Crispus Attucks: From Runaway to the Revolution’s First Martyr

In September 1750, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Crispas walked away from his master’s farm in Framingham, Massachusetts, and out of the written record. Twenty years later, he reemerged on a Boston street — the first man to fall in the struggle that became the American Revolution.

Crispus Attucks was born around 1723 in Framingham. There is disagreement among historians whether he had been enslaved or was free, although his father was an enslaved African and his mother was Native American. His descendants say he escaped enslavement in his late 20s, and this advertisement, printed in the Boston Gazette on October 2, 1750, describes him accurately: “Ran-away from his Master William Brown of Framingham, on the 30th of September, last, a Molatto Fellow, about 27 years of age, named Crispas, six feet, two inches high, short curl’d Hair.” The notice offered a ten-pound reward; two more followed that November. Then the record falls silent.

A Sailor in Boston

By 1770 Attucks had made a life at sea. He was living in Boston as a sailor, and witnesses at the trial knew him by the name Michael Johnson — probably an alias a runaway carried to move freely. What the fugitive from Framingham did in those twenty years, the record does not say; a man with a price on his head learned to keep himself off paper.

King Street, March 5, 1770

On the cold evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd of Boston workingmen confronted a sentry and then a squad of soldiers of the 29th Regiment outside the Custom House on King Street, today’s State Street. Witnesses placed Attucks at the front, a seaman with a stick in his hand, urging men forward. John Adams, defending the soldiers at trial, cast him as the leader of the mob. A soldier fired; Attucks took two musket balls in the chest and died on the spot. He and ropemaker Samuel Gray were killed outright; James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr died of their wounds within days. Five dead. Boston called it the Boston Massacre.

The First Martyr

Boston buried Attucks and three of the other victims together in a common grave in the Granary Burying Ground, where all five rest today. For revolutionaries he became something new: a martyr. Pamphlets and orations carried his name through the colonies, and he entered history as the first casualty of the American Revolution.

Remembering Attucks on His Own Terms

For nearly a century, public commemorations of the Massacre passed over the Black and Indigenous man who died first. In 1855, the Black abolitionist William Cooper Nell published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution and put Attucks at its center. After the Dred Scott decision denied Black citizenship, Black Bostonians held the first Crispus Attucks Day at Faneuil Hall on March 5, 1858. In 1888, after a campaign Nell began and Lewis Hayden carried on, the city dedicated an Attucks monument on Boston Common. In 1927, Indianapolis opened a segregated high school bearing his name; its students made it a center of Black pride.

Why He Still Matters

Attucks died first in a revolution whose Declaration proclaimed all men created equal while many of its signers held people in slavery. His story has been claimed, dismissed and reclaimed ever since — proof that who gets remembered is itself a struggle. As we say at HistorianSpeaks, the past is present.