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Ethan Allen and the Tale from the Outhouse

On Sept. 25, 1775, the British captured Ethan Allen while he ran a fool’s errand to Canada.

Fresh from his stunning capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen thought he could capture Montreal. He led an invasion into Canada with a small band of his Green Mountain Boys, but he timed the mission badly and didn’t think it through.

Ethan Allen capturing Fort Ticonderoga

The British seized Allen and held him on a series of prison ships, then moved him to England. As an officer of the Continental Army he would have been executed, but the British feared reprisals.

So the British held Allen for two years in England, then sent him back to America as part of a prisoner exchange.

Ethan Allen Returns to England

Abraham Lincoln loved to tell a story about what happened to Allen after the war. Though it may never have happened, it’s characteristic of Allen, who courted controversy in life. He was brash, crude and daring.

Ethan Allen

Allen opposed organized religion and wrote an attack on Christianity called Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. He married a Loyalist only a few weeks after meeting her and only six months after his first wife died.

Ironically, Ethan Allen’s daughter Fanny converted to Catholicism and became New England’s first nun.

Here is the story as Lincoln liked to tell it.

Ethan Allen returned to England after the war, and the British made fun of him. One day they put a picture of George Washington in an outhouse where Allen would be sure to see it. He used the outhouse but said nothing about the picture. Then the British asked him about it and Allen said it was a very appropriate place for an Englishman to hang the picture because “nothing will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

Abraham Lincoln

There is little evidence to support the truth of the story, though Lincoln most certainly told it.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Boston Tong Wars Explode in 1907 Chinatown Massacre

As evening arrived in Boston on August 2, 1907, Chinatown merchants began closing their shops and laundries for the day. Breaking through the mundane clanking and clattering of city life, a firecracker exploded. It was a signal to a crew of 10 thugs – hatchetmen – assembled on tiny Oxford Place to begin the tong wars.

Chinatown in Boston, site of the 1907 tong wars.

After a few short minutes of chaos, punctuated by gunshots and stabbings, the street emptied of people. Left behind were three dead men and many injured, one fatally.

The Chinese tong wars had erupted in a shocking massacre.

Tong Wars

The Boston Police, after making inquiries, developed a theory of the case.

The Hip Sing tong was emerging as a powerful new Chinese gang and stealing territory from the better-established On Leong tong. It tried to recruit members from Boston’s Chinese business community. Facing reluctance, the members of the Hip Sing decided to recruit thugs to carry out a raid. The objective was to demonstrate the need for Hip Sing protection, and to punish some of the On Leong loyalists.

The incident that night became New England’s biggest entry in the history of the tong wars. But it wasn’t ultimately a Boston story. The violence had its roots, oddly enough, in the murky world of New York politics. There, rival tongs had pitted different wings of the New York legal and political establishments against one another.

The tong wars would ultimately slop over into Boston.

The case would eventually reach right to the top. Massachusetts’ industrialist governor and its patrician lieutenant governor would be asked to choose sides: the people of Massachusetts or the Republican powers in New York.

Tong Wars Come North

Boston Police in 1930 in Chinatown post a sign in Chinese warning against starting a Tong War. (Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection).

Boston Police in 1930 in Chinatown post a sign in Chinese warning against the tong wars. (Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection).

The word tong means “meeting house” or “hall.” Chinese-Americans initially formed tongs as sort of civic associations to protect their members from unfair business practices and discrimination and to promote their own business interests. Out of these, however, grew the criminal tongs of the late 1800s and early 1900s. These secret societies specialized in gambling, prostitution, opium dealing and protection rackets. It was a lucrative and violent business.

The tongs started, and were strongest, in the cities of California where the Chinese population was larger. Chinese immigration to the United States began in earnest in the mid-1800s, as Chinese came to the country seeking work as miners and laborers. Twenty-five thousand Chinese lived in the U.S. by 1851; that number increased to roughly 110,000 by 1890.

As they grew, the immigrant communities established businesses that served both the Chinese community and the Americans. However, the increase in prosperity opened the Chinese to discrimination and criminal harassment by native workers who resented their presence. This situation initially gave rise to the tongs — and to the tong wars.

By 1900, the Chinese population waned after Congress passed several laws that stifled its growth. With few Chinese coming to this country, and many leaving to return home with their savings, the Chinese influx had ended. Except some, of course, wanted to stay. Warry Charles was just such a man.

Warry Charles

At first glance, Warry Charles seemed an odd man to be involved in tong wars. The civic and business aspects of the tongs no doubt would appeal to him. But the criminal ones? The picture was not so clear.

Charles was born in China in 1857 and had come to America via San Francisco and New Orleans as an 11-year-old boy. He was thoroughly Americanized. He attended business school in Nebraska, where he met and married his American wife, Mary Whiting, who came from a prosperous family.

The Charleses moved to New York, and Warry got jobs as a ticket agent for the Santa Fe Railroad and a floorwalker at a department store. He ran a small business selling stoves and hardware.

Charles also had connections to government. He was an official interpreter in the U.S. Customs House, and an officer for the immigration service, enforcing immigration laws among the Chinese arriving in New York.

There are hints, however, that he was also involved in less upstanding pursuits. He ran a poolroom on Darcy Street in New York’s Chinatown. And in 1893, he was arrested for extorting money from Chinese immigrants, threatening to deport them if he wasn’t paid.

The Chinese community accused him of extortion, bribery and using his influence with authorities to push out competition. And there is no doubt he was active in the Hip Sing tong, trying to expand its membership.

What happened in Boston after the Oxford Place massacre resulted from the tong wars in New York.

Gangster Ties

Hip Sing had been started by a flamboyant gangster in direct opposition to On Leong and its longtime leader Tom Lee. On Leong had ingratiated itself with the Tammany political machine, providing information in exchange for police protection.

The Hip Sing tong wanted to shift the balance of power with the help of men like Warry Charles. By 1896, however, Charles’ enemies pressed in on him in New York. After one of them assaulted him, he closed up his pool hall and moved to Boston. However, he left his wife and family behind in New York.

In Boston, he established a laundry that flourished and added several storefronts. And in 1903, with a $400 contribution to open an office, he established a Hip Sing chapter in Boston.

The Hip Sings in Boston

Boston Police examine the latest victim of the tong wars in 1930. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

By the time of the 1907 tong wars in Chinatown, Charles claimed to have curtailed his involvement in Hip Sing. But soon after the killings, police came looking for him.

In rounding up nine of the alleged shooters, police noted at least three carried Warry Charles’ business card. And several of them specifically asked police to contact Charles with news of their arrest.

In New York, where the tong leaders had longstanding relationships with their protectors in government, this may have been standard practice. Perhaps they were letting the authorities know which side they were on in the tong wars.

In Boston, it only raised eyebrows among the police. They began asking around about Warry Charles, and the story they heard was damning.

Suspicion

A series of Chinese-Americans interviewed by police all told very similar stories. Charles, they said, was upset that the Hip Sing was not growing fast enough and he wanted to attack those businessmen reluctant to join. The goal: Frighten them into membership. The result: the tong wars.

Several people gave detailed accounts of Charles’ crusade, including explicit descriptions of money offered in exchange for participating in the attack. Another witness testified that he saw Charles provide the guns to the men involved. Police arrested Charles was arrested and charged with organizing the entire attack.

While the evidence was building, the Hip Sing leader in New York, a man named Mock Duck, took pains to tell the New York press he had retired. He had no involvement in the Boston violence, which he feared would soon spread to New York.

Tong Wars Trial

Back in Boston, a jury made quick work of the case following 33 days of trial. Despite Charles’ flawless English and American mannerisms, he was convicted as the ringleader, with four others, of the Oxford Place massacre. The weight of the evidence against him was overwhelming.

One witness told the jury: “Charles said that he would have to do some killing and make the Chinese businessmen so afraid that all of them would join our society.”

The judge handed down his sentence in March of 1908: Warry Charles would die by electrocution at the Charlestown Prison.

Wife Battles to Save Charles

By now, the Charles story gained an audience. His wealth, in particular, seemed to surprise a society that thought of Chinese as living in ghettos and doing other people’s wash. And his friends, who had stayed mostly quiet during the trial, began stepping up.

Mary Charles, and their son Warren, began a public crusade in support of Charles. Warren, a veteran of the Spanish-American war, was now a police officer in New York. Together they began tapping Warren’s military friends and the Hip Sing political networks in New York to put together a $10,000 defense fund to spring Charles.

And the Hip Sing political machinery sprang into action to help, too. Hip Sing was then providing information to New York’s Parkhurst Commission, a private organization bent on exposing and cleaning up prostitution and gambling in New York.

The On Leongs, meanwhile, were aligned with New York’s district attorney. The records show several cases where the Parkhurst Commission, working with friendly police, would raid On Leong operations. The district attorney, meanwhile, relying on On Leong’s ‘honest’ leader, Tom Lee, would target Hip Sing.

Parkhurst Commission

The point man for the Parkhurst Commission was Frank Moss. A spotlight-seeking criminal lawyer, he led the investigation to free Charles. As appeals and requests for a new trial failed, Charles’s chances for freedom grew slim.

In 1909, three of the men convicted with Charles declined to seek a further stay of execution in hopes of a pardon from the governor. On October 12, they were electrocuted in Charlestown Prison. On Leong members celebrated upon hearing the news.

Charles and another Hip Sing member, Joe Yuen, had made a request for clemency. The governor granted a stay through November so the case could be considered. Charles’ fate now rested in the hands of Massachusetts Gov. Eben Draper and Lt. Gov. Louis Frothingham, who would conduct a hearing on Charles’ request.

While Charles was fortunate that both men were Republicans with political leanings similar to his New York connections, Massachusetts was not known for commuting death sentences. The public had little sympathy for Chinese criminals, even if they were wrongly convicted.

The Final Hearing

Frank Moss took sides in the tong wars.

When Frothingham convened the governor’s council to hear the appeal, Frank Moss took on the task of building the case for Charles. Moss explained that on many occasions in New York Charles had used his Hip Sing connections to gather information about On Leong gambling operations. He said Charles had often provided confidential information that allowed the Parkhurst Commission to break up protected On Leong operations.

When the Boston murders occurred, the On Leong saw a chance to implicate Charles in the tong wars. Working within the Chinese community, they recruited the people who would testify that Charles had orchestrated the massacre.

Witnesses came forward who, only six months earlier, had implicated Charles. Now they said they took money to lie. Most damning, a witness who said he saw Charles providing the hatchet men with guns now said he had made it up.

The bottom line, Moss said, was that Charles’ enemies from New York were getting the Massachusetts’ courts to do their dirty work for them.

When he rested the case, public opinion was divided. The lawyers had not cleared Charles, but they had muddied the waters. Charles’ supporters demanded the governor pardon him.

His enemies said that the governor’s council shouldn’t hear new evidence. It was not a judicial body, and didn’t properly handle witnesses.

In one remarkable passage, one of Charles’ supporters made a showboating statement that he knew who had orchestrated the crime. But he would not name the person.

The council, meanwhile, privately made its own rule under which it intended to operate. It would not recommend pardoning Charles, no matter what. It didn’t intend to stand in place of the jury on deciding guilt or innocence.

So instead, it recommended that Charles’ sentence be commuted to life in prison. Governor Draper agreed, though he carefully noted that he only followed the council’s recommendation.

For his part, Warry Charles expressed disappointment. He had expected a pardon. Still, his supporters insisted, he would fight on for a new trial and parole.

Postscript

The tong wars did not end with Warry Charles. There were several other flare-ups in the years before World War II.

The tongs, in fact, still exist. If you walk through Chinatown (in Boston and elsewhere) and you know how to read Chinese, you will find their addresses. But the bloody tong wars have ended.

Charles never made another bid for freedom. He died in prison in 1915 of natural causes.

If you enjoyed this story about the tong wars, you may also want to read about the New England roots of the Chinese revolution here. This story about the Boston tong wars was updated in 2022.

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Take a Freedom Trail Out of Boston

In 1951, Boston Evening Traveler columnist Walter Schofield began campaigning for the city to create a path taking pedestrians past milestones of the American Revolution. By May, Mayor John Hynes bowed to the pressure and agreed to establish the Freedom Trail. Two young men — Malcolm X and Martin Luther King — took note.

Malcolm X in 1964

Malcolm Little was incarcerated in the Norfolk Prison Colony that year. Martin Luther King was just settling in to his St. Botolph Street apartment as he began doctoral studies at Boston University.

The history of Boston’s fight for freedom cannot have been lost on them. Their rhetoric centered on freedom. “I believe in a religion that believes in freedom,” said Malcolm X. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote Martin from Birmingham Jail.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

But religion, not revolution, marked the path of liberation for these two deeply spiritual men. Boston turned Malcolm Little into Malcolm X when he left in the summer of 1952. Boston turned Martin Luther King into Dr. King when he left for Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. There he had a job as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Within 18 months, Martin would rocket to the center of the international stage as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. For Malcolm, fame would take longer. He would attract a large following to the Nation of Islam. But not until 1959 did he attract much attention beyond the black community.

Mrtin Luther King delivering his “I Have a dream” speech.

White people found Martin’s pacifist, integrationist religion far more palatable than Malcolm’s muscular Islam. By 1957, Time put Martin Luther King on the cover of Time and Meet the Press. interviewed him on television. Prime time wasn’t ready for Malcolm’s message of black independence, pride and entrepreneurialism within the African-American community.

Together they would play good cop, bad cop in the struggle to lift up American blacks. They learned how to do it in Boston.

The Cradle of Freedom

Both men immersed themselves in the city’s culture of scholarship and debate, even if for Malcolm that meant the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library and debating society. Martin was cocooned in a white, liberal school of theology that welcomed black scholars. Malcolm studied the literature of slavery in an extraordinary prison library.

Both men acknowledge the influence Boston had on them. Malcolm wrote in his autobiography, “No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.” Martin often referred to Boston as his second home.

Martin at BU

Boston must have been exciting for a young doctoral student from the Deep South. He had never lived in a multicultural, mixed neighborhood like Boston’s South End. That’s what Martin found at 170 St. Botolph St. for his first few months in Boston, and then at 397 Massachusetts Ave., in the middle of this first year at BU. It must have also been a heady experience to debate with world-famous religious philosophers like Edgar Brightman.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, Boston University was a center of liberal theological thought. It welcomed African-American graduate students. Brightman led the school of theology known as Boston Personalism. From Boston Personalism, Martin derived two tenets of his thought: belief in a personal God and belief in the dignity of all mankind.

Marsh Chapel.

In his final year at Boston University, King family friend Howard Thurman became dean of BU’s Marsh Chapel, the first African-American dean of a predominately white university. An internationally known theologian, he knew Gandhi. He became Martin’s spiritual advisor. Martin was said to have carried until his death Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited. The book shows how to use the Gospel as a guide to resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.

The Parkhurst Collection

A very different institution had a profound influence on Malcolm: The Parkhurst collection at the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library. In 1946, Lewis Parkhurst, a successful Unitarian lawmaker and publisher, had bequeathed his books to the prison. The collection had so many books that some were still in crates when Malcolm was transferred to Norfolk in 1948.

The Parkhurst collection included anti-slavery pamphlets and books, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It also had the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted — probably The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. And it included Frances “Fanny” Kemble’s Journal of A Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.

The cruelty of chattel slavery described in Parkhurst’s books horrified Malcolm X. Writes Louis DeCaro in John Brown the Abolitionist – A Biographer’s Blog: “Malcolm went so far as to say that “Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man”.”

Malcolm X Rise to Fame

Upon his release from prison, Malcolm moved to Detroit, where he worked for his brother in a furniture store and in an auto plant. Then he moved to Chicago to live with Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He returned to Boston in 1953 to start Temple Number 11 at 35 Intervale St. in Dorchester. By the next year Elijah Muhammed appointed him minister for Temple Number Seven in New York, but he returned to Boston to build the membership of the Boston temple.

35 Intervale St. today. Photo courtesy of @ 2021 Google.

The Nation of Islam grew rapidly, in part because of Malcolm’s charisma, his tireless speaking and his message. He had little use for Martin’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance – he called it the “philosophy of the fool.” And he saw no good coming from political involvement with white people. He preached that black people must separate from the race he called “white devils,” and he defended African-Americans’ right to fight violence with violence. That resonated with black people who faced vicious white resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. They concluded whites would never grant blacks equality. It made sense to them to build all-black social and economic institutions.

Hate that Hate Produced

In 1955, Malcolm served as minister of Temple Number 12 in Philadelphia. He also founded three successful Nation of Islam temples in Hartford, Atlanta and Springfield, Mass. By 1959, a documentary about the Nation of Islam called, The Hate That Hate Produced made him a national figure.

Malcolm helped elevate Martin’s image with white people. Martin wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He refused to meet with Malcolm or respond personally to his overtures. “Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief,” he said.

Malcolm X guards his family home in an Ebony magazine photo.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

When Martin and Coretta Scott King permanently moved to Montgomery in the summer of 1955, a campaign had already begun to end segregation on city buses. In March, before Martin obtained his doctorate, police arrested a 15-year-old black girl. She had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Black activists had started to build around that case to challenge Alabama’s bus segregation laws.

Martin Luther King (left) and Rosa Parks in 1955.

Then they decided to stop riding the buses after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. Martin, not yet 30, found himself in the middle of the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. It ended on Dec. 20, 1956, when a court ruled the state’s segregation laws violated the Constitution.

The bus boycott rocketed him to fame. In 1957 he met with President Eisenhower and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Within the next 10 years he would be arrested in Selma and Birmingham and deliver his “I Have a Dream” Speech before 250,000 people. He would also win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 35 – the youngest ever to do so.

King would also lead marches in the North for better housing, better schools and better jobs. He led one such march in Boston on April 23, 1964, during one of his frequent visits to the city. The march followed a speech to the Massachusetts Legislature the day before. The audience included young lawmakers Michael Dukakis and William Bulger, reported WBUR.

March on Washington

By 1963, two events just a few months apart would indelibly stamp onto history the good-cop, bad-cop images of Martin and Malcolm. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the most famous in history. Malcolm called it the “Farce on Washington.” Three months later, Malcolm would shock the world. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he commented the “chickens [were] coming home to roost.”

But both men were changing. Martin got more aggressive, demanding more than just integration and acceptance. More and more he aligned himself with the militant American labor movement. He once said that when he listened to Malcolm speak, even he got angry.

The March on Washington itself was organized by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The demands of the march went beyond desegregation. They included a $2 minimum wage, a federal jobs program and the expansion of federal labor regulations to more classes of workers such as farmworkers and domestics. Many forget that Martin was assassinated in Memphis while he supported the sanitation workers’ strike.

Malcolm, too, was changing. He would soon renounce the Nation of Islam and embrace traditional Sunni Islam. In February 1965 he said, “I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then … pointed in a certain direction and told to march.”

He also recognized that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a stunning success. He realized he had to present a strategy to improve the lives of African-Americans. In doing so, he harkened back to work he’d done with Randolph in 1961 to fight the deterioration of York City’s black communities. Their strategy: raise workers’ wages.

MLK Meets Malcolm X

And once Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1964, he began to pay attention to civil rights issues and to reach out to civil rights leaders – including Martin.

Their only meeting.

On March 26, 1964, they met for the only time. The meeting lasted for about one minute, long enough to shake hands and have their picture taken. They had both come to Washington, D.C., to watch the Senate filibuster the Civil Rights Act. Eight days later Malcolm X made a speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In it, he advised African-Americans to exercise their right to vote wisely. He also announced he would form a political organization.

By then, both men correctly expected to die soon. Gunshots killed each at the age of 39. Malcolm died on Feb. 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Martin was then murdered on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

Malcolm X Meets With Coretta Scott King

Just a few weeks before he died, Malcolm X met with Coretta Scott King in Selma, Ala., while her husband served time in the Birmingham Jail. Malcolm told her he came to make Martin’s job easier. “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King,” he said.

To read the first part of this story, click here. We are indebted to several books for this article: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Also, Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. Finally, Parting the Waters: America in The King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

Images: Marsh Chapel By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17310479. Malcolm X with gun By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3898865. This story was updated in 2022.

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Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in Boston: One City, Two Different Worlds

When Martin Luther King, Jr., moved to Boston in 1951 to study for his graduate degree in philosophy, Malcolm X was already there voraciously reading books. Malcolm X, though, read from the Charlestown State Prison as he finished his six-year sentence for burglary.

Together, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King spent about 15 years in Boston. The two men only met once, and not in Boston. They experienced two very different sides of the same city. Those differences became clear by the time of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Martin and Malcolm X

Martin, the son of a well-to-do Atlanta minister, lived the genteel life in Boston. He wore tailored suits to concerts, teas, sermons and classes. He owned his own Chevrolet and matriculated at Boston University. There he consulted renowned philosophers Paul Tillich and Reinold Neibuhr for advice about his dissertation.

Malcolm X in 1964.

Malcolm X matriculated in Boston’s streets and prisons during the dozen years he lived there on and off. Parentless and poor, the 15-year-old first moved to the Roxbury section of Boston in 1941. There he stayed with his older half-sister, the formidable Ella Little Collins. She saw theft as her only way to make it into the black bourgeoisie. Police arrested her 21 times, but received only one conviction.

Her rebellious little brother took from her a lesson about evading personal responsibility. He dropped out of ninth grade after one day, smoked pot, hustled, stole, ran numbers and seduced loose women.

Fame

By 1963, the ex-con and the former graduate student had achieved international fame. Martin Luther King, Jr., earned international celebrity for preaching nonviolence and integration, Malcolm X for preaching separatism and self-defense. Where Martin said he had a dream for America, Malcolm X said he saw an American nightmare.

That was the year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Both Martin and Malcolm had only a few years left. The two men were coming closer – certainly not to each other, but to the same views and strategies. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, repudiated his earlier racism and advocated a program of economic advancement. Martin Luther King, Jr., increasingly embraced the labor movement as a force for the economic justice required for social justice. Many forget he died while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.

Martin Luther King in 1964.

Malcolm X Meets the Cradle of Jazz

In February 1941, Malcolm X, still known as Malcolm Little, rode the Greyhound bus from Lansing, Mich., to Boston. He wore a too-small dark green suit and a light green topcoat. He moved in with his older half sister Ella at 72 Dale St. in Roxbury. The modest house sits a block from what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard and three miles from what would be Martin’s apartment at 397 Massachusetts Ave. in the South End.

Malcolm X frequented Boston’s jazz clubs.

Malcolm’s mother had been committed to an insane asylum in Kalamazoo. His father, a Baptist lay preacher, was killed by a streetcar when Malcolm was six. Though Earl Little’s death was ruled an accident, Malcolm believed his father had been pushed in front of the oncoming trolley by white racists. Earl followed Marcus Garvey, leader of the black separatist and Pan-Africanism movement. So did his half-sister Ella.

Boston made an enormous impression on the small-town boy from Michigan.

Malcolm X on Mass. Ave.

“I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays,” Malcolm X wrote in his 1964 autobiography. “Neon lights, nightclubs, poolhalls [sic], bars, the cars they drove! Restaurants made the streets smell-rich, greasy, down-home black cooking. Jukeboxes blared Erskine Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, dozens of others.”

Ella had offered to take him in and enrolled him in a private boys’ academy in downtown Boston. On his first day he saw no girls in school and decided to end his formal education. Soon he met his mentor in the ways of the underworld, Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis. Jarvis, a trumpet player, introduced him to Boston’s demimonde.

“The stretch of Mass. Ave. between Huntington and Columbus was, by the late ’40s, Boston’s answer to 52nd Street in Manhattan. It had not only the Roseland, but the Savoy Café, the Hi-Hat, Wally’s, and a handful of smaller clubs, according to Nat Hentoff in a 2001 Boston Globe article.

Malcolm conked his hair, bought a zoot suit and learned how to hustle and dance. He deliberately set himself apart from African-American strivers like the preacher’s son from Atlanta.

The “M” in Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr., 22, arrived in Boston in 1951, the son of a well-to-do Baptist pastor. He too had skipped ninth grade – but because he was such a precocious student. Martin went right to the tenth and, right after 11^th grade, enrolled in Morehouse College at age 15. He had graduated in 1948 with a degree in sociology and then received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa.

Boston University along Commonwealth Ave.

King adopted an elite persona as he moved between his classes, the library and his Massachusetts Avenue apartment. In Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch writes: “King continued to wear tailored suits whenever he stepped out of his apartment, and he worked consciously to develop habits befitting an intellectual. Doodling on the back of a notebook, he practiced increasingly ornate signatures, until the “g” in King looped all the way back to the “M” in Martin.

Martin was influenced by his advisor, theologian Howard Thurman, the first black dean of a predominately white university. He listened to Thurman’s sermons at the University’s Marsh Chapel. Thurman, who had visited Mohandas Gandhi in India, educated his young student in the mahatma’s philosophy of nonviolent protest.

Martin surrounded himself with books and pursued an elegant social life. He wanted to find the proper wife for an ambitious Baptist minister. One of his friends called him “the most eligible and popular bachelor in town.” His dating began to affect his grades.

Courtship

Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott in Boston.

Martin wooed Coretta Scott, an Antioch College graduate studying to become a classical singer at the New England Conservatory of Music. He treated her to concerts and the theater and showered her with poetic prose. In a letter written in 1952, he wrote “My life without you is like a year without a spring time which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere saturated by the dark cold breeze of winter.”

They wed in 1953, and moved into a new apartment in Boston. They didn’t stay long. In September 1954 he became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Nine months later, he would receive his Ph.D. from Boston University. Soon after that he would be plunged into the civil rights movement.

Menial Jobs, Prison

Malcolm would get a series of menial jobs in Boston: as a soda jerk, as a warehouse worker at a South Boston wallpaper company, at a Sears Roebuck warehouse in the Fenway, as a waiter at the posh Parker House.

When the United States entered World War II, jobs opened up on the railroad, and Malcolm got a job as a fourth-class cook. He traveled to Washington, D.C., and to New York, where he fell in love with Harlem. By 1943 he had moved there, supporting himself by dealing drugs, gambling and stealing. He drifted back and forth between Boston, New York and his family in Lansing for the next few years. Police arrested him several times.

Police mugshot of Malcolm X after his arrest in 1944.

Finally, in 1946 police arrested him for burglary. He had dropped off a stolen watch for repair at a Roxbury jewelry store. Detectives were waiting for him when he came to pick it up. He received a sentence of six to eight years of hard labor at the notorious Charlestown prison.

Charlestown State Prison is now the site of Bunker Hill Community College. Malcolm was incensed about his imprisonment, and his cellmates called him “Satan.” He furiously paced his tiny cell, insulted the guards, ranted profanely and got high on ground nutmeg.

Malcolm X Turns Around

And then Malcolm Little started to turn his life around. A fellow inmate persuaded him to begin formal study through correspondence courses. Malcolm threw himself into his self-education. Prison officials, noting his good behavior, moved him to a slightly better institution, the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord.

By then, he’d convinced Ella of the sincerity of his good intentions. She began a letter-writing campaign to move him to a more humane facility. She succeeded. He then moved to the Norfolk Prison Colony, where he could read extensively in the prison library and practice his debating skills.

Prodded by his family, Malcolm began to follow the Nation of Islam, a new movement that preached self-reliance and Pan-Africanism. He left prison in 1952 and moved to Detroit. There he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

To read Part 2 this story, click here. This story about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., was updated in 2022.

Image; Malcolm X in 1964, By Ed Ford, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c15058, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3515550.

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New England Good Life: The Great Madness of Scott Nearing

The announcement of their wedding was that of a classically trained musician to an academic economist and political provocateur. So naturally, when you fast forward to the end of the long lives that Helen and Scott Nearing made for themselves and view their accomplishments, you find…farming?

Yes, farming. Though that’s certainly not how things began. Scott Nearing’s life followed an arc extending from academic, to social activist, to political commentator, to eccentric lifestyle coach.

It was Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree’s statement that she had been inspired by the Nearings when she settled on the island of North Haven, Maine, which brought them to mind so long after they had died. After all these years, how do their lives look?

Scott Nearing

Born in 1883, Scott Nearing came out of Pennsylvania coal country from a well-to-do family. Winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, he demonstrated what a lifelong trait of boundless energy by attending both Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, and landing a degree in economics.

His career as an agitator got started while volunteering for the Child Labor Commission of Philadelphia. Its modest goals were to establish the nine-hour workday for child laborers, limit the work week to 52 hours and require children to attend school at least one-half day per week.

Scott Nearing as a young academic.

He also attained a position as an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he had earned his Ph.D. in 1909. In 1915, the University of Pennsylvania fired Nearing, however, for his “radical” views on child labor. His beliefs endangered his impressionable followers.

“I do not believe in muzzling any member of the faculty,” the University provost said at the time. “I do believe, however, that no man may go too far.”

Though the American Association of University Professors would later decline to take up Nearing’s cause, his firing — and subsequent student petitions for his reinstatement — was a milestone in the development of the concept of academic tenure and academic freedom.

Agitator

Soon after his dismissal, Nearing won a position with the University of Toledo in its school of social sciences. It didn’t last long, however; the problem now was his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. In November of 1917, seven months after the United States formally entered the war, Nearing spoke out against the war to a group in Duluth. An FBI stenographer recorded his speech and he was arrested for sedition. Declining to be associated with his views, the university dismissed him.

NearingCartoon New York World Tribune January 1918

New York World Tribune cartoon showing Nearing with a German helmet and Iron Cross

But this second dismissal did nothing to squelch his opinions. Nearing went on to publish a pamphlet entitled, The Great Madness: A Victory for the American Plutocracy, in which he described war in economic terms. A “big business murder game,” he called it. It was the basis for his prosecution under the Espionage Act.

Though the prosecution failed and he was cleared of the charges, Nearing was now untouchable in academia. He ran a quixotic campaign as a socialist against New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, and began a decade long dalliance with socialism and then communism. He toured the United States debating Clarence Darrow on the issue of democracy’s ability to reform mankind.

Must We Starve?

In 1930, he quit the Communist party, though he remained a lifelong socialist. Issues of inequality were now uppermost in his writings as the nation slogged through the Great Depression. The title of a 1932 book asked, Must We Starve? Nearing’s answer? Yes, unless the country undertook dramatic economic reform that more fairly divided the profits of a man’s labor between property owners and laborers. 1932 was also the year Nearing bought a 65-acre farm in Jamaica, Vt., and began his famous back-to-the-land experiment.

Though he didn’t exactly surrender his podium to discuss world affairs, he certainly retreated, choosing to pursue an ascetic life building a farm from the ground up and drawing what he needed from the land.

Problems

Scott Nearing was not without his personal problems. Along the way, in 1908, he had married fellow academic Nellie Seeds. Together they had two sons.

The Nearings coauthored a number of publications, including in 1923 writing an introduction to help with sales for labor activist Ralph Chaplin’s Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems. Unlike Nearing, Chaplin, who authored the lyrics to the labor standard Solidarity Forever, had been convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking out against World War I and was serving time in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

The Nearings’ marriage, however, was already on the rocks by that point. They had separated by 1920, and one son went on to renounce the Nearing name. Neither son was close to his father. Nellie Seeds did not believe in divorce, and the Nearings stayed married until 1946, when Nellie Seeds died.

In Search of the Good Life

In 1928, however, Scott Nearing met Helen Knothe, 21 years younger than he and training as a concert violinist. They became romantically involved, and Helen set up house with Nearing in 1932 in Vermont. Producing maple syrup and growing their own food, Scott and Helen set about creating their own version of paradise in Vermont.

In this semi-seclusion, Nearing solidified his views on economic inequality, socialism and pacifism. When the United States deployed the nuclear bombs at the end of World War II, he grew even more distant from politics, and his appreciation for the simplicity of farm life grew. In 1952, after 20 years in Vermont, the Nearings left. The encroachment from the ski industry troubled them. The value of their $4,500 land investment had increased to $6 million, and the Nearings donated the property to the Town of Winhall, Vt.

Brooksville

Married since 1947 after Nellie Seeds’ death, the Nearings moved to Brooksville, Maine, and started over building their Forest Farm. That would be their last move. In 1954, the Nearings published their most popular book: Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. It recounted the principles that had guided them in their move to the country.

The book was not wildly popular, at first, but it gradually found a greater audience, and its themes resonated with young people fed up with politics in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was reissued in 1970. You can watch Scott discussing The Good Life here.

Scott Nearing in 1983

Later critics would point out that the Nearings had the benefit of sizable trust funds to cushion them against failure. Nevertheless, their legacy lives on at the Good Life Center in Brooksville.

Both Nearings have died, Scott in 1983 and Helen in 1995. By the end, it seems almost impossible to believe Scott Nearing generated the controversy he did. Newspaper accounts and interviews of the time treated him like an anachronism, his battles behind him. However, to the end Scott Nearing believed that the issues he wrote about, economic inequality in particular, were central to the future of mankind.

For lots more information on Scott Nearing, visit here.

This story about Scott Nearing was updated in 2023.

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Classic Movies Shot in New England, 13 Award-Winners

Hundreds of filmmakers have come to New England since the turn of the last century and some have shot classic movies here.

It isn’t just because autumn leaves and church steeples make the perfect backdrop for classic movies. New England’s history and literary tradition provide rich material for stories and characters set against quaint fishing villages, gritty mill cities, Gilded Age resorts and Ivy League campuses.

New England’s Classic Movies

Familiar New England themes appear again and again in film. The theme of the salty sea captain fighting a sea monster inspired classic movies from Moby Dick through Jaws to The Perfect Storm. Family secrets inspired Eugene O’Neill’s fictional Ah Wilderness in 1906 as well as the true story of a suspected murder in Reversal of Fortune in 1990. And haunted New England was a favorite theme long before Stephen King arrived on the scene.

New England characters populate many classic movies shot in the region. They include the Boston Brahmin, the rustic Yankee, the stalwart fisherman, the town gossip and the outsider struggling to assimilate.

Characters from New England literature also populate many classic movies. Filmmakers first shot Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in New England in 1909 and remade it four times as a feature film, three as a television production. But because it’s literary doesn’t make it good; Demi Moore starred as Hester Prynne in the 1995 remake of Scarlet Letter. It bombed at the box office and earned seven Golden Raspberries including “Worst Remake or Sequel.”

Here is a baker’s dozen of classic movies shot on location in all six states.

Boomerang

When a murderer takes the life of a kindly priest on a street corner, a prosecutor fights to prove the accused man innocent. The true story of Boomerang actually took place in Bridgeport, Conn., but the filmmakers couldn’t get permission to film there.

Elia Kazan, who directed many classic movies, shot the 1947 film in Stamford, Conn., instead.

He directed an all-star cast including Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt and Karl Malden. Playwright Arthur Miller appeared uncredited as a suspect in the police lineup.

Boomerang received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Kazan also won Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

Homer Cummings, the real-life prosecutor who inspired the film, served as U.S. attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt.

Boomerang, filmed in Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire.

The Boston Strangler

This true-crime film about the serial killer who terrorized the Boston area from 1962-64 starred Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. As shooting was set to begin in 1968, the man believed to be the Strangler — Albert DeSalvo –escaped from the mental institution where he was held. DeSalvo was captured 33 hours later. Ed Brooke was elected U.S. senator after coordinating the hunt for the killer. “The Boston Strangler” was filmed in Boston, Cambridge and Malden. It received Eddie, Edgar and Oscar nominations. DeSalvo died in prison (where he made choker necklaces for sale) in 1973. His family is still trying to exonerate him.

The Boston Strangler was mostly shot in Boston.

The Trouble With Harry

Just about all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films are classic movies, and The Trouble With Harry is no exception. The trouble with Harry in the film is that he was dead. Hitchcock’s 1955 dark comedy starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine was filmed in Morrisville, Barre and Craftsbury Commons. The crew arrived in Craftsbury on September 27, 1954 to film outdoor shots of fall foliage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any, so they glued leaves on trees. It was nominated for three awards, including BAFTA, Directors’ Guild and Satellite for “Outstanding Classic DVD” in 2005.

Jerry Mathers in The Trouble With Harry, filmed in Craftsbury, Vermont.

The Stepford Wives

A 1975 take on the theme of haunted New England, the film takes place in the fictional Connecticut town of Stepford. Johanna Eberhart moves there with her family and soon discovers a sinister truth behind the perfect behavior of the town’s housewives — they’re robots.

Bryan Forbes shot the film in Connecticut, including Redding, Fairfield, Westport, Weston, Darien (at the Goodwives Shopping Center) and Norwalk at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion.) Katharine Ross, who stars as Johanna, won the 1976 Golden Scroll Best Actress award.

Stepford Wives enjoyed moderate success at first, but evolved into a cult classic over time.

The Stepford Wives, filmed at the Goodwives Shopping Center in Darien, Conn.

Lost Boundaries

This 1949 drama fictionalized the true story of Albert Johnson, a light-skinned African-American doctor. Johnson passes for white in a small northern New Hampshire town.

Starring Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson, director Alfred Werker shot Lost Boundaries in Kennebunkport, Me. (church scene), York (Nubble Light) and Portsmouth, N.H.

In one scene, the doctor takes a Coast Guard boat from Portsmouth to the Isles of Shoals, six nautical miles away. He lands in York, however, quite farther away.

The film won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949.

Lost Boundaries, fimed in Portsouth, New Hampshire.

Jaws

Jaws was the first of the summer classic movies released in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. The 1975 blockbuster featured a simple premise — the hunt for a man-eating shark that terrorized beachgoers.

The most successful film in box office history at the time, it set a precedent. Director Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws mostly in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard.

It won many awards, including three Academy Awards for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound. In 2001, Congress voted to include it in the National Film Archive as “culturally significant.”

The author, Peter Benchley, later felt guilty about unfairly maligning the Great White Shark, a creature generally uninterested in eating human beings.

Jaws, filmed in Menemsha, belongs to the pantheon of classic movies shot in New England.

The Great Gatsby

This 1974 film starring Robert Redford as self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby featured the Newport, R.I., mansion Rosecliff as his home. Another mansion, the Vanderbilt’s Marble House, provided interior scenes.

The original Long Island mansion that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write the novel fell to the wrecking ball in 2011. Stanford White designed Rosecliff in 1902 for Nevada silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs.

The Great Gatsby also featured Hammsersmith Farm, another famous Newport property where Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier.

The Great Gatsby, which also starred Mia Farrow, received two Academy Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Music.

Robert Redford in the Great Gatsby, filmed in Newport, Rhode Island.

Peyton Place

New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious’ best selling book Peyton Place inspired the 1957 movie of the same name. It starred Lana Turner and Hope Lange.

Director Mark Robson shot the film mostly in Camden, Maine, with some exteriors filmed in the Maine towns of Belfast and Rockland, Gilmanton, N.H., and Lake Placid, N.Y.

Peyton Place employed as many as 500 local residents as extras. Most of them donated their earnings — $10 or so — for a new hospital.

The film premiered in Camden two days before everyone else saw it. Peyton Place didn’t do well at the box office for the first four months. Then, Lana Turner’s daughter killed her mother’s mobster lover, Johnny Stompanato. It then became the second-highest grossing film of 1958.

Peyton Place received nine Oscar nominations, including four for supporting performances.

A scene from Peyton Place shot in Camden, Maine.

Love Story

Love Story, the highest grossing film of 1970, was a romantic tragedy based on the wildly popular novel of the same name. It starred Ryan O’Neal as the preppy Harvard student Oliver Barrett IV. Ali MacGraw played the working-class Italian “Cliffie” doomed to an early death.

The American Film Institute placed Love Story in its pantheon of classic movies, calling it one of the most romantic films of all time. Production at Harvard caused such damage to the campus that the university denied future requests to film there.

The movie was also shot in Massachusetts at the frame house at 119 Oxford St. in Cambridge. There, MacGraw’s character utters the famous line, “Love means never having to say your sorry.” Love Story received nominations for seven Academy Awards, winning one for Best Music, Original Score.

Our Town

A 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder‘s play Our Town about family conflict in a small town, this classic movie was shot in Peterborough, N.H. It starred William Holden and Martha Scott.

The town served as the real model for the play, written by Wilder while in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. Wilder probably named the fictional town of Grovers Corners for Peterborough’s Grove Street. The film received six Academy Award nominations. See the full film here.

Captains Courageous

Spencer Tracy — in curls — played a Portuguese fisherman who rescues Harvey Cheyne, played by Freddie Bartholomew. Captains Courageous begins when Cheyne, a railroad magnate’s spoiled son, gets thrown overboard from an ocean liner.

The 1937 film adapted a book written by Rudyard Kipling in 1897 when he lived in Brattleboro, Vt.

Director Victor Fleming shot scenes in Gloucester, Mass., as well as in California with fish flown in from Alaska and Boston. Gloucester has also provided settings for quite a few classic movies, including Mutiny on the Bounty and The Perfect Storm.

The film received four Oscar nominations. Spencer Tracy won the first of two consecutive Best Actor awards for Captains Courageous; he won for Boys Town in 1938.

Spencer Tracy starred in many classic movies; Captains Courageous, with Freddy Bartholomew, was one of them.

The Thomas Crown Affair

Thomas Crown, a debonair bank executive, thinks he pulled off the perfect bank robbery in this 1968 crime drama.

Steve McQueen starred as Crown, while Faye Dunaway played the insurance investigator who will do anything to get her man.

Director Norman Jewison filmed The Thomas Crown Affair in a number of well-known (and still recognizable) Boston-area locations, including Beacon Hill, the North End, Cambridge Cemetery, the Tobin Bridge, the Allston-Brighton toll booth, Crane Beach in Ipswich and Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant.

The second Harrison Gray Otis house, designed by Charles Bulfinch for a congressman, appeared as Crown’s house. The Thomas Crown Affair won an Oscar for Best Song, Windmills of Your Mind.

Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway on Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass.

High Society

This 1956 musical remake of The Philadelphia Story starred Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. Kelly, who starred in many classic movies, retired after making High Society to marry Prince Albert of Monaco.

Cole Porter wrote the score and Louis Armstrong appeared as himself. Sinatra and Kelly appear driving together in a scene along Ocean Boulevard in Newport, R.I.

Director Charles Walters filmed interiors at a Newport mansion later purchased by Sunny von Bulow. Prosecutors later accused her husband Claus von Bulow of murdering her in the mansion. That story then inspired another film in 1990, Reversal of Fortune.

High Society received nominations for two Oscars, Best Musical, Original Song, and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra on the set of High Society.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about historic New England movie sets and six places New England films were shot.

Images: Menemsha by User:Elkman – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Menemsha.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1350749. Boston Strangler By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26732719. Our Town By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7159045. Love Story https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6778617.

This story about classic movies shot in New England was updated in 2022.

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