For D.C. delegates, a modern Tea Party
To protest taxation without representation, what better spot than Boston Harbor?
That was the idea yesterday as delegates from the District of Columbia, invoking the Boston Tea Party to gain publicity for their long-frustrated efforts to win voting rights in Congress, used silver scoops to dump South Carolina tea into the harbor.
And if the delegates' command of Boston history and geography was a bit shaky, no one seemed to mind much. A thumping soundtrack of live and taped soul and rhythm-and-blues gave the event, on a harborfront promenade close to the site of the original Boston Tea Party, the feel of a block party rather than a political protest.
''One! Two! Three! Free D.C.," yelled A. Scott Bolden, the chairman of the delegation, as he tossed about a pound of tea over a railing into the water. Other delegates ripped open teabags and scattered the tiny leaves.
If the atmosphere was festive at the event outside the Children's Museum, the delegates' message here this week is serious. They say that while D.C. residents fight and die to bring democracy to Iraq, the US capital remains disenfranchised in the national political process. The District does not have a full vote in the House of Representatives -- its sole congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, can vote only in committee -- and it has none at all in the Senate.
Members of the delegation are primarily working-class and middle-class residents of the city, many of them African-American, rather than Beltway political insiders and lobbyists. The delegates, who arrived in Boston Saturday night in an Amtrak car festooned with ''Free D.C." posters, compare their struggle for representation to the great civil rights struggles in American history. Holmes-Norton, who will speak at the convention Thursday evening, called D.C.'s plight ''the last remaining fight of the civil rights movement."
Historical references were rife at yesterday's ''Free D.C." tea party. Participants dressed as Frederick Douglass and John Philip Sousa milled around the crowd. Several speakers cited Boston's history, though not without running into trouble.
At one point, Bolden, referring to the original Tea Party, exhorted the crowd, ''like the patriots of old," to march to the Charles River. He appeared to be unaware that he was standing next to Boston Harbor.
''I don't know about you, but I'm ready to throw some tea into the river," said another speaker, D.C. Councilor Adrian Fenty, in a rousing pep talk.
''Is that a river?," one woman asked a bystander, indicating the water.
''No, I think it's the harbor," the man replied.
In fiery remarks, Holmes then summoned the memory of the patriotic sacrifice of Crispus Attucks, a black man from Revolutionary-era Boston, whom she described as the first casualty of the Battle of Lexington.
Attucks was actually killed in the Boston Massacre near the Old State House in 1770.
After dumping his tea, Bolden, surrounded by television cameras, shrugged his shoulders at his mistake. ''Hey, that's what they told me," he said. ''I'm from D.C., not Boston."
One speaker, Paul Strauss, an organizer of the event, correctly referred to the ''harbor" when he addressed the assembled delegates.
''Yeah, someone came up to me and said, 'You're the only one who got it right,' " Strauss said.
As Strauss spoke, Sousa's ''Stars and Stripes Forever" sounded in the background. On a festive day when the Charles River and Boston Harbor seemed interchangeable, no one was sweating the details.
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at b_macquarrie@globe.com.
