Occupy Boston is a protest that, as of November 2011, taking place at Dewey Square in Boston, Massachusetts. The location is part of the financial district, which aligns with the movement's anti-corporate greed/anti-corporate political influence message. The protest in Boston began on September 17 and is part of a long history of protest in Boston. In a way, the core of the city's history is based on the right of protest, making it a fitting setting for this most recent spate of public displeasure with government.
The years leading up to the American Revolution were marked by protests across Boston. There had been minor protests before then, but these were the protests that shaped the city, the colony and the nation, which had yet to be established. When one thinks of this time in Boston protest history, one typically thinks of the Boston Tea Party. However, the Boston Tea Party was not the only protest to take place at that time. There was the burning of a tax collector's boat on Boston Common after the incidence with John Hancock's sloop. There was the attack of Governor Thomas Hutchinson's home. There was also the small protest of a soldier's treatment of a young boy that led to the misnamed Boston Massacre.
Protests are part of free society and so, protests continued in Boston even after the American Revolution. Shay's Rebellion started as protest and became an armed conflict. This was just after the American Revolution. The next big issue to strike the city was slavery. Andrew Lloyd Garrison was nearly lynched in Boston for supporting the rights of African-Americans, but the government was barely involved. On May 26, 1854, a fugitive slave by the name of Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston. A crowd of abolitionists, both black and white, protested his incarceration in front of the courthouse that held him.
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