LAST RUN OF THE BLACK DUCK

Premiere Screening

Tickets are $20 per person

PARKING
Free street parking is available.

ACCESSIBILITY
Screening space wheelchair accessible.

ABOUT THE FILM: Prohibition – America’s grand social experiment – spawned unexpected hazards throughout the country – in law enforcement, public attitudes, and economic forces. In New England as elsewhere, this led to large scale smuggling activities to feed the public’s thirst, which was not abated by the laws against the sale of alcoholic beverages. In the waters off Southern Rhode Island, this led to frequent encounters between smugglers, or “rum runners”, with their fast coastal boats, and the U.S. Coast Guard, the newly militarized arm of the federal effort to enforce the prohibition laws.

Conditions were ripe for the large scale liquor smuggling operation which quickly sprang up in the offshore waters between Boston and New York, with foreign cargo vessels maintaining station beyond the 12 mile limit, safely beyond the reach of US laws, allowing speedy coastal craft to arrange transfers under cover of darkness or fog, and evade the Coast Guard patrols with guile and guts. The offshore sanctuary came to be known as Rum Row, and the activity there quickly came to be controlled by emerging organized crime groups, who were growing fat off the immense profits to be gained.

The teenage mariner Charlie Travers was raised in the full bloom of this illegal traffic, growing up in the old whaling town of New Bedford, one of the busiest zones of smuggling activity. Charlie quickly gained experience in the trade, despite several brushes with the law. At the same time a newly minted Coast Guard patrol boat commander – Alexander C. Cornell, was busy proving his worth in chasing down the rum-boats, becoming the top skipper from New London Station, the Cost Guards busiest base. Travers had outfoxed Cornell on many occasions, but in the waning days of 1929, this led to an encounter between Travers – the young skipper of the rum running vessel Black Duck – and Bos’n Alexander Cornell, the captain of Coast Guard Patrol Boat 290 – a clash between two men entangled from both sides of the law.

On the calm yet foggy night of December 29th 1929, Cornell set up his patrol boat in the perfect place to ambush any approaching rum running vessel, right off the mouth of Newport Harbor. At about 2:00 AM the Black Duck, captained by Travers, approached as they navigated along the rocky shores, and when suddenly encountering the Coast Guard Patrol vessel, were met with a blaze of machine gun bullets. With no warning, three of the four crew on the fully laden rum boat were killed – only the skipper survived. BY the time the Coast Guard returned to base in New London – the Black Duck in tow – the national press exploded with the news, dubbed “The Newport Massacre” by the Boston Globe. The following days saw multiple state, federal, and local investigations, continued national press coverage, riots in the streets of Boston, and debates in the Halls of Congress – and funerals for the dead sailors. The central question: How far can the federal government go when enforcing an unpopular law? Ultimately the backlash to the Black Duck incident, the overt use of military weapons against US citizens, and the public concern over the growth of organized crime led to the appeal of prohibition in 1933 – the only Constitutional amendment to ever be overturned.