Crispus Attucks

Crispus Attucks died in King Street on the night of March 5, 1770, when British soldiers fired into a Boston crowd. He was about forty-seven. Contemporary accounts describe a tall man of African and Native ancestry, a seaman and ropemaker who had lived as a free man after earlier years in bondage in the Framingham country.

He was not a soldier of 1775. He was dead five years before Lexington. The Revolution still begins, in American memory, with that street and that volley. Attucks was the first man named among the dead. Samuel Adams and the funeral procession made the five deaths a political fact the Crown could not talk away.

A later generation would argue over how much of the night was riot and how much was massacre. The body does not argue. Attucks was carried to the Granary Burying Ground and laid with the others. The city still keeps the grave.

This page does not invent a commission he never held. It records a man who stood in the street when the empire's muskets went off, and who became, without asking, the first name on a long American list.