On April 5, 1770, the Maryland Gazette reported on the Boston Massacre and mentioned one of the victims only in passing:
“A Mulatto man named Johnſton, who was born in Framingham, but lately belonging to New-Providence, and was here in order to go for North-Carolina, killed on the Spot, Two Balls entering his Breaſt.”
No first name. No legacy. Just another anonymous Black man gunned down in the street by British troops.
But that man wasn’t nobody. That man was Crispus Attucks—a former slave, a sailor, a whaler, a ropemaker, and, now, the first man to die in the American Revolution.
For nearly 20 years after escaping from a Framingham plantation in 1750, Attucks lived under an alias—Michael Johnson—to avoid recapture. It was under that name that the official coroner’s jury recorded his death. But the people who knew him? They called him Crispus.
He wasn’t a bystander. He was at the front of the crowd. And when the bullets flew, he was hit twice in the chest.
Framingham raised him. Boston buried him. History renamed him. And a revolution followed.
✊ The Evolution of Crispus Attucks’ Legacy
What’s remarkable is how Attucks’ story transformed:
- By the 1850s, abolitionists like William Cooper Nell and Frederick Douglass resurrected his name and Framingham roots to argue that Black Americans had been present at the very birth of the Republic—and deserved full citizenship.
- In 1858, Boston erected the first public monument to a Black American, honoring the victims of the Boston Massacre. Attucks’ name was listed first.
- By the 20th century, he was canonized in textbooks as the first American to die for independence, a martyr for liberty.
- Today, schools, bridges, stamps, and murals bear his name.
And yet, in his own time, he was barely acknowledged. His name was likely misrecorded, his body buried in a common grave, and his life reduced to a one-line entry in a colonial newspaper.
Crispus Attucks lived in the shadows, died in the street, and rose in memory.
The first to fall for freedom… from Framingham.