By Peter F. Stevens
Special to the Reporter

South Boston's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade - which steps off from Broadway and Dorchester Ave. this Sunday, March 16 at 1 p.m. 0 started officially in 1901, but the procession that so many enjoy today did not arrive easily for the Boston Irish, who long had to battle prejudice before they could have their celebration.

Have their parade, Boston's Irish would, and proudly so.

As Irish Catholic immigrants landed in Boston in ever-increasing numbers in the 1840s and staked their claim to a new life in America, they soon thumbed their collective nose at Yankee antipathy to any commemorations of St. Patrick's Day. One of the early manifestations of the local Irish love for their old sod's patron saint was the Shamrock society, a social club that gathered on March 17 to defiantly toast the saint and "sing the old songs," the revelers' voices pealing from Dooley's the Mansion House and Jameson's.

No single building, however, would long serve to hold the growing numbers of local Irish longing to celebrate the day in a bigger way.

There was only one way, Boston Irish leaders decided, to include not just Irishmen, but also women and children, in a celebration to St. Patrick. The solution was a parade.

As early as 1841, without official sanction by Boston's government officials, more than two thousand local Irish marched through the North End, their bands booming and crowds singing. Earlier, they had honored their patron saint at a traditional Mass. Religion and festivity were the order of the day for the impoverished immigrants, reflecting a wistful yet often raucous longing for a bit of Ireland in their new homes. The scenes enraged many Yankees who still espoused their ancestors' loathing of anything Catholic - especially Irish Catholic.

The cant of Brahmins who reviled the St. Patrick's Day Masses and revelry notwithstanding, the Boston Irish prayed and paraded on March 17. St. Patrick's Day commemorations became so much a part of Irish life in the city that on March 17, 1863, the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts Regiment - composed of Boston Irishmen fighting and bleeding for the Union in the Army of the Potomac - celebrated the saint's day with their fellow regiments in the vaunted Irish Brigade. An Irish infantryman from Charlestown recalled that the unit's songs, toasts, horse races, speeches and an impromptu "stage show" on that day all celebrated Ireland and its religious symbol.

The unofficial St. Patrick's Day parades that wound through every Irish ward from the 1870s to the 1890s proved the highlight of the festivities, bands and marchers tramping proudly through the heart of Boston, South Boston, Charlestown and Dorchester alike. All along the route, hordes of spectators lined the pavement, and Irish homes and businesses were emblazoned with colorful images of St. Patrick and draped with sheets or banners adorned with such traditional slogans as "Erin Go Bragh" and "Cead Mile Failte."

On March 17, 1886, Hugh O'Brien, Boston's first Irish-born mayor, infuriated the Yankee nabobs of Beacon Hill with his decision to close the Boston Public Library for the day in honor of the revered saint and the celebration of his name.

As much a part of the local landscape as the St. Patrick's Day parades and other celebrations had become from 1841 to the turn of the century, the hard-won traditions were about to evolve into something far more, something that truly proclaimed the growing clout of the Boston Irish. In South Boston, the biggest of the March 17 celebrations would ma

In March 1901, the blare of bands and vibrations of marchers' feet pealed above South Boston's streets. Banners awash with glittering shamrocks, harps and images of the patron saint himself nodded in the gusts racing from the Atlantic. The date, however, was March 18 - with good reason. The city's leaders had sanctioned South Boston's first official St. Patrick'/Evacuation Day Parade for the eighteenth because the seventeenth had fallen on Sunday and was subject to the Blue Laws.

The patriotism and "Irish pride" reached a throaty crescendo at Faneuil Hall as the parade's rousing climax erupted amid music and seemingly ceaseless applause. The first official South Boston Parade was over, but the post-march celebrations were merely beginning. Dignitaries in natty overcoats and top hats, figures such as Mayor Thomas Hart, stepped from the open, horse-drawn carriages in which the city's "high and mighty" had ridden in the parade and dashed into venerable Faneuil Hall for an official St. Patrick's Day banquet.

A newspaper column that year captured the essence of Southie's St. Patrick's Day Parade, past, present and future: "A sign that, although scattered far and wide, Irishmen still hold to their love of county and countrymen, and never forget the verdant home they fondly call the gem of the sea."

Beyond those sentiments, the "Irish holiday" has become something far more from Southie to San Francisco. As Edward Wakin notes in his book Enter the Irish-American, "The Irish had not only won acceptance for their day, but persuaded everyone else to join in, an achievement matched by no other immigrant group."

The Irish World, in the late nineteenth century, posed the following question: "How Long Will St. Patrick's Day Live Among Irish-Americans?"

An editor answered:

While in veins of Irish manhood flows one drop of Irish blood;

While in the hearts of Ireland's daughter beats true Irish womanhood;

While God sends to Irish mothers babes to suckle, boys to rear;

While God sends to Irish fathers one man child thy name to bear.

In Southie on every St. Patrick's Day, those sentiments and traditions still flourish as the bagpipes' skirl heralds the start of the Big Parade.

Peter Stevens writes for the Boston Irish Reporter.