History Recap: The Boston Massacre

I swore my next blog post was going to be a book review. I am still working on that book review, but I've also recently been hit with the Revolutionary War Era feelings, so here's another history post. Please enjoy!

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Today we're going to start with a story. 

Once upon a time, there was a town. Not a small town, but not a huge town, either. Recent events meant that the inhabitants of this town--mostly blue-collar workers without a ton of money to their names--were, well, disgruntled with the law enforcement in their town. For the most part, this disgruntlement had resulted in some heckling of the local law enforcement officers--kids yelling things and throwing snowballs, people grumbling under their breath and glaring whenever an officer passed. 

Then, things escalated. 

There was a gathering--ostensibly a peaceful gathering, a legal gathering, but bordering on a riot in some places. People were getting violent, pressing in a couple of officers, yelling things at them, threatening to get violent. The officers called for backup. A higher-ranking officer showed up with reinforcements, but ordered his men not to get violent with the crowd, as that wouldn't end well for anybody. The crowd, though, was determined to provoke a reaction. They continued to act up until--and no one exactly knows why or how--one of the officers fired his gun. 

Some of the other officers fired, then, though none of them would later recall hearing the order to fire. The crowd scattered; when it was all over and the smoke had cleared, eleven people had been shot. (If I'm remembering this incident correctly, five died and two more died later of injuries.)

This broke the floodgates. The people of the town were enraged. Some of them held funerals and wakes and protest marches. Some of them formed violent mobs, seeking to take out their fury on any scapegoat they could find. The government sent in more law enforcement officers, which only aggravated the situation. 

Eventually, the officers involved were indicted, taken to court, for murder. Their lawyer crafted a compelling case--the situation really wasn't as cut and dry as it first appeared, and the officers weren't directly at fault. They were found not guilty; but this, too, aggravated the people, because at the end of the day, sons and father and brothers had been killed by the very people who were meant to protect them. Law enforcement fired on a crowd of citizens, and no one was going to let that go. 

The story doesn't end there, of course, but I think it's a decent stopping point. Now, thanks to the title of this post, you've probably figured out that all that up there is the story of the Boston Massacre of 1770. However, that's not all the story is. I deliberately used vague terminology to re-tell the story, because I want you to be able to look back at it and see the story of Ferguson, of Baltimore, of the all the communities that have been in turmoil recently. 

Recently, we as a country have been more aware than ever of the misdeeds and unclear decisions of our police forces. There's been a question, recently, of just what racial biases are embedded in our law enforcement system. I'm not here to answer that question; there's a lot of evidence and argument and rhetoric on either side, and I am far from the most educated person on any of that. 

But I have been thinking about history lately. And I have been thinking about parallels lately, and I've been thinking about how messy--muddy and unclear and divisive--the Boston Massacre really was. It came at a time of palpable tension--economic tension, not racial tension, but tension all the same. Both sides debated it, trying to twist it to fit with their own narrative. Loyalists said that the crowd was a mob on the verge of attacking soldiers who didn't have the option to fight back. Rebels said that armed soldiers had fired into an innocent, peaceful gathering of civilians. Neither narrative was completely correct. The truth is, the people were angry and the soldiers were scared and a horrible, irreversible mistake was made. 

I'm the last person to try to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. I'm the last person to say that we need to tear down our police departments. But I am the person to say that we need to be better, we need to work our hardest to ensure that our neighborhoods are safe--that all neighborhoods are safe, regardless of who lives there--and that our cops are doing their jobs to the very best of their abilities. I think, in the end, the lesson of the Boston Massacre is that we need to be able to look rationally at both sides of a conflict, since it's rare that only one side is in the right. 

(We tend to empathize with the members of the crowd in the case of the Boston Massacre, yet in a modern-day rehashing of the story, the cops are often the ones who receive the most empathy. Just something to think about.)

So, yes. Does the Black Lives Matter movement have a valid point? Yes, I think they do. Nothing has ever been accomplished by people staying silent about the issues they see affecting their communities. However, I also think that we need to listen to police officers and their advocates, since it just isn't fair or right to target an entire group of people without at least hearing them out. In conclusion, I think the only way for us to resolve this issue is to impartially listen to both sides and try to come to an equally impartial conclusion. If we can't do that, I don't think we'll be coming to a solution any time soon.