Episode Details

The first man to die at the Boston Massacre in 1770 was not legally free himself. This episode explores the life and legacy of Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Wampanoag descent who escaped enslavement in 1750, took the alias Michael Johnson, and spent two decades working as a sailor, whaler, and dock worker along the Atlantic coast.

We look at the economic tensions in occupied Boston, where off-duty British soldiers undercut local laborers, and the chaotic night of March 5, 1770. We also examine how John Adams cast Attucks as the violent instigator to defend the soldiers, how Samuel Adams and Paul Revere turned the event into propaganda, and how abolitionists later resurrected Attucks as a symbol of Black patriotism.

• What William Brown's 1750 runaway advertisement reveals about Attucks and his heritage
• Why the maritime world offered a rare loophole in the colonial caste system
• The contradictory eyewitness accounts of what Attucks was doing when the soldiers fired
• His lying in state at Faneuil Hall and the 1888 monument on Boston Common
• The story of 11-year-old Christopher Seider, killed weeks before the massacre