Passing The Torch Presents Black Then with Crispus Attucks

Summary - Black Then 

A history podcast from Passing The Torch Podcast Network.

Join Martin Foster and a rotation of guest hosts to celebrate and uplift the talents of African Americans throughout military history. Tune in to hear a quick synopsis of heralded and unheralded patriots.

What has been pieced together paints a picture of a young man who showed an early skill for buying and trading goods. He seemed unafraid of the consequences of escaping the bonds of slavery. Historians have theorized that Attucks was the focus of an advertisement in a 1750 edition of the Boston Gazette in which a white landowner offered to pay 10 pounds for the return of a young runaway enslaved person.

Attucks, however, managed to escape for good, spending the next two decades on trading ships and whaling vessels coming in and out of Boston. He also found work as a rope maker.

• Fast forwarding, As British control over the colonies tightened, tensions escalated between the colonists and British soldiers. Attucks was one of those directly affected by the worsening situation. Seamen like Attucks constantly lived with the threat they could be forced into the British navy, while back on land, British soldiers regularly took part-time work away from colonists.
• On March 2, 1770, a fight erupted between a group of Boston rope makers and three British soldiers. The conflict was ratcheted up three nights later when a British soldier looking for work reportedly entered a Boston pub, only to be greeted by furious sailors, one of whom was Attucks.
• The details regarding what followed are a source of debate, but that evening, a group of Bostonians approached a guard in front of the customs house and started taunting him. The situation quickly escalated. When a contingent of British redcoats came to the defense of their fellow soldier, more angry Bostonians joined the fracas, throwing snowballs and other items at the troops.

Attucks was one of those at the front of the fight amid dozens of people, and when the British opened fire he was the first of five men killed. His murder made him the first casualty of the American Revolution. Quickly becoming known as the Boston Massacre, the episode further propelled the colonies toward war with the British. 

Accomplishments and Legacy

Attucks became a martyr. His body was transported to Faneuil (like Daniel) Hall, where he and the others killed in the attack were laid in state. City leaders waived segregation laws in the case and permitted Attucks to be buried with the others.

In the years since his death, the legacy for Attucks has continued to endure, first with the American colonists eager to break from British rule, and later among 19th-century abolitionists and 20th-century civil rights activists. In his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait,

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