Largest mass arrest in state history remembered
Everyone knew they were coming. On Memorial Day 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) marched from Concord and set up camp on the Battle Green.
And Lexington's selectmen made one thing clear: They weren't going to stay.
What followed was the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history. At 3 a.m., Lexington Police peacefully rounded up 458 veterans and protesters, took them by bus to the Public Works facility on Bedford Street for processing, and then on to Concord District Court.
Along the way, the town of Lexington changed.
"Up until that point, Lexington had the reputation for being somewhat of a conservative community," said Lt. Joseph O'Leary, who was a 19-year-old police cadet at that time and took place in the arrests. "After that, the political environment changed, and [Lexington] got the reputation of being much more liberal. I think the complexion of the entire town and the people in town changed."
That is why a group of Lexington residents decided more than a decade ago that the events leading up to, during, and after that day on the Battle Green in 1971 needed to be recorded. What originally was an effort to memorialize the arrests for the 20th anniversary in 1991 by local historian Eugenia Kaledin turned into the creation of Lexington Oral History Projects, Inc. (LOHP) a year later. The group has interviewed more than 60 participants including former selectmen, policemen and protesters and used their research to create or contribute to several short films on the topic.
On Thursday, Oct. 11 at 7 p.m., LOHP will show the 17-minute film "Struggle for the Green: Democracy and Dissent" at Cary Memorial Library to celebrate the completion of its work. The LOHP has recently donated all its photographs, films and artifacts to the Lexington Historical Society and the Library.
"Our real focus for this particular even is the completion of our archives," said Nancy Earsy, who was arrested that day and became a member of the LOHP. "We have given our materials to the library; they have DVDs for each person interviewed."
Those people include Robert Cataldo, the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, James Corr, the chief of police, Chris Gregory, a VVAW founder, Anne Scigliano, the editor of the Lexington Minuteman, famed political theorist Noam Chomsky, and many others.
One person who was prominently involved that wasn't interviewed was Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. In many ways, Kerry was the face of the VVAW, and a month earlier he testified in front of Congress in Washington. He was on the Battle Green that day and was among those arrested.
Kerry said via e-mail that the significance of Lexington's Battle Green was not lost on the VVAW; it was the very reason they were there.
"We came to Lexington because we wanted to make it clear that we were dissenting in the same tradition as America's first patriots," Kerry said. "We were taking a stand for our fellow vets. I believed then, just as I believe now, that it is profoundly wrong to think that fighting for your country overseas and fighting for your country's ideals at home are contradictory or even separate duties. They are, in fact, two sides of the very same patriotic coin."
Unlike other Vietnam War protests, in a war where tens of thousands of American soldiers were dying, the protest on the Battle Green never became violent. From the gathering's outset, there was a peaceful tone to the protest, unlike incidents at Kent State University and the National Mall that had happened just weeks before.
"It was a completely orderly and very folk-songy kind of gathering," said Arthur Katz, a Lexington resident who brought his 13-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter to the rally. "There really wasn't any tension in the air."
Katz said things had quieted down by midnight when Corr, the chief of police, shouted to the crowd that they were to clear the Green.
"Nobody stirred," said Katz. "Nobody moved."
They had to when buses arrived at 2 a.m., and the crowd was placed under arrest.
"Three or four buses pulled up on the Mass. Ave. side of the green, and out of these buses came state police in full riot gear," he said. "Shields, helmets, clubs, the whole thing."
According to O'Leary, each of the 458 people arrested were taken in by Lexington police officers. The state police merely stood by as support in case things got out of hand.
O'Leary was a little worried during the day about what might eventually happen on the Battle Green, because he had seen the footage of protests like Kent State.
"I was apprehensive," said O'Leary. "Everything I had seen on the news had involved outrageous behaviors, and situations that turned violent. There was a lot of conflict, and we had seen it all around us. Those were the only [protests] you heard about. You didn't hear about the peaceful ones."
However when O'Leary approached a member of the VVAW to arrest him, he was cooperative.
"He clinched his fingers of the back of his head like a POW," O'Leary said. "It was very symbolic. [The whole protest] was an exercise in civil disobedience that was nonviolent [and] got a tremendous amount of publicity, but it wasn't bad publicity. There was no violence, nobody got hurt, and people respected one another."
O'Leary said that respect continued in the Public Works barn, where he shared some orange juice with the protesters. The whole event brought the community closer.
"It allowed a lot of people with a differences in opinion to express their views, and it created a great dialogue … that otherwise wouldn't have happened," he said.
Now, 26 years later, LOHP members hope that viewing all the work they've done will help this and future generations understand that dissent and protest are still important tools for practicing democracy.
"There is a similarity [between the two eras] in that we need to be constantly reminded that dissent is something powerful in our history," said Norma Norland, who was also arrested in 1971. "This is an issue that arises again and again."
- Lexington (Mass.) Minuteman