"A New Day Is Here": The Shooting of George Borden and 1930s Civil Rights Activism in Boston

ON 8 July 1934, George Borden, a black janitor from Roxbury, was eating Sunday dinner with his wife, three young children, and a friend when he heard a knock at his Copeland Street door. Hello George, said Motor Vehicles Inspector Everett Gardner as he and Patrolman William Harmon stepped into Borden's apartment. They had come, Gardner informed Borden, to serve a warrant for his arrest. For his three outstanding traffic violations-driving without a license, driving to endanger, and refusing to pull over-Borden was summoned to the nearby Dudley Square police station. After asked to place a call from a friend's apartment, a request Gardner and Harmon granted, they accompanied him upstairs and waited while he telephoned his supervisor. No one answered. Struggling to explain the ensuing tumble of events, noted black reporter and civil rights activist Eugene Gordon would later write that Borden was suddenly stricken with terror. He was without influential friends; he had been arrested once before for violating a minor traffic law and held for three days like a desperate criminal, incommunicado. He knew something of the workings of Law and Order, and he was afraid.'