Just as the doors were to open, Mary Donovan posed at the head of the coffins with a sign: “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHISTIC BASTARDS?”—JUDGE WEBSTER THAYER. When Langone, fearing for his license, refused to allow her to continue there, she stalked outside with the placard and showed it to reporters. A police sergeant snatched it from her. There was a scuffle, the placard was torn up, and she was taken to the station, charged with inciting to riot and distributing anarchistic literature.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the bodies lay in state from six in the morning until ten at night. A hundred thousand people filed through the narrow parlor—so many that the terrazzo floor and the marble threshold began to crack. Huge floral pieces kept arriving by the hour. The windows of adjoining shops were borrowed to display them. Everyone in the North End, whatever his politics, viewed the bodies at least twice. In after years a common question of the district was: “Were you at Langone’s?” Many North Enders dropped by on their way to work. Children made a game of seeing how many times they could dart in and out. Afternoons the line extended up the street beyond the double line of ropes. Evenings it reached over a third of a mile to Waldron’s Casino.
It was planned to hold the funeral on Sunday and to have the bodies cremated at the Forest Hills Crematory. The health commissioner granted an extension of the four-day burial law. Saturday, Langone re-embalmed the bodies. Jackson wanted to have a procession with a band, the coffins carried by relays of pallbearers past the State House and through the heart of the city. Superintendent Crowley told Jackson he would allow nothing of the kind. There was to be no band, no filing past the State House, the coffins must be in hearses, and although those who wished might follow on foot there were to be no banners carried or shown.
Sunday morning broke gray and desolate. A line of sightseers and sympathizers still passed through the undertaking parlor for a last look at the now much-darkened faces. At ten o’clock Langone locked his doors and closed the coffin lids.
The procession was to start from North End Park near the Paul Revere House. Five hundred policemen patrolled the North End. Seventy mounted police were assigned to guard the cortège. The police were edgy, resentful of the gadfly agitation that had kept them on twenty-four-hour call for the last two weeks. Just to make certain there would be no gesture before the State House, Crowley had the pavement at Beacon and Tremont streets ripped up. Heavy trucks loaded with sand were placed there, as well as at the corner of Park Street. Police also blocked off the streets behind the State House.
All during the morning crowds collected along Hanover Street, trampling the turf of North End Park into mud. The men—many wearing black neckties, and red carnations in their buttonholes—outnumbered the women eight to one. Four open cars heaped with scarlet blossoms stood in front of Langone’s. At 1:30 a column of mounted police cantered over the cobbles of Scollay Square and formed a double line along Hanover Street. Volunteers now began to remove the dozens of floral pieces from the undertaking rooms and the shop windows. Some of the pieces were so large that it took half a dozen men to carry them. At 2:20 the topheavy hearses drew up in front of the funeral parlor, and members of the committee earned out the coffins while Langone supervised them nervously in tail coat and silk hat.
In spite of Superintendent Crowley’s order, a group of men in black moved through the crowd, quietly passing out red felt armbands stamped REMEMBER JUSTICE CRUCIFIED! AUGUST 22, 1927. At half past two Alfred Baker Lewis, as organizer of the procession, gave the signal. The two Cunninghams glided from the curb, the cortège advanced up Hanover Street. First came four mounted policemen in black rubber capes. Then a single marcher led the way with the committee’s laurel wreaths. Behind him six men, with some difficulty, carried an eight-foot-high floral piece showing photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti and inscribed MARTYRS OF MASSACHUSETTS. Two rows of marchers carrying smaller floral pieces were followed by the hearses, moving side by side and flanked by an honor guard. Behind the hearses more volunteers carried more floral displays—eighteen in all. Then came the open cars heaped with flowers, and two limousines with drawn curtains, one carrying Rosina, Dante, Luigia, and Felicani, the other, members of the committee. Fifteen mounted police rode on either side.
The marchers followed in close-packed ranks, eight abreast, stern-faced, overwhelmingly Italian. Five thousand started from North End Park. It was the most spectacular funeral the city had ever seen.
The sidewalks of Hanover Street were packed with watchers. As the hearses moved up the gradient to Scollay Square, the undertone of muttering was punctuated by the clop of horseshoes on the rain-glazed cobblestones. The marchers, their arms now linked, stretched down the street to the curve of North End Park. On they came, over the cobbles and glistening parallels of car-tracks into Scollay Square, past the pawnshops and the painless dentists, past Waldron’s Casino, past the drab lodgings of the American House and the Crawford Chambers, the cheap shoe and clothing shops, the pasticcerias, the shoeshine parlors, the poolrooms, and the bowling alleys. Hundreds of faces clustered in the second- and third-story windows. Along the six-mile route two hundred thousand watched the procession. The March of Sorrow they called it afterward.
At first the attitude of the police seemed neutral, but as the hearses and limousines crossed Scollay Square and turned left into Tremont Street, a detachment of state troopers in trucks cut between them and the massed marchers. Halted momentarily, the marchers surged over the sidewalks, sifted past the subway entrances, picked their way among the stalled vehicles. So great was the crush in Scollay Square that a plate-glass store front caved in. There was a moment of panic as the glass crashed on the pavement. The police now seemed less neutral. Two bystanders were arrested for jeering at them.