Person · 1723–1770
Crispus Attucks
A sailor and dockworker of African and Native American descent, killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre and remembered as among the first to die in the American Revolution.
Little is certain about Crispus Attucks's early life; he is generally believed to have escaped slavery and worked for years as a sailor and rope-maker. On the night of March 5, 1770, he was at the front of the crowd confronting British soldiers on King Street in Boston when the soldiers fired, and he was among the five killed.
In the decades that followed, Attucks became a powerful symbol — first for Revolutionary propagandists, and later for 19th-century Black abolitionists who pointed to him as proof that Black Americans had shed their blood for the nation's freedom from its very first martyrdom.