Crispus Attucks Killed at the Boston Massacre, First to Die in Revolution

On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Wampanoag descent who had escaped slavery twenty years earlier, was the first person killed when British soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street, Boston. He became the first martyr of the American Revolution. John Adams, defending the soldiers at trial, described Attucks as a rabble-rouser. Abolitionists later celebrated him as proof that Black Americans had invested blood in the nation's founding from its first moment.