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I did not watch the inauguration.
Everything I saw and read in the lead-up gave me flashbacks to January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed and trashed in the name of Trump under the banner of the Confederacy.
I didn’t want to hear Carrie Underwood sing. Or watch Barack Obama and Joe Biden behaving with decorum while Trump told the world how terrible things have gotten in America because he wasn’t in charge.
I didn’t bother with the endless loop of specific postmortems either: the seating chart, the distance between Trump’s screed and reality; commentary on Melania’s outfit. (I did catch a glimpse. Black? Really?)
The United States that I inhabit is not a hellscape. It’s a mess in a lot of ways, but it’s not only a mess. So, to remind myself about things I still enjoy, respect and honor about the U.S. of A, I bundled up and went to Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall — the linear park that runs from Charlesgate to Arlington Street.
The United States that I inhabit is not a hellscape. It’s a mess in a lot of ways, but it’s not only a mess.
The mall is a tourist attraction, and in fine weather, you hear languages from all over. No so much in January.
It’s also a city neighborhood park, however, so, on Monday, couples walked hand in hand, people with dogs were meeting and greeting. There was an exaltation of toddlers exploring the still-pristine snow: picking it up, tasting it, flopping down in it.
I left my dog at home because I wanted to spend time visiting the monuments that honor Americans who make me stand up a little taller. As it happened, I ended stopping at all of them and was surprised to find that, taken together, this group is a far more diverse crew than I’d assumed, and not without flaws.
There in one truly goofy monument honoring Leif Erikson, the Norse explorer who has absolutely no connection to the city. But it was commissioned and paid for by Bostonian Eban Horsford — the inventor of baking powder! — who believed that it was Ericson, not Columbus, who “discovered” America.
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You gotta laugh.
It’s easy to assume that the statues of stern-looking men all referred to prominent, well-born, home-grown politicians or soldiers. But there are only two that fit that description: Revolutionary War hero John Glover, who helped Washington cross the Delaware. And Alexander Hamilton — founding father and first secretary of the Treasury, who was an illegitimate child and stowaway immigrant — things we all know, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical.
There’s a statue of William Lloyd Garrison, journalist and abolitionist. The Newburyport native founded and ran the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston from 1831 to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was passed
His words are etched on the pedestal: “My country is the world – our countrymen are all mankind.”
Like Hamilton, Patrick Andrew Collins was an immigrant who came from Ireland and made good in America. As a boy, he worked in an upholstery shop where he became a union member and a union leader. He served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and then the Massachusetts Senate, while he earned a law degree from Harvard. He was the mayor of Boston from 1902 to 1905. Two figures of warrior-women flank his monument: one representing America, the other Ireland.
There is a monument to Domingo Sarmiento, a diplomat and the president of Argentina, whose connection to Boston was education reformer Horace Mann. Sarmiento came to learn from Mann, then based his country’s school system on his teachings.
They’re all white men until the Boston Women’s Memorial, installed in 2003, which celebrates not one, not two, but three women. Although each of them deserves her own, it is undeniably beautiful, and unique; the women on the ground, at street level. The pedestals are part of their sculptures, and all the words are their own.
Abigail Adams stands against a post inscribed with part of the famous letter she wrote to her husband John Adams, second president of the United States.
Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
Lucy Stone was the one of first women in Massachusetts to graduate college, in 1847. She held onto her birth name after marriage. A close associate of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she was an eloquent proponent of women’s abilities and convened the first national women’s rights convention in 1851.
From the first years to which my memory stretches I have been a disappointed woman. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.
Phillis Wheatley, an African-born woman, leans over her desk, pen in hand. Captured in Africa and sold as a slave in Boston, she became one of the best-known poets of her time, popular in England as well as America.
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
The Vendome Fireman’s Memorial is a shrine to the nine firefighters who died on June 17, 1972, at the Hotel Vendome, in the worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history. Their names are listed on a bronze plaque nearby. The monument itself is simplicity itself: a curved wall of polished granite with a firefighter’s hat and jacket — cast in bronze — on top. Whenever I’ve been there in temperate weather, someone has left fresh flowers.
The tallest monument on the mall includes a 10-foot-tall granite boulder that serves the base for a statue of Samuel Eliot Morrison. Dressed for a hike, binoculars in hand, he sits, legs dangling over the precipice. On the ground, at my feet, bronze seashells and seaweed locate him — and us — at ocean’s edge.
Until my recent visit, I assumed he was an environmentalist. And while he did love the sea, he was a Harvard history professor for 40 years, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian for two of his 50 books.
And because history isn’t set in stone, his writings about racism and even slavery have been challenged for the paternalism that was mainstream for his time.
Boston’s newest monument is not on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. To get there, I crossed Arlington Street, walked through a sleeping Boston Public Garden, crossed again into Boston Common and found The Embrace, the memorial to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Dedicated in 2023, it got mixed reviews. Some thought it was too modern; disrespectful even. It is big and powerful, and it felt good to be there on this third Monday of January, the national holiday that honors their lives.
It is unsettling for what is arguably the most fraught inauguration in American history to fall on a day dedicated to peacemaker, a justice seeker, a bridge-builder.
I remember how, in 2017, then-and-now-President Trump was asked what he thought of the white supremacists who carried torches as well as Nazi and Confederate flags while marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, some of them chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Donald Trump told reporters that there were very good people on both sides. And it cost him nothing.
In the sidewalks around The Embrace there are bronze plates engraved with the names of local men and women who worked long and hard to make Boston — and the country — more just, more peaceful, more loving.
Melnea Cass, Ruth Batson, Jean McGuire, Henry Hampton, Elma Lewis. I heard them speak.
Bob Moses, Sarah-Ann Shaw, Jeep Jones. I read about them in the paper and watched them on TV.
I once had the honor of meeting met Mel King at a South End diner.
They never gave up. They never let go. And we can’t either.
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Anita Diamant Cognoscenti contributor
Anita Diamant is the author of 14 books, the most recent, published in 2021 is, “Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice.”
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