Women's March of Courage

Beacon Hill Scholars organizes a periodic commemoration of a key event in Boston’s abolitionist history: a defiant march by Black and White women, members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), in downtown Boston.  

On October 21, 1835, the Society held a meeting at its offices at 46 Washington Street. It had invited the charismatic British abolitionist George Thompson to speak, but a campaign of intimidation waged in newspapers and handbills had forced him to cancel. Nonetheless, a pro-slavery mob of several thousand gathered outside the building. It included many wealthy Bostonians who owned businesses in the textile industry, and profited from the cheap cotton produced by enslaved labor in the South. 

The mayor of Boston, Theodore Lyman, advised the women present that he could not guarantee their safety and persuaded them to leave. He also urged William Lloyd Garrison, who at the time was working in the office of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, located in the same building, to do likewise. Garrison escaped through a back window, but the mob captured him, dragged him through the streets with a rope around his waist, and threatened to kill him. The mayor intervened, and Garrison was taken to jail for his own protection. 

Meanwhile, undaunted and determined to continue their anti-slavery work, the women walked arm-in-arm with grace and dignity through a gauntlet of hostility and abuse to the home of a Society member, Marie Weston Chapman, on nearby West Street where they held their meeting. 

Today, participants in the “Women’s March of Courage” walk the same route, down Washington Street, as those courageous women did nearly two centuries below.