The Boston Courthouse Bombing

Don Wildman (0:00)

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On any given Thursday morning, the steps of Boston's Suffolk County Courthouse are crowded with a stream of people heading inside, lawyers and clerks arriving for court appointments, average citizens conducting business, going about their ordinary routines. But on this morning, April 22, 1976, there's something different. A bomb scare was called in just a short while ago, but few people out here or inside will know about it. And when, minutes later, that bomb goes off, it lays waste to the building's second floor and leaves many victims severely injured and maimed. But the shockwave of this bomb will be felt far beyond the courthouse for years to come, because this attack is part of a broader campaign, one launched in protest against the American system itself.

Hey, and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. The mid-1970s were a turbulent time in the United States. Political scandal, social upheaval, economic uncertainty, all bubbling up like boiled water, and sometimes it spilled over into bloody violence. Today, my guest is Kevin Galvin, author of Troubled Times, The Boston Courthouse Bombing of 1976, which explores one of these violent episodes, who perpetrated it, how were they caught, and the impact of the bombing on the people and society it affected.

Hello, Kevin. Welcome to American History Hit. Nice to have you.

Kevin Galvin (2:09)

Thanks for having me, Don.

Don Wildman (2:10)

You know, these historic events that I, for one, lived through really dates me. But I vividly recall Boston in the 1970s was a raucous and radical place on the news for some pretty ugly reasons.

Kevin Galvin (2:23)

It's true. I mean, it was a difficult time for the country, right? We had just seen a president leave the end of the Vietnam War. It was bad economic times. Unemployment was on the rise. But in Boston, things were particularly on edge because of a federal court decision trying to desegregate the Boston public schools that came down in 1974

And tensions only rose from that point.

Don Wildman (2:47)

I remember the news on one of those three channels. It was always people screaming in the streets of Boston about, how dare you? It was really big, big, big stuff. This courthouse bombing that your book is about, and congratulations on your book, which has just been released, set the stage for me, will you? This bombing happens on Thursday, April 22, 1976, shortly after 9 a.m. in the morning.

What are the circumstances before the bomb goes off?

Kevin Galvin (3:13)

It's another day at the courthouse. People have been starting to arrive from about 7 o'clock in the morning. The switchboard opens right around 9 a.m. And one of the first callers says, there's a bomb that's about to go off.

Don Wildman (3:25)

So it had been warned. The bombers have called in, and the cops know about this, everybody knows about it.

Kevin Galvin (3:31)

Well, there's a big delay between the time the call comes in and the police are informed. There wasn't really a written protocol. The switchboard operators had received bomb threats in the past, and they all sort of brought the experience they had from having past calls in those jobs or in other places. And they sort of started passing the word leader by leader and making different calls to different parts of the courthouse.

And this, in fact, is part of the reason that it ends somewhat tragically, because the bombers did call.

This was their first action, for all intents and purposes. And they didn't really gamut out as closely as they might have. They estimated how long they thought it would take to evacuate the courthouse, and they assumed that people would just promptly evacuate.

Don Wildman (4:18)

Wow, interesting. The bomb was placed on the second floor in the Probation Department of Office, which I suppose is a significant detail.

Kevin Galvin (4:27)

Well, it is, because the group that was accused, or the group that took responsibility for the bombing, was known as the Sam Melville Jonathan Jackson Unit. And that bombing, according to the communicate that they put out a couple of days later, was to protest conditions at Walpole State Prison, which were very difficult, very bad at the time.

At the probation office, interestingly enough, some six, eight months before that, there had been a story in the Boston Globe about an effort to computerize court records. This is the day where everyone's just beginning to try to figure out how to use computers to make things operate more efficiently. And there was pictures of court records spilling out of shoe boxes on top of filing cabinets on the floor. The records were everywhere. So according to one of the people who was involved in early conversations but had split from the group and ended up cooperating with authorities, the thinking was if we blow up these records, we'd be really messing things up for the court system, and the probation system, and the prison system.