when you are a young woman.  In fact, you are connected to ancestors on both sides of your family whose interesting lives made yours possible.  You are part of a great river of humanity.

Beyond your kin and home there are many friends waiting to greet you and support you on your life journey—your folks’ friends, your whole neighborhood, the Sisters Grandma Kathy works with, and the good people at Papa’s church.  It takes a village to raise a child and you have many villagers to guide you.

The day you were born everyone wore masks.

But I am sorry, not everything was pixie dust and unicorns on the day you were born.  The wide world was a freighting mess.  You were born in the middle of the great Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 which is why no one but your Mom and Dad could be with you in the hospital.  Even after you get home many of your clan will have to wait to see you and play pass the baby until it is safe.  People will wear masks on their faces.  They are scared for themselves—and for you.

Climate change—I am sure you will have heard of it when you can finally read this—is making over the world.  Where you live it will be hotter and wetter, snowier in the winter, apt to big, dangerous storms.  Everything will change from the way things once were.  Your parents and grandparents will have to do everything they can to keep that change from being catastrophic.

The country you live in is riven by bitter division.  Ominous forces are at work.  The free democracy of your parents and ancestors is threatened.  Fascism—I am sorry you will have to learn what that is—looms and some long for a civil war.  Many good people, however, are doing everything they can to prevent that and to leave you a free and safe country.  But it will be a struggle.  

The day you were born Papa was here to help make the world better for you. 

Even sadder, on the day you were born cities across America were torn by demonstrations, protests, riots, looting, and violence.  All because Black people in this country are not safe from violent assault by police and because a long sad history of white oppression has been unmasked again.  Your world will not be safe until Black children are safe.

That is why Papa on the day you were born went to Woodstock to hold a sign that said Black Lives Matter and march around the Square with hundreds of others.  He pledges to spend the rest of his life fighting to give you a better world than the one in which you were born.

                                Matilda opts for bold fashion choices these days.

The ancient Chinese had a curse—“May you live in interesting times.”  You were born on a day in the middle of interesting times.  Bless you as you make your way through them.

With all the love in the world,

Papa

Remembering George Floyd and Minneapolis—National Poetry Month 2026

During the trial of former cop Derek Chauvin accused on kneeling on George Floyds neck and killing him. Despite massive security and media-stoked fears of a rampage demonstrations were angry, massive, and determined, but peaceful.  

The latest Resistance movement in Minnesota defending immigrant neighbors from ICE and Border Patrol agents and protesting the murders of Renee Nichole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti has inspired and instructed the world.  But that movement was made possible by the experience of the death-by-cop of George Floyd and the lessons learned about communal solidarity and rapid community mobilizations.

Floyd was an African American man who was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis,  during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected he used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020. One of four police officers who arrived on the scene, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd's neck and back for over nine minutes, fatally asphyxiating him. After his murder, protests against police brutality, especially toward Black people, quickly spread nationally and then globally. His dying words became a rallying slogan: "I can't breathe".

The initial response was spontaneous, explosive and marked by rioting, rampaging, and violent clashes with the police.  But the anger struck nerves around the U.S. in the wake of a series of police shootings, murders, and atrocities.  Protestors in the street began organizing themselves.  

The New York Times described the events in the wake of Floyd's murder and the video that circulated of it as "the largest protests in the United States since the Civil Rights Era." Calls to defund and abolish the police were widespread. The protests became the first civil disorder event to exceed $1 billion in losses to the insurance industry.

The Black Lives Matter movement dominated urban streets and the national debate until the Coronavirus national shut down.  Minnesotans learned how to respond by lessons learned back then.

Poets, of course, commented on George Floyd’s murder and the broken system it exposed from the beginning here are just three examples I picked from hundreds.

Tori Derricotte.

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan on April 12, 1941.  Her family life was marked by death, abuse, pain, and racism.  Her Roman Catholic schooling and light skin often made her feel alienated and guilty. She received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University.  She is a professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh and won a 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African-American poets.  Derricotte’s books of poetry include The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit; Natural Birth (1983), Captivity (1989), Tender (1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011).

Why I Don’t Write About George Floyd

Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body

 

—Toi Derricotte

Olive Senior.

Olive Senior shared poems on Twitter (X) throughout the Coronavirus pandemic in a series called Pandemic Poetry. You can check those out at @olivesenior. B for Breathe was first published as part of Pandemic Poems.

Senior is a Jamaican-Canadian writer and the author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her collection Over the Roofs of the World was shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. In 2019, Senior delivered the prestigious Margaret Laurence Lecture. Her children’s picture book Boonoonoonous Hair was illustrated by Laura James.

B for Breathe

It takes one’s breath away: a man dying during a pandemic that

takes away one’s breath, no ventilator but one brave spectator,

recording 

 

his last breath, his need please

 

somebody

 

taking the knee on the neck from men who from birth breathed in

tainted air, imbibed a foul history, burning crosses

 

still smouldering

 

i can’t breathe

 

like the hot breath of anger consuming the cities

that inhaled this before

this white heat this

burning sensation in the throats of

the numerous ones held down and 

 

mama

mama

i can’t

 

Come on, George Floyd, breathe in the timeless rhythm of Mother

Earth waiting for you, for all her lost children, for justice

 

I’m through

I’m through

 

—Olive Senior

Jonathon Peterson a/k/a  JP da Poet

Jonathon Peterson is an Alabama spoken word artist and poetry slam performer who was profiled in the Montgomery Advertiser for this poem when the murder of George Floyd seemed like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He writes and performs under the name JP da Poet.  As the father of a son the accumulated pain of injustice after injustice is more acute.

If Black Lives Mattered

Before I wrote this poem, I sat with my pen in my hand for eight minutes and 46 seconds,

Then second guessed myself like maybe I got the time wrong cause this just seems too long for a man to have a knee on his neck,

I checked time again on impulse, pulse racing, chasing a logical explanation for the asphyxiation of another Black man at the hands of the men in blue who swore to protect and serve.

I heard him sayin’ he can’t breathe.

To me, logically that meant air wasn't properly reaching his lungs, he hung on as long as he could,

But when the weight of the world's wicked ways weighs on your throat you would choke, too.

The situation is so sad, rest in peace George Floyd.

And it seems it happens too often.

They offed 10 in the last two months.

An aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, we learned her name after shot in her home playin’ video games in front of her nephew who had to watch his loved one killed by someone he thought were the good guys.

I try to imagine how an EMT asleep in her home shot after shocked a no-knock warrant warranted police to force entry in her home in the middle of the night,

I fight to find the logic in justification of the situation. Breonna Taylor, gone to soon.

It’s messed up we live in a society where in so many cases like Kalief Browder were treated guilty until proven innocent.

With no evidence even evident somehow we’re still prime suspect.

The system is backwards and broken,

And I’m not joking or jivin’ when I say simply for ridin’ with an improper signal can give off a signal for a cop,

To hold you for an hourlong traffic stop.

Enough is enough when I saw my sister body-slammed in handcuffs,

And yes, I can attest with Sandra Bland's family,

That that was such an unnecessary tragedy.

But you see,

But you see, when in broad daylight for a broken taillight a brother named Walter Scott can be shot in the back on video with evidence planted. 

Should finally show what we perceived as straight is actually slanted,

And as crooked as some of these politicians.

And through repetition time and time again,

We’re losing our Black men to the pen not for the offense,

But at the hands of a great conviction rate.

Prosecutor turns persecutor,

If you don't have enough money for bond then you are merely a pawn in this game when we are the weakest pieces.

 

You see Black lives mattering started tiptoeing on that fine line around the time they introduced court fines and minimum sentencing guidelines.

And how is it that the time we get is always what we deserve?

But the same predicament, different pigment, gets them off with time served is just not fair.

But you see fairness,

Fairness took its last breath asking for reprieve using the words “I can't breathe,” by George Floyd or Eric Garner,

Another brother whose only crime was selling short Newports, no weapon.

Mike Brown gunned down.

Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice,

Whatever they did, they were still some kids who deserve to live,

If Black lives mattered,

Then why are our hearts being shattered as our ashes are being scattered into the winds of injustice.

I want you to take a second and close your eye,

For real do it close your eyes.

Now imagine you've been confined to a 8-by-5 for the last 30 years of your life.

Now take a deep breath.

What if I told you your sentence was death for a crime you did not do.

 

Look up the story, it's really true.

Right here in Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton could have been anyone of you.

And that’s as real as the man’s missed appeals for not copping to a plea deal,

If Black lives mattered.

If Black lives mattered then Laquan McDonald wouldn’t have received one less bullet in his body than he got the number of candles on his last birthday cake.

And as we lay in the wake of the Flint water tragedy,

These modern-day catastrophes from Freddie Gray back to the Jena 6,

It literally makes me sick to even know I have to pen this.

But let me ask you a question, 

If Black lives matter then please tell me why our hearts are still being shattered as our ashes are still being scattered into the winds of injustice?

 

—JP da Poet

Blood on the Snow--How the Boston Massacre Looks a Lot Like the Cases that Inspired Black Lives Matter

Blood on the snow in Boston.

Some parts of the tale of the so-called Boston Massacre, an iconic moment in pre-Revolutionary colonial history that used to be familiar to any school child echo in today’s world.  All of the ingredients—a rowdy protest boiling spontaneously up from streets where outrage over long time grievances sparked violence over a trivial incident and was met by either firm and appropriate action by responsible authorities or was a vicious and violent over reaction depending on the political bias of the observer.  And not only was the first victim a Black man who became a symbol of rebellion, but his uniformed killers were let off virtually Scot free at a trial on the flimsiest and most arcane of grounds.  Sounds like the familiar arc of a police slaying of an unarmed youth, the kind of all-to-common occurrence that fed the Black Lives Matter movement.

It was a miserable night in Boston in 1770.  What else would you expect on March 5 in the midst of the Little Ice Age which chilled Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America for nearly two centuries?  A nasty wind whipped across the harbor, a few flakes of snow stung exposed fresh.  Old snow and ice were pushed up against buildings turning gray with the soot from a few thousand hearth fires.

A lone English soldier, Private Hugh White of the 29th Regiment of Foot had the bad luck to draw sentry duty outside of the Customs House on King’s Street that night.  The building was a symbol of unfair taxation without representation and oppression to the people of the city.  Customs collectors had been harassed for attempting to enforce the unpopular Townsend Duties and for seizing ships of leading merchants like John Hancock for smuggling, a mainstay of the local economy.  So, the building needed protection.

The bright red coat of an English private soldier, while colorful, was entirely unsuitable for the harsh New England winter.  Private White undoubtedly shivered in misery.  His life was made worse by the taunting by local toughs, mostly apprentices and day laborers loitering about.  One of them, Edward Garrick, a wig maker’s apprentice, mocked a passing British officer, Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch, for not paying a bill due his master.  Goldfinch ignored the jeers and in fact had settled his account that very afternoon.  But White scolded Garrick for insulting an officer.  The two exchanged heated words.  White struck Garrick with the butt of his musket. A small crowd gathered and began pelting the soldier with snow and ice balls. 

19-year-old bookseller Henry Knox made his bow in the history books by warning besieged Private White and later Captain Preston of the dangerous consequences of opening fire. In five years, he would be General Washington's trusted commander of artillery and the man who hauled the heavy artillery from overland from Ft. Ticonderoga setting the stage for the British evacuation of Boston.  Still later he would later be Washington's Secretary of War.

When White leveled his musket against his taunters, Henry Knox, a corpulent 19-year-old bookseller warned him not to shoot because, “if he fire, he must die.”  White refrained from shooting but the crowd on the street grew as church bells rang in alarm.  Someone thought of sending to nearby barracks for reinforcements for the now besieged White who had retreated to the steps of the Custom House with the door at his back.

Things were about to go from bad to worse.

Four regiments of troops were sent to Boston in 1768, more than were ever stationed there when its very existence was threatened by possible invasion during the French and Indian Wars, after the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned the Crown for relief from the Townsend Duties and circulated letters of other colonial legislatures asking for support in the protest.  The Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston officially asked for troops to protect him after some of his officers were manhandled and abused.

Four regiments were dispatched as a show of force.  That was about 4,000 men plus the wives and children of many of them, officers and enlisted alike, servants, and the inevitable hangers-on to any army.  The city of Boston boasted only 16,000 residents and a few thousand more resided in nearby villages.  Such a large force deployed among so few civilians, most of them hostile to their presence, led to inevitable friction.

Although two of the regiments had been withdrawn, soldiers of the remaining two were involved in a number of incidents over that winter.  In addition to hostility to the policy that dispatched them, minor personal disputes like the Captain’s late payment to a wig maker, irked the population.  So did the inevitable attention to the local girls by the soldiers, which was often returned by lasses enamored of a dashing uniform. 

A serious bone of contention was the employment of off duty soldiers at the rope walk, Boston’s biggest industrial concern and a main employer of unskilled and casual labor.  The soldiers were working for less than locals and costing many of them jobs.  Wives of several soldiers publicly scolded colonists.  That very afternoon one had promised that the troops would wet their bayonets on troublemakers.

Back at the Customs House, White was finally relieved by a corporal and six private soldiers under the personal command of Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch who declined to trust a junior lieutenant with the sensitive assignment.  As they drew close to the Customs House where the angry crowd had grown to over a hundred, Knox again warned the Captain of the awful consequences if his men fired.  Preston reportedly told him, “I am aware of it.”

This 19th Century engraving featured the death of Crispus Attucks.  It also depicted Captain Preston ordering a disciplined volley.

Once at the Customs House Preston had his men load and prime their muskets and form a semi-circle in front of Private White and the door.  They faced a crowd now swollen by further reinforcements, many of them armed with cudgels and brick bats.  In the very front of the mob, just feet away from Captain Preston who took up a position in front of his men, was a dark-skinned man named Crispus Attucks.

Not much is known about Attucks, not even whether he was a slave, an escaped slave, or a freeman.  He worked as a sailor on coastal traders and on the docks.  He was described as Mulato but was known to have both African and Native American Wampanoag ancestry.  Although there were not many Blacks in Boston, their presence was not that unusual.  They mixed casually and freely with the lowest classes of White Bostonians—the day laborers, indentured servants, and apprentice boys.

As Attucks and the crowd pressed forward, Preston had his men level their muskets but ordered them to hold their fire.  He ordered the mob to disperse.  They responded with taunts of “go ahead and fire.”  Preston said that the troops would not fire “except on his order” and made the point of standing in front of his men’s guns.

From out of the crowd someone hit Private Hugh Montgomery on the arm with a clump of ice or in other accounts he was struck by a cudgel.  Montgomery fell to the ground, although he may simply have lost his footing on the ice and lost his musket.  He grabbed the gun and scrambled to his feet.  Enraged, he leveled his gun at the nearest man, Atticus, and fired yelling “Damn you, fire!” to his fellow soldiers.

Attucks crumpled to the ground mortally wounded.  There was a pause of a few seconds and then a ragged, un-coordinated volley went off from the troops.  The only command Preston gave was a desperate order to cease fire.

Eleven men were hit by fire indicating that some may have been injured by the same round or that some soldiers had time to re-load and fire. In addition to Attucks rope maker Samuel Gray and mariner James Caldwel died on the cobblestones.  Seventeen-year-old ivory turner apprentice Samuel Maverick standing near the rear of the crowd was struck by a ricocheting fragment and died a few hours later. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant died of his wounds two weeks later.

The crowd retreated to near-by streets but continued to grow.  Preston called out the entire regiment for protection and withdrew his squad to the barracks. 

Massachusetts born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the angry mob that surrounded the State House.

An angry mob descended on the near-by State House which was ringed with troops for protection.  Massachusetts-born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the crowd by addressing them from the relative safety of a balcony.  He promised a thorough and prompt investigation.  After a few hours the crowd drifted away.

Local malcontents, becoming known loosely as Patriots, were quick to use the slaughter to raise a hue and cry against the Townsend Duties and to the onerous virtual military occupation of their city.  Two virtually identical engravings purporting to accurately portray the shooting were rushed to publication.  The most famous, engraved by Paul Revere, the master silver and coppersmith, iron foundry man, bell caster, and master of all trades, after a drawing by Henry Pelham was published in the Boston Gazette and then re-issued in sometimes hand colored prints which made Revere and the printer a good deal of money.

A hand tinted copy of Paul Revere's famous broadside of the affair on King's Street.  The image was actually cribbed from an earlier version by Henry Pelham that appeared in the Boston Gazette.

With public opinion inflamed, the two regiments in the city were withdrawn to Castle William on an island in the harbor.  Had they not been, “they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion, should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would,” according to Secretary of State Andrew Oliver.  By May General Thomas Gage, in command of all troops in the colonies, decided that the presence of the 29th Regiment was counterproductive to good order, and had the regiment removed from Massachusetts entirely.

Meanwhile, at the end of March Captain Preston, the men in his rescue squad, Pvt. White and four civilian employees of the Customs House, who some had charged fired out the windows of the building were indicted for murder and manslaughter.

Gov. Hutchinson managed by hook or by crook to delay the start of the trial for nearly a year to let inflamed passions died down.  Patriots took that time to organize the publication of an account of the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, which although banned from circulation in the city, inflamed passions across the Colonies, and even earned sympathy when it was reprinted in London.

Patriot lawyer John Adams successfully took up the defense of Captain Preston, the accused soldiers, and civilian employees of the Customs House.

Despite the delay, it looked like it would be very difficult for Captain Preston and the soldiers to get a fair trial in Massachusetts.  All of the leading local lawyers had refused to take their cases.  John Adams, a leading Patriot, a man with boundless political ambition, and first cousin to rabble-rouser-in-chief Samuel Adams, agreed to take on the case, despite howls of protest from his political allies.

It was a great choice.  Assisted by his cousin Josiah Quincy, another Patriot, and Loyalist Robert Auchmuty he quickly obtained a not guilty verdict in the first trial.  Captain Preston was shown by the testimony of multiple witnesses to have never ordered the troops to fire and to have tried to get them under control.  That was in October.

In November the cases of the enlisted soldiers proved dicer.   They had, after all, fired lethal rounds without orders.  Adam’s pled straight up self-defense.  He told the jury that the men were under attack by the mob, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”  Appealing to the class prejudice of the land-owning pool of eligible jurors, Adams won acquittal on murder charges for all of the defendants, and only two were convicted of manslaughter.      

Privates Montgomery and Kilroy still faced the death penalty at the sentencing on December 14, they “prayed the benefit of clergy”, a remnant of Medieval law in which the essentially claimed exemption from punishment on the grounds that they were “clergy” who could read a Bible verse.        The two were branded on the thumb and released.

By the time the civilians were up for trial in December, enthusiasm for continuing the case against them, which was weak and based on the testimony of one servant easily proven to be false, was waning.

Whatever the outcome of the trials, the events of March 5 helped set the stage for the American Revolution.

By the way, the term Boston Massacre was not applied to the bloody ruckus until long after the fact.  Like another iconic event, the so-called Boston Tea Party it got its name during the brief national enthusiasm generated by the 50th anniversaries of important Revolutionary and pre-revolutionary events.  And like the Tea Party it was soon imbued with a lot of romantic myth and nonsense.