Were it not for his role in the Boston Massacre, most people would likely never have heard of Crispus Attucks. He was formerly enslaved and in 1750, escaped from his enslaver in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was both African American and Native American, of the Natick nation. Attucks, whose name in the Natick language means deer, came to Boston and joined the many free Blacks and Native Americans working in the maritime trades. The urban setting and large numbers of people of color working on the docks offered a welcome degree of anonymity to fugitives like Attucks. Tall and powerfully built, he worked for the next twenty years as a sailor, often using the name Michael Johnson as an alias.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, leaders like Samuel Adams and John Hancock successfully mobilized sailors and dock workers to protest, sometimes violently, against England’s colonial taxation and trade policies. Crispus Attucks was one of many Boston maritime men who were part of the unrest of the 1760s and 1770s between England and her North American colonies.

Crispus Attucks was fifty-one years old when he helped to lead a crowd of several hundred angry Bostonians who surrounded British sentries at the Boston Customs House on March 5, 1770, and was one of nine men and boys killed when the panicky soldiers fired into the hostile crowd. He and the eight other victims were instant martyrs to the American cause. Their names became household words. Patriots faithfully commemorated the “Boston Massacre” annually in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Attucks’ role in this crucial event raises important questions about people of color in Revolutionary New England culture and society.