You are standing at the site where, on March 5, 1770, the first person to die for the American Revolution fell. This person was Crispus Attucks, born into slavery, of both African and Indigenous descent, likely Nipmuc. The shots that killed him on King Street are remembered as the Boston Massacre. 

Attucks was born into slavery around 1723 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He likely escaped around 1750. He made his life at sea on whaling ships, one of thousands of men living at the edges of a society that proclaimed liberty while practicing bondage.

When he died on King Street, witness testimony at the trial interchangeably called him “mulatto” and “Indian.” Yet Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the massacre shows no Afro-Indigenous man among the fallen. John Adams, defending the British soldiers in court, dismissed those present as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack Tars.” 

Because Attucks and fellow victim James Caldwell had no family in Boston, their bodies lay in state at Faneuil Hall. City leaders waived segregation laws to bury him alongside the others at Granary Burying Ground, where they share a headstone today. 

The revolution he died for was not yet ready to include him. His Indigenous identity was not widely recognized until the Native American civil rights movement of the 1970s. March 5 is now Crispus Attucks Day.