On March 5, 1770, shots rang out in Boston, Massachusetts. Soldiers from Britain fired on an angry crowd. They killed five people. One was Crispus Attucks. If people didn’t know his name before, they soon would. Attucks became a symbol of . He was an icon — first of the and then for the fight to end slavery.
Not a lot is known about Attucks’s life. He was born around 1723 in Framingham, Massachusetts. Attucks’s father had been brought from Africa and forced to work as a slave. His mother was likely from the Wampanoag group.
It seems that Attucks was also enslaved. But by 1750, he had escaped. A newspaper ad asked people to look for a “fellow about 27 years of age, named Crispas, 6 feet 2 inches high, short curl’d hair.”
Attucks never went back to slavery. He took to the seas as a sailor. In March of 1770, he was in Boston.
At the time, there was tension between Britain and its in North America. Britain had started charging to the colonies, and the colonists were mad. Fights broke out with British officials in Boston. British soldiers showed up in the city in 1768. Some of them took part-time jobs. That made it harder for colonists to find work. The people of Boston were not happy.
On March 5, 1770, an angry crowd of Bostonians threw snowballs and rocks at a British soldier. Other troops showed up, and the fight grew. People were using sticks and clubs instead of snow. Some said Attucks was the one leading the group. And when the British soldiers fired their guns, he was hit.
This event was the Boston Massacre. It was huge news. There was a funeral for Attucks and the other victims. Some stories say 10,000 people saw it. In the following months, colonists and soldiers argued about what happened and who was to blame. Two British soldiers were charged with a crime.
By then, some people were already seeing Attucks as a hero. He became known as the first American to die in the American Revolution — even though that war started five years after his death. In the 1800s, poet John Boyle O’Reilly called Attucks “the first to , the first to die.”
Attucks also became an icon of the abolitionist movement. That movement fought to end slavery. In the 1800s, abolitionists said Attucks had stood up for freedom. They asked: If a Black man could die for the Revolution, shouldn’t Black people have equal rights?
The American Revolution ended in 1783. And the United States ended slavery in 1865. The story of Crispus Attucks still lives on, though. There are schools named after him. And a monument to the massacre rises up in Boston. People in the city still remember Attucks every March 5.
By Ashley Morgan
Updated January 31, 2025, 5:00 P.M. (ET)
