here’s to you Nicolas and Bart

“If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.” B. Vanzetti

Today is the 90th anniversary of the execution of Nicolas Sacco and Bartholomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists executed in Boston by the State of Massachusetts after an unfair trial. Impacted by anti-Italian prejudice and the radical political views of the accused. Here’s to you is the leading song of the soundtrack of the 1971 movie Sacco e Vanzetti, song written by Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez, also a song I remember singing endlessly in summer camps, as a teenager in the 70’s…