Activists gathered in the Boston Common Wednesday afternoon, standing in solidarity with Kenosha, Wis. following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in late August.
The protest included planned speeches from a number of progressive groups in Massachusetts as well as an open-mic segment during which attendees could voice their opinions.
Although the event focused on Blake, speakers discussed issues ranging from the Minneapolis death of George Floyd to structural racism in Boston and national police abolition.
As a technical issue delayed the start of the program, a verbal confrontation broke out between a handful of protestors and an unmasked instigator, who insulted attendees for wearing masks and denied the presence of systemic racism in the U.S.
Several protestors told the man to leave, but no physical fighting broke out, and the rest of the afternoon remained peaceful.
Speeches began around 4 p.m. on the steps of the Common’s gazebo.
The first speaker, Scott Gilbert of RefuseFascism.org, called for cooperation between the organizations present to demand change.
“Tell the world we are uniting,” Gilbert said. “We need millions of people in the streets day after day with all our different banners, and different chants and different causes, day after day, united around the necessity to drive out the Trump-Pence regime.”
Shane Ahola, who helped organize the protest, then echoed Gilbert’s calls for unity.
“Too long have the police abused the guise of servitude and protection in order to hide their real intentions to communities of color: surveillance and predation,” Ahola said. “We need to bring light to the horrors of the past.”
Additional speakers included James Walker, founder of The Black Cake Collective, which offers meals to the homeless; Marc Smith-Brown, a veteran and Worcester resident, who described his experience with racism in Massachusetts; and several representatives of the Eastern Service Workers Association, who spoke of the challenges low-income, largely minority workers are facing during the ongoing pandemic.
After the planned speeches concluded, organizers offered the microphone to attendees.
“A great reparation would be some financial literacy classes, some equal housing, just some tools,” said Torah Bogarty, a Cambridge resident who said she came across the protest by chance and took the podium. Bogarty, who grew up in Roxbury, added that Americans have a civic duty to protest injustice.
“We love our country as much as everyone else,” Bogarty said. “I feel like a lot of people don’t understand that we’re just fighting for American rights, because at this point, we’re African, but we’re still just American.”
Ahola — who co-founded The World Tomorrow with Nick Colella — said the pair felt compelled to act following what they considered an insufficient response in Boston to Blake’s killing.
“We saw a lack of protests at the time from other organizations, or not other organizations, but just in general, and it was kind of strange to us,” Ahola told The Daily Free Press before the event. “Although the March on D.C. was occurring at the time, so I guess other people were occupied.”
Although the protest had lower attendance than others earlier in the summer, the two said they were satisfied with the turnout.
Attendees remained supportive, but some were unsure what to expect from the new group, which aligned itself with the Black Lives Matter movement but has received no official endorsement from the Boston chapter of the BLM organization.
“I don’t know the group that’s sponsoring it. The World Tomorrow, I’ve never heard of them. We thought Black Lives Matter was sponsoring it,” said Ann Philbin, who previously organized a vigil for BLM at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain. “We wanted to come and support [BLM], but when I saw it was World Tomorrow, I was just curious who they are.”
The event concluded when activists from RefuseFascism.org returned to the Common around 6 p.m. after marching from Copley Square. As they marched in, the 10 demonstrators carried signs commemorating those killed by police brutality and white supremacy.
Gilbert, who had spoken at the start of the protest, read brief biographies of victims before a crowd of roughly 50 remaining attendees.
Following another call for impromptu speeches, the crowd dispersed into the park just after 6:30 p.m.
