Northerners like to think of themselves as enlightened - not like those prejudiced southerners. It is largely myth - as the Boston School Busing crisis demonstrated. But even there educated liberals tend to look at that as the thuggery of working class Irish. But the problem is much deeper, and of broader scope as University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol demonstrated in his All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (Basic Books, 2014). More recently the problems have been explored by Lasalle University ethicist Maureen O'Connell in her newly published Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness.
It was a deeply unsettling sight, as was surely intended. Two days before the Fourth of July, about 100 white supremacists, their faces covered, marched through the heart of Boston with riot shields, at one point brawling with a Black man.
The brazen demonstration, an apparent declaration of strength, heightened fears that white nationalist ideology had taken hold in Massachusetts, widely considered a progressive bastion, and that the national surge of extremism during the Trump administration had arrived here with troubling force.
But white supremacist movements have deep roots in Massachusetts and New England, historians said. While the displays of propaganda are shockingly hateful and vile, they are far from new.
“These ideas have been around,” said William C. Leonard, a history professor at Emmanuel College.
The Colonists, of course, codified slavery in Massachusetts in 1641, more than a century before the United States declared its independence. (The state abolished slavery in the 1780s.) In the early 1700s, the local Colonial legislature passed a law prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. The ban on sex was removed in 1786, but the ban on mixed marriages was expanded to include Native Americans. Two years later, local authorities prescribed whipping for nonresident Black people who stayed in the state more than two months.
In 1849, the state’s highest court ruled that the Massachusetts Constitution allows for segregated schools, and the US Supreme Court would later use that ruling to make the legal case for a “separate but equal” doctrine.
The anti-immigration movement also has roots in Massachusetts. In the 1890s, a trio of Boston Brahmin intellectuals founded the Immigration Restriction League, which laid the intellectual groundwork for many contemporary hard-line beliefs.
“It’s always had a nativist opposition to outsiders,” Leonard said of the region, “going back to Puritans.”
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