In April 1775, Paul Revere set out on horseback from Boston to warn the patriots that the British king in London was sending redcoats to suppress their demands for liberty. When I was a kid, I dreamt I was there.

In April 2025, nearly 100,000 people rallied in front of Boston City Hall to warn the would-be American king in Washington to keep his hands off their democracy. This time, as an adult, I really was there.

In his classic poem, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that Revere shouted out “a cry of defiance and not of fear” on his ride. There was plenty of defiance in Boston’s City Hall Plaza, too. Signs demanded that the Trump Administration keep its “hands off” public health, clean air and water, women’s bodies, Medicare, free speech, due process, personal liberty and much more.

Back in 1775, Harvard was the only college in Massachusetts. Harvard’s still there, but today in Greater Boston there’s also Boston University, MIT, Tufts, Boston College, Wellesley, UMass Boston, Brandeis, Emerson, Lesley and other institutions with a total student enrollment of close to 400,000. It’s no surprise, then, that at the rally, signs were also plentiful calling for the administration to keep their “hands off our students, books, education, and science.” Cancer survivors waved placards demanding the administration also keep its hands off university cancer research to which they attributed their very lives.

Just what were the patriots fighting for in the Revolutionary War? According to the Declaration of Independence, they wished to win freedom from George III whose “every act” went to “define a Tyrant” and whose character made him “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

These words resonated among the present-day Boston protesters.

There were over 1,400 demonstrations against Trump and his regime in cities besides Boston on April 5. But for me, even after 250 years, Boston stands preeminent as “the cradle of liberty.”