Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks was born around 1723 in Framingham, Massachusetts, of both African and Native American ancestry; his surname echoes the Natick word for "deer." In an age that would not record his early years with care, he came into a life bound by enslavement, and for a time his name belonged to another man before it belonged to history.

On September 30, 1750, a notice in the Boston Gazette announced that a man named "Crispas" had fled the household of William Brown of Framingham. He was described as a "mulatto Fellow, about 27 Years of Age, six Feet two Inches high, short curl'd Hair." From that flight forward, Attucks claimed his own life. He went to sea as a sailor and whaler, laboring on trading and whaling vessels and along the docks, at times using the name Michael Johnson, and for a season living in the Bahamas.

On the night of March 5, 1770, Attucks stood at the front of a crowd confronting British soldiers on King Street in Boston. When the soldiers fired, two musket balls struck him in the chest, and he fell first among the dead. His body lay in state at Faneuil Hall, and he was buried, across the color line of his day, alongside the other fallen.

In the nineteenth century, abolitionists led by William Cooper Nell lifted up his name as the first martyr of the American Revolution, refusing to let a Black patriot be erased from the founding. A monument on Boston Common bears his name still. We honor Crispus Attucks — a man who claimed his freedom, and whose blood was among the first shed for a liberty he was never granted to enjoy.