A Colorful History

Crispus Attucks (ca. 1723-1770) was an African American who would become known as the “first martyr of the American Revolution”.  Attucks was the first person to be shot and killed by the British Redcoats during the “Boston Massacre” on March 5^th, 1770; there is much debate and uncertainty about Crispus Attucks’s life before this event and whether he was a freedman or a runaway, a martyr or, as John Adams would testify, a villainous instigator. What is commonly agreed upon though is that he was of both African and Native American descent and was the first to die in the attack. Regardless of the reality of the event, the people of Boston held Attucks and the others that fell with him as icons of American freedom and the Abolitionist Movement would use his story to illustrate what they felt were the actions of an American hero of color.