Join women and men of all races to re-enact a remarkable 1835 event. On Oct 21 of that year abolitionist women in Boston held the first annual meeting of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. It was scheduled for an office on Washington Street, near what is now State Street. A mob of angry people who were opposed to abolitionists assembled in protest. The crowd was out of control, and the Mayor told the women that he could not protect them.

The women determined to hold their meeting at the home of one of their leaders. Black and white women, arm in arm, marched with grace and dignity through the mob, six blocks down Washington Street to the home of Maria Weston Chapman, on West Street.

History usually remembers the day as the time when
William Lloyd Garrison, in the same incident, was nearly lynched by the mob. On this Oct. 21, we will lift up that group of women, whose courage then was evidence of the demands women in the later 19th century would make, claiming their full rights as citizens.