Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

On April 19, 1909, in the village of Tabriz, a 24-year-old American, Howard Baskerville, a recent Princeton graduate who had gone to Persia as a missionary, led about a hundred volunteer fighters, some of whom were his students, in support of the Persian Constitutional Revolution and against the Tsarist forces who, allied with Russia and British forces, were trying to maintain monarchist tyranny over the Persian peoples.

He was killed by a sniper.

Baskerville’s funeral was attended by thousands of Persians and he was buried in Tabriz’s Assyrian Cemetery. To this day, it is reported, visitors to his gravesite often find fresh yellow flowers, left by anonymous mourners, decorating his tomb.

While I know of no roadside historical marker for Baskerville, I do know that some schools and roads still bear Baskerville’s name.

I know, too, that in 2005, despite continuing hostilities between Iran and America since 1979, that a bronze bust of Baskerville was unveiled at the Constitutional House of Tabriz, Iran, by then-President of the Islamic Republic Mohammad Khatami.

Below the bust, a sentence, inscribed in Persian, reads: “Howard C. Baskerville. He was a patriot, a history maker.”

“I cannot remain and watch indifferently the sufferings of a people fighting for their right,” Baskerville told an American consul who was demanding Baskerville stand down. “I am an American citizen and am proud of it, but I am also a human being and cannot help feeling deep sympathy with the people of this city ... The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference.”

I was reminded of Baskerville when I read that this week the state of New Hampshire purged a historical marker placed in remembrance of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn just two weeks after it was erected.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, because, after all, she wasn’t U.S. Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury (marker #43) who supported the Fugitive Slave Act.

She wasn’t even Hannah Dustin (marker #49), honored for “killing and scalping ten Indians,” for which she collected a bounty.

She wasn’t President Franklin Pierce (marker #80) who opposed abolition, enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, and has a university named after him.

She didn’t even have towns and a college named after her as did Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who conducted biological warfare against Native peoples by distributing small-pox-infected blankets.

She was just a founder of the ACLU, a feminist, labor organizer and social justice activist, and communist who believed in the humanity of the weak, the vulnerable, the exploited, and the disenfranchised, a woman who came to believe that communism offered more opportunity for women, laborers, and people of color than did a Jim Crow, anti-labor, post-Depression era infected America but who never advocated for America’s overthrow.

While Flynn, as I have written, “clearly failed to recognize how the Soviet Union and the Communist Party had abandoned their egalitarian principles and the purges that killed millions of people, not all of which was publicly known contemporaneously,” she became caught up in the hysteria surrounding an anti-Soviet, anti-Communist, Cold War, Korean War, Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, book burning, McCarran Act, McCarthyism, Red Scare, and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) America than often threatened the fundamental rights of many Americans.

An America where she was found guilty.

All this context has been ignored by those opposed to any recognition of Concord’s Rebel Girl who, when offered the option of living in Russia rather than go to prison, refused, saying: “I am an American; I want to live and work in the United States of America. I am not interested in going any place else ...”

After a public outcry by Republicans, led by members of the Executive Council, New Hampshire recently removed a marker honoring Flynn after just two weeks of public display.

Joseph Kenney, a Republican member of the Executive Council, described the historical marker to the New York Times as “a slap in the face to the state of New Hampshire and the city of Concord.” He told the Times that “he hoped removing the plaque would teach children a valuable lesson about the history of communism in the United States, and the time when it threatened ‘to take the world over and change our way of life.’”

I agree: The lesson for children is that if you don’t agree with the Executive Council your voice will be silenced.

Kenney is wrong. A historical marker is not a good housekeeping seal of approval. It says that something historical, and important, happened and we should know about it, just as they have the right to know about those insurrectionist Americans who actually tried to violently overthrow our government on January 6, 2021.

We don’t have to like it. We have to know it.

In 1956, famous American singer, actor, and Black activist Paul Robeson was called to testify before HUAC after refusing to sign an affidavit stating that he wasn’t a communist. When asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union because of his beliefs he answered, “because my father was a slave and my people died to build [the United States and], I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you and no fascist-minded people will drive me from it!”

“Whether I am or not a communist is irrelevant,” he stated. “The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights.”

Baskerville’s, “I am an American citizen and am proud of it;” Flynn’s “I am an American [and] ... not interested in going any place else;” and Robeson’s, “my people died to build [the United States and], I am going to stay here...;” are sentiments we should all support and embrace because that’s who we are.

Because that’s who I am.

Because those are our rights.

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