Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti weren't famous during most of their lives. They were, respectively, a shoemaker and a fish peddler. Their deaths, however, earned a front-page headline in the New York Times and TIME noted that fear of the reaction to the news led officials to close Boston Common to public speakers for the first time ever. And, 90 years after those Aug. 23, 1927, executions, the story of Sacco and Vanzetti is still taught in American classrooms.
On May 5, 1920, the two were arrested in connection with the murders of two other men, a shoe-factory paymaster and the man who had been escorting him while he transported about $15,700 in pay down the main street in South Braintree, Mass. A little more than a year later, a jury convicted Sacco and Vanzetti of robbery and murder — even though the evidence against the two was mostly circumstantial, according to Moshik Temkin, a professor of History and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial.
Read Full Article »