SAUCY BOY

Crispus Attucks, our namesake at the Center, was born in 1723 to an enslaved man from Africa and a woman of indigenous Wampanoag-Natick ancestry. Attucks was enslaved in Framingham, Massachusetts for much of his early life. He fled white ownership to Boston when he was 27, and as a free man, Attucks worked as a skilled sailor on whaling ships and as a rope-maker. 

In the 1750s, Great Britain was paying their soldiers so poorly that they were forced to supplement their wages by taking off-duty employment with local establishments, and colonist sailors faced a constant danger of being forcibly drafted into the Royal Navy.  

On March 5, 1770, frustrated with unjust British practice and angry that his own and other colonists’ livelihoods were being threatened, Crispus Attucks is said to have been lamenting with a group of sailors and tradesmen at a local pub when a British soldier walked in asking for work. 

Later that evening, a group of angry colonists, with Crispus Attucks bravely at the front, confronted a group of British soldiers. Tensions mounted quickly, with the British soldiers firing their muskets into the crowd after one of them was hit with a thrown object. Crispus Attucks was the first to fall when two musket balls ripped through his chest, alongside four other men who all lost their lives, at what came to be known as the Boston Massacre and the spark of the American Revolution.   

In the trial against the British soldiers for the murders of Attucks and the four other men, John Adams played to racial and class prejudices in defending the soldiers when he described the colonist protestors as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”

Most all of the soldiers were acquitted of their charges, but Crispus Attucks has lived on as a symbol of liberty and bravery in the face of injustice for many Americans.