# Boston Massacre *A protest turned killing ground in 1770, in which Crispus Attucks and other colonists were shot down by British soldiers, recast in later telling as a white patriot martyrdom.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 14, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/boston-massacre-aa57 ## Questions this record answers - What really happened at the Boston Massacre, and what was Crispus Attucks’s role in it? - Why is Crispus Attucks often missing from popular accounts of the American Revolution? - How did Black and multiracial Bostonians shape the politics that led to the Boston Massacre? - How have artists and historians portrayed the Boston Massacre over time? ## Summary The Boston Massacre was a street confrontation in Boston on 5 March 1770 in which British soldiers fired into a crowd of colonists, killing five men, including dockworker and sailor Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native descent who became an early symbol of resistance. In dominant schoolbook versions the scene is framed as an almost exclusively white patriot martyrdom, pushing Attucks and the multiracial working‑class crowd that stood against empire to the margins or into footnotes. ## The archive's standing The archive holds the Boston Massacre as a multiracial act of resistance in which a Black and Indigenous man stood at the literal front line of the conflict that produced the American republic. It recognizes Crispus Attucks and his fellow laborers not as extras in a drama of Founding Fathers, but as the first dead in a revolutionary project whose benefits they were long denied. The Massacre is a reminder that Black and Native presence is foundational to the story of American liberty, even where later commemorations tried to whiten the cast. ## The event and the crowd On the night of 5 March 1770, tensions that had been building for months between Boston residents and British troops quartered in the town erupted outside the Customs House on King Street. A confrontation between a sentry and a crowd of laborers, sailors and apprentices drew reinforcements from the 29th Regiment; under shouted taunts and thrown objects, the soldiers fired, killing five and wounding others. Contemporary accounts in Boston newspapers and the town’s later official narrative describe an already politicized working‑class crowd, many of whom were maritime laborers angered by impressment, job competition and the occupation of their city. Crispus Attucks, widely recognized in period sources as the first person killed, was a seaman and rope‑maker of African and Indigenous (likely Wampanoag or Natick) ancestry who had escaped enslavement in Framingham decades earlier. Notices in the 1750 Boston Gazette advertising an escaped enslaved man named “Crispas,” owned by William Brown of Framingham, match later descriptions of Attucks’s appearance and skill set, tying him to the world of Black mariners who moved between port cities and plantations. ## Crispus Attucks and the making of a martyr Eyewitness testimony from the soldiers’ trial, including that of witness John Adams summarized in trial pamphlets, places a tall, dark‑complexioned man at the front of the crowd, wielding a heavy stick and leading the jeers at the troops moments before the volley. Later depositions, and Paul Revere’s famous engraving (itself a piece of patriot propaganda), compress the chaos into a clean line of soldiers and a collapsing white victim, but contemporaries who knew Attucks identified him as that leading figure. Attucks’s funeral procession, held jointly for the dead, was one of the largest public gatherings in Boston to that date, with Black and white mourners lining the route as four coffins were carried to a shared grave in the Granary Burying Ground. Local reports and later abolitionist histories remembered Attucks explicitly as a martyr to liberty; by the mid‑19th century, Black activists such as William C. Nell and orators at Black abolitionist anniversaries regularly invoked his name to claim a Black stake in the Revolution and to argue that African Americans had earned citizenship with blood at the nation’s founding. ## Erasure, whitening and recovery in memory Over the 19th century, mainstream depictions of the Boston Massacre gradually centered anonymous white figures and minimized Attucks’s racial identity. Popular engravings and school histories often omitted his name or described him only as a “mulatto” or “mixed‑blood,” while positioning Samuel Adams and other elite patriots as the moral protagonists. Gary Nash and other historians of popular politics have documented how the Massacre was recast from a laboring‑class riot into a dignified precursor to independence led by gentlemen, flattening the multiracial crowd into a generic “people.” Black communities, churches and fraternal organizations did not accept this erasure. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black newspapers such as the Boston Guardian and the Pittsburgh Courier ran commemorative pieces on Attucks around March 5 and the Fourth of July, explicitly naming him a Black hero of 1770 and pushing back against whitewashed textbooks. The Crispus Attucks Clubs founded in cities like Indianapolis and Boston, and the naming of schools and community centers for Attucks, kept his story alive at a neighborhood level even as national narratives lagged behind. ## Black and Native presence in Revolutionary Boston The Massacre cannot be separated from the broader story of Black and Native resistance in Revolutionary‑era New England. Free and enslaved people of African descent in Boston filed some of the earliest freedom petitions of the period, linking their demands to the same natural‑rights language white patriots used against Britain, while Black sailors like Attucks circulated news, radical pamphlets and grievances between ports. Scholars of the Black Atlantic have shown that these maritime workers, many of them multiracial and from Native communities, formed a political class attuned both to imperial exploitation and to the slavery that undergirded it. Attucks’s presence at the front of the crowd on King Street is therefore not an anomaly but emblematic of a wider pattern: people barred from voting or office still taking the physical risks of protest and becoming the first to die in conflicts that elites later narrate as their own. The archive holds that any honest accounting of the Boston Massacre must restore Crispus Attucks to the center of the frame and recognize the event as a multiracial uprising against imperial occupation, not a white‑only prelude to independence. ## Sources 1. Mitch Kachun, "First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory," Oxford University Press, 2017. 2. Hiller B. Zobel, "The Boston Massacre," W.W. Norton, 1970. 3. William C. Nell, "The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution," Robert F. Wallcut, 1855. 4. Gary B. Nash, "Race and Revolution," Madison House, 1990. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/crispus-attucks - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-revolution - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-sailors-in-the-age-of-sail - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/abolitionism-in-new-england --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Boston Massacre," revised July 14, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/boston-massacre-aa57 Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.