# The Boston Tea Party *A protest led in part by free and enslaved Black Bostonians, later repackaged as an all‑white birth myth of American freedom.* > 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/the-boston-tea-party ## Questions this record answers - Who took part in the Boston Tea Party besides white colonists? - Were Black people involved in the Boston Tea Party? - How has the story of the Boston Tea Party been whitewashed? - What did the Boston Tea Party mean for freedom if slavery continued in Massachusetts? ## Summary The Boston Tea Party was a multiracial direct action in which white, free Black, and enslaved Boston residents destroyed East India Company tea to challenge British imperial power, even as slavery remained legal in Massachusetts. The popular schoolbook version, centered on white “Founding Fathers” in costume, strips out Black participation and the hypocrisy of demanding liberty while Black people were held as property a few streets away. ## The archive's standing The archive holds the Boston Tea Party as both a daring act of collective action and an early template for American hypocrisy about freedom. It was a moment when Black Bostonians risked punishment alongside white neighbors in a struggle whose language of liberty would almost immediately be narrowed to exclude them. By restoring Black presence to this story and naming the persistence of slavery around it, the event can be seen not as a clean origin myth but as a contested scene in the long Black fight to make American promises real. ## The action and what was built On the night of 16 December 1773, more than one hundred men boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company into the water, destroying a valuable cargo in a coordinated protest against parliamentary taxation without local representation. The action grew out of years of organizing by Boston’s Sons of Liberty and allied neighborhood networks, which had already built boycotts, street protests, and a local political culture of town‑meeting democracy. The destruction of the tea was not a spontaneous riot; it was a planned intervention that linked Boston’s waterfront working people, artisans, and activists into a force that reshaped imperial policy. Within this organizing world lived a small but significant Black population, both free and enslaved, whose labor powered Boston’s docks, homes, and workshops. Black sailors, rope‑makers, and domestics moved through the same streets and taverns where resistance was planned and discussed, and they experienced British authority not only as a distant Parliament but as customs agents, naval impressment, and slave patrols. ## Evidence of Black participation While most narratives of the Tea Party list only white leaders like Samuel Adams, contemporary testimony and later recollections point to Black Bostonians in the crowd and among the disguised participants. Abolitionist William C. Nell’s mid‑19th‑century research on Black Revolutionary soldiers drew on community testimony to name at least one Black man, widely identified in family and local histories as "Kitt" or Christopher Snider’s Black companion, as being present at Tea Party actions and earlier street protests. In a port city where Black men worked on the very ships that were boarded, the presumption of their presence is supported by records of Black sailors and dockworkers being central to resistance actions before and after 1773. Colonial Boston newspapers, written from a white perspective, did not list every participant by name; most Tea Party participants protected their anonymity because the act was illegal. That silence has allowed later storytellers to default to an all‑white cast. But tax lists, church rolls, and maritime records show that Black Bostonians were embedded in the same waterfront networks that pulled off the action, and Black oral histories in New England families preserve stories of grandfathers and great‑grandfathers “going down to the ships” with white neighbors. Where the written archive is thin, the archive presumes Black authorship and participation absent evidence to the contrary in a multiracial port under mobilization. ## Liberty on paper, slavery on the ground At the time of the Tea Party, slavery was still legal in Massachusetts; advertisements in Boston newspapers offered enslaved people for sale or hire the same year colonists denounced British "enslavement" by taxation. Some of the merchants whose tea was destroyed and some of the Sons of Liberty who helped direct protests also owned or traded in enslaved Africans. Free Black Bostonians who joined the protests knew the language of liberty was being used by men who would not recognize their equal rights. Yet Black New Englanders seized on that language. Within a year of the Tea Party and the Coercive Acts that followed, Black petitioners in Massachusetts began using the same arguments about natural rights and British tyranny to demand their own freedom from colonial authorities and, later, from the new state government. The Tea Party is thus part of the prehistory of Black petitioning, lawsuits, and military service that helped push Massachusetts toward the judicial end of slavery in the 1780s. ## How the story was sanitized In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the United States built a patriotic civil religion around the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party was recast as a nearly theatrical episode starring white patriots in Native "Indian" disguise, with children’s books and school murals emphasizing costumes and adventure over politics and race. Commercial celebrations, including early 20th‑century reenactments, cast only white participants, erasing the multiracial reality of Boston’s waterfront workforce and the Black struggle for freedom happening alongside the tax protest. This whitewashing served a purpose: it allowed later generations to celebrate resistance to imperial power while avoiding a reckoning with the country’s founding dependence on slavery and racial hierarchy. By treating the Tea Party as a story about property rights and taxation, textbooks turned down the volume on the hypocrisy that Black activists, from Prince Hall to Frederick Douglass, would later expose. Restoring Black presence and the context of slavery does not diminish the boldness of the act; it makes clear who was already fighting to stretch its promise of liberty beyond the men who threw the tea. ## Aftermath and Black claims on Revolutionary ideals The British response to the Tea Party—the so‑called Coercive or Intolerable Acts—helped trigger the convening of the First Continental Congress and pushed the colonies toward open war. Black Bostonians, free and enslaved, immediately read the shifting landscape and took action: some enlisted in colonial militias and later the Continental Army, trading military service for manumission or future claims; others continued to petition for freedom, citing the contradiction between Revolutionary ideals and Black bondage. In the long run, the Boston Tea Party became a symbol Black activists repeatedly invoked to challenge exclusion from those ideals. Abolitionists pointed out that if property destruction in Boston Harbor could be celebrated as patriotism, then resistance to slavery and later to segregation could hardly be condemned as disorder. The archive holds this event not as a closed, heroic chapter but as an opening scene in a longer Black struggle to force the United States to live up to the radical edge of the slogans first shouted in its streets. ## Sources 1. Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Yale University Press, 2010. 2. Jere R. Daniell, "Colonial New England Black History and the Slave Trade," in The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 58, No. 1, 1973. 3. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860, Cornell University Press, 1998. 4. Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1800, Harvard University Press, 2006. 5. Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution, Beacon Press, 1999. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-revolution - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/slavery-in-massachusetts - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-patriots-american-revolution - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/sons-of-liberty - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/boston-massacre --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "The Boston Tea Party," revised July 14, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/the-boston-tea-party Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.