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The First Person Killed in The American Revolution Was a Black Man
“[The] first man to die for the flag we now hold high was a black man” — Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life
A not so commonly-known fact is that the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, six years before the Declaration of Independence, was a Black man named Crispus Attucks. Attucks was a stevedore in Boston of Native American and African descent who was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre by British soldiers.
Attucks, as a Black man, was the first American killed in the American Revolution.
According to the Crispus Attucks Museum, Attucks’s father was captured as a slave and then bought to Massachusetts, and sold to a landowner in Buckminster named Colonel Buckminster. His name was Prince Yonger, and it took months for him to reach the East Coast through the Middle Passage, where 40 percent of people died before arriving. Those people who survived lived while they were “packed in hulls and were brandished with hot irons”, according to the Museum.
Attucks’s mother was probably a Native American woman of Wampanoag descent. She was forced into slavery at the end of the First Indian War by the colonial government of Boston, being…
