Rogue History

- Crispus Attucks didn't recognize the significance of what he was doing as he swung a stick at the British soldiers.

He only knew that, suddenly, he found himself leading a protest against their brutality.

But when he fell just a few moments later, struck by two bullets, Crispus became the spark not just for the American Revolution, but for debates over race, politics, and police brutality that continued long after his death.

His legend was woven through centuries of American political action, growing and shifting to meet the needs of those who used it.

But even now, the man at the middle of it all remains a mystery.

I'm Joel Cook and this is "Rogue History."

If you're even a little familiar with American history, you've probably heard about Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the American Revolution.

But if you don't know much more than that about him, you're not alone.

He was most likely born in Framingham, Massachusetts around 1723 and was half Black, half Native.

Most stories about him claim that his father was African and his mother, Wampanoag.

And we know that his last name, Attucks, means small male deer in the Wampanoag language.

So Crispus was born and then we don't have another clue about his life until 27 years later.

In 1750, slaveholder William Brown placed an ad in the paper for a runaway named Crispus who was described as, "A mulatto fellow about 27 years of age, six feet, two inches high."

Today, we think of the word mulatto as an antiquated term for a person of mixed black and white ancestry, but in 18th-century New England, the term meant mixed people in general.

So it's pretty likely that this runaway was our guy.

We know that at some point Crispus became a sailor, which makes sense for a Black person escaping slavery in 18th-century New England.

The seafaring world provided opportunities for runaways to disappear and Black people can move upwards socially and financially more easily as well.

But that didn't mean they were treated any better once they were back on shore.

The founding slave code in North America, written in Barbados in 1661, described Black people as heathenish, brutish, and an uncertain dangerous kind of people.

And early New England leaders like Cotton Mather, a Boston minister, called them, "the most brutish creatures upon earth."

Words like "heathen" or "brute" were used to describe Black men in the same ways the word thug is used by some people today.

By contrast, the dangerous nature of maritime work forced white sailors to respect and sometimes follow the leadership of Black sailors when the conditions dictated.

When a Black sailor onboard the Zant started a mutiny against the captain over poor treatment, the white sailors followed his lead and continued to rebel even after he was arrested.

So Black sailors returning to land with independence, confidence, and crews of roughneck comrades willing to back them up were a problem for the social order.

Local authorities were terrified that they would not only buck the system themselves, but spread ideas of liberty and equality to other Black people as well.

The separation between these two worlds, the oppressive one on land and the more independent one at sea, created a paradox in 1770.

Boston authorities wouldn't have expected or even wanted a formerly enslaved sailor to be the man who struck the first blow for America's freedom.

But when the alarm bells began ringing on March 5th, 1770, everything about Crispus's heritage and life experiences made him the man for the job.

You may have heard about Boston holding a tea party in 1773, but what you might not know is that the tension that led to that had been brewing for years.

You see, after the Seven Years' War, British Parliament passed several tax bills to regain the money they lost.

But just like Americans today, colonists didn't like taxes and they protested paying them.

Parliament then passed the Townshend Acts, a series of punitive laws intended to punish those stingy little colonists.

And they sent troops to America in 1768 to enforce them.

Now to you, that might seem a little excessive, and maybe it was, but what's important to understand from the British perspective is that police forces, as we know them, didn't quite exist yet.

The British army was the police and they were deployed in England just as often to serve in this duty.

Still, Boston wasn't going for it.

Besides the fact that they were acting as a militarized police force, the soldiers weren't exactly behaving themselves.

Sometimes they got drunk and committed armed robberies and assaults against citizens.

At least one drunken British soldier tried to incite a slave rebellion, fully understanding how threatening his words would be to a slaveholding society.

Not really mad at that.

But worst of all, the British soldiers were cute.

And the Colonial podcast bros were really upset about American women dating them.

Nothing a little toxic masculinity to send things over the edge.

But in all seriousness, there really were problems with the British presence.

On February 22nd, 1770, a British customs official shot 11-year-old Christopher Seider for throwing rocks during a protest against a loyalist business owner.

Christopher's funeral set off massive fights between soldiers and disgruntled Bostonians on March 2nd and 3rd.

Things reached a fever pitch on March 5th when a British soldier began beating a wig maker's apprentice for taunting him over an unpaid debt.

The young man's cries of pain attracted a growing crowd.

Colonists began ringing church bells to bring out more men.

And within a matter of hours, the soldier was facing a crowd that was absolutely furious at his unnecessary use of force.

As he called for reinforcements, the crowd backed him up against the Custom House.

And right at the front of that crowd was none other than our mystery man, Crispus Attucks.

In the court testimony that followed, multiple soldiers reported that a tall mulatto fellow was leading a group of sailors towards the soldiers.

One sailor reported him leading 20 or 30 men towards the British while huzzahing and whistling.

Another person said that he attacked the soldiers while someone else said that the soldiers responded to a piece of wood being thrown from the crowd.

Whatever happened, the first two shots the British fired hit Crispus and he died from his wounds a few hours later.

Including Crispus, the soldiers shot 11 people.

Three died that night and two others were wounded severely enough that they died later on.

Revolutionaries in Boston quickly picked up the story, reporting the horrid massacre in Boston and collecting 96 eyewitness testimonies proving the soldier's guilt.

Of course, not all of those testimonies were legitimate, but it was a heck of a propaganda win by the men who would soon become revolutionaries.

And right at the center of it all was Crispus.

But even in this moment, he was still a bit of a mystery.

His body was taken Faneuil Hall along with another victim because they were both strangers to the community.

In fact, he was originally mistaken for another man named Michael Johnson before someone identified him correctly.

After three days, Crispus and the other men killed in the massacre were given a massive funeral procession.

I'm talking 10,000 people at minimum in a city of 16,000.

The procession stopped at notable revolutionary hotspots like Boston's Liberty Tree before the men were taken to the Granary Burying Ground and placed in a common grave.

This was unusual because non-white people were typically separated from whites in the graveyard, but it wasn't really about racial solidarity.

The goal was to send a message about shared sacrifice and the revolutionaries prioritized Crispus's working-class background over any acknowledgement of his race.

But they weren't the only people who got a say in how Crispus Attucks was remembered.

Before he was even buried, ferocious jockeying began over who he was and what he represented.

The first person to truly contest the interpretation of Crispus's memory was none other than a future president.

John Adams volunteered to serve as a defense attorney for the British soldiers charged with manslaughter.

Adams believed that everyone had a right to a fair trial and fair representation in America.

Well, everybody except Crispus.

Adams' defense strategy was to prove that Crispus was one of those words we talked about earlier, a brute, leading a group of working-class ruffians.

He mocked Crispus as, "the hero of the night."

He portrayed him as a tough guy the soldiers had no choice but to defend themselves against.

He weaponized Crispus's physical stature as, "enough to terrify any person," and called the sailors who joined him, "a rabble of Negroes mixed with immigrants and other low-class people."

He even weaponized Crispus's hometown by referencing his birth in Framingham as a dog whistle for Black and Native culture.

Adams understood what many a defense attorney has understood for centuries: stereotypes can often work better than a truly good defense.

And unfortunately for the fallen, they did, and the British soldiers were released.

But for just about everyone else in Boston, Crispus was still a martyr, though they carefully avoided noting that he was a man of color.

When Paul Revere's famous engraving of the massacre hit the newspapers, it only showed Crispus with darker skin some of the time.

As this image made its way across the colonies, many people didn't realize that Crispus wasn't white.

And by 1775, five years later, America had other revolutionary moments to lean on.

Crispus and the other victims were forgotten as the revolutionaries focused on the big-picture meaning of the massacre instead of the actual victims.

He remained a forgotten hero until 70 years later when a Black abolitionist named William Cooper Nell finally presented him both positively and as a man of color.

Nell revived the memory of Crispus Attucks as the first martyr to prove that Black people were worthy of being treated as full and equal citizens.

Counterarguments against the "Crispus was Black" camp argued that he had to have been fully native because, "The Negro occupied the most servile position."

In other words, they were acknowledging that, yes, the man who struck the first blow for independence wasn't white, but he couldn't have been Black either because Black people weren't capable of leadership.

Well, that's clearly not true.

By Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, Crispus was a household name in Black communities.

Black parents all over the country told their children about the legend of Crispus Attucks to encourage them to be both proud of their heritage and proudly American.

But when white supremacy was voted into power again, Crispus was erased from the nation's public memory.

After being mentioned in a children's book of US history in 1881, no mainstream textbook mentioned him again for the next 80 years.

He still remained a significant part of Black cultural heritage, but perceptions of him continued to change with the times.

In the '60s, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, and other Black activists used the absence of Crispus Attucks in mainstream education to argue against calls to slow down the Civil Rights Movement.

If the country couldn't even acknowledge its first martyr, then surely a conversation on race was needed.

Perhaps the most conflicted reclamation of Crispus Attucks was that of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.

Stokely Carmichael, one of the original freedom riders and the person who popularized the phrase "Black power," praised Crispus for challenging police authority, but he also used him as an example of an Uncle Tom alleging that he died defending slaveholding America instead of dying in defense of Black people.

It wasn't until the bicentennial of the American Revolution in 1976 that Crispus was reintegrated into the broad story of our national origin.

And he wasn't widely considered a Black American hero again until the 1990s.

But even that redemption arc doesn't fully honor the man he actually was.

Despite being a legend in the story of our nation's birth, the real Crispus Attucks remains hidden behind a veil of time and political intrigue even today.

For those who learned about him at all, Crispus Attucks remains many things to many people.

Most still consider him as the first Black casualty of the American Revolution, but that doesn't capture the whole picture.

The man we think of today only in terms of his death was a unique and whole human being with much more fullness and complexity to his story than just the day he fell in front of the Boston Custom House.

As we continue to study him and so many other historical figures, we, to the best of our abilities, should remember them for all that they were, not just the headline we need them to be.

(soft pensive music)