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Interest in promoting Attucks as a national hero was redoubled as African Americans’ heroic participation in World War II once again presented opportunities to sharpen activists’ arguments for black inclusion and full citizenship rights. Even before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor drew the United States fully into the new world war, African Americans expressed concern about the meaning the global crisis would hold for black citizens and soldiers. African Americans, growing numbers of sympathetic whites, and US government propagandists all used the era’s expanding mass media—books, periodicals, plays, pageants, radio broadcasts, film, visual arts, school programs, and more—in order to make Crispus Attucks and other black heroes visible in American public culture as never before. Yet mainstream attention to black history, as well as advances in African Americans’ ability to participate fully in American social and political life, were still slow in coming.

This chapter examines how black Bay Staters in the 1850s strove to claim “manhood” and “citizenship” by representing themselves and their ancestors as agents in history. This endeavor was especially pressing after 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act made African Americans vulnerable to slave catchers, even on the professedly free ground of the North. In this context, Crispus Attucks, who had largely been forgotten in early national commemorations of the Revolutionary War, assumed his place as black America's finest example of patriotism and heroism. The leading figure in the effort to recover the agency of Attucks and other black patriots was William Cooper Nell, an abolitionist, integrationist, and historian who published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855. This chapter interprets the revival of interest in black Revolutionary heroism in the context of the struggle for African American civil rights in Massachusetts, with particular attention to the effort to allow black men to serve in the militia.

While the new century saw continued nods to African American figures and experiences in American history textbooks and curricula, blacks still remained mostly on the margins of the master narrative in those mainstream accounts, with several twenty-first-century texts showing a significant shift in the presentation of Attucks’s race, identity, and character. Generally, however, treatments of Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre in twenty-first-century textbooks adhered to many of the same patterns found in those from the late twentieth century. This was also true for the attention given Attucks in popular culture, public commemorations, journalism, children’s literature, art, music, and academic scholarship.

As Jim Crow segregation came to define black Americans’ place in the nation by the end of the nineteenth century, American memory also became largely segregated. African Americans continued to hold Attucks in high regard, but his name was invoked far less frequently in mainstream popular culture and historical scholarship. As white America all but abandoned its concern for the basic welfare and rights of black citizens, a black hero like Crispus Attucks had little chance to enter the heroic pantheon of the nation. School textbooks, mainstream popular culture, and white Americans in general virtually erased Attucks from the story of the American Revolution. African Americans kept his memory alive in history books, public commemorations, and memorial acts like the naming of children and community organizations.

During the era of the “New Negro” after World War I, African Americans intensified their attention to Attucks and other race heroes as they made more overt efforts to incorporate African American achievements into the national historical narrative. The decades after 1920 saw an expansion of both textual and nontextual attention to black history as well as increasing complaints from black commentators about the exclusion of that history from school curricula and public life. While mainstream textbooks failed to incorporate Attucks or African Americans in general, black authors attempting to replace or supplement the white narrative apparently were frustrated by how little was actually known about Attucks. Black activism and black attention to heroes of the race intensified as World War II approached.

As the integrationist civil rights movement took shape, Attucks became one of the most prominent black figures to enter elementary and secondary school curricula and textbooks. In most mainstream texts he became merely a token black presence, yet some white commentators took issue with even this superficial elevation to the status of Revolutionary patriot, reviving the contention that Attucks was no more than a rabble-rousing ruffian. Meanwhile, black writers characterized him as everything from a peaceful integrationist to an Afrocentric rebel to a sellout Uncle Tom. Attucks was now more present than ever in the nation’s public schools and popular culture, but widespread disagreement remained regarding his status as a national hero to be honored by all, an embodiment of race pride, a symbol of violence and disorder, or an irrelevant nobody who should be forgotten.

By 1850 Crispus Attucks began playing a significant role in African Americans’ affirmation of their essential Americanness. Black abolitionists muted his mixed racial background in favor of a fully African American one, and his possible reasons for being part of the Boston mob were left unscrutinized. Attucks emerged as a black patriot and Founder. During and immediately after the Civil War, for African Americans, Attucks remained a symbol of black patriotism and military valor. But some whites began to emphasize his Native American background and to question his status as a hero. And as the nation slowly distanced itself from the Civil War, it became clear that the national interest did not include racial justice for black Americans.

The 1976 bicentennial brought greater mainstream attention to Attucks and black participation in the Revolution as well as increasing opportunities to disseminate interpretations of Attucks and other African American heroes in schools and through ever-expanding mass media exposure over the subsequent decades. Attucks was becoming a standard figure in most popular American history textbooks and was featured even more visibly in mainstream culture outside the classroom. Of all the competing versions of Attucks circulating at that time, it was the taken-for-granted Revolutionary token that seemed most prominent in the nation’s collective memory; for many, he was a bland symbol of a romanticized American Revolution and an unthreatening black patriotism. By the end of the twentieth century, Attucks had, to a large degree, become a black American hero of the Revolution, though one who was still marginalized within the nation’s story.

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

The Conclusion ties together the book’s main arguments about Crispus Attucks’s place in American history and memory. We do not know enough about his experiences, associations, or motives before or during the Boston Massacre to conclude with certainty that Attucks should be considered a hero and patriot. But his presence in that mob on March 5, 1770, embodies the diversity of colonial America and the active participation of workers and people of color in the public life of the Revolutionary era. The strong likelihood that Attucks was a former slave who claimed his own freedom and carved out a life for himself in the colonial Atlantic world adds to his story’s historical significance. The lived realities of Crispus Attucks and the many other men and women like him must be a part of Americans’ understanding of the nation’s founding generations.

With a focus on early representations of the Boston Massacre and the Battle of Bunker Hill, this chapter argues that the individuals publicly honored as heroes of the Revolutionary War in the period up to the War of 1812 were primarily those with recognized political, social, and cultural authority: elite white men. Early accounts of these pivotal Revolutionary events noted the presence, but not generally the political agency, of people of color. This chapter develops this argument by exploring the commemoration (or lack thereof) of the Revolutionary contributions of Crispus Attucks and black military veterans, including Primus Hall, Peter Salem, Salem Poor, and Edom London. The sources include both visual culture and print culture, including an analysis of John Trumbull's painting of Bunker Hill.

Between 1771 and 1850 the Boston Massacre itself remained a part of the nation’s collective memory of the American Revolution. Some characterized it as a key event in forging colonial unity while others preferred to distance the Revolution from what they considered a disorderly riot. In either case, Attucks’s role and racial identity remained largely ignored, even among African Americans. A few scattered references to Attucks appeared during the first half of the nineteenth century, but he did not become a focal point for African American arguments for citizenship, inclusion, and equality until the 1850s, when African American activists recognized the central role Attucks might play in establishing blacks’ rightful place in the nation.

The introduction outlines Crispus Attucks’s story and the book’s approach, using the concepts of history and memory to explore how Attucks has been remembered and forgotten, lionized and vilified, from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including a brief description of each chapter. Key themes introduced include the role of Attucks and other black heroes in the centuries-long debate over African American citizenship, patriotism, and inclusion; the meanings both black and white Americans have attached to Attucks’s name, image, and story; different conceptions of who belongs in the nation’s history and who does not; and the process through which national heroes and myths are constructed.

The epilogue follows the commemoration of Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, and other Revolutionary‐era blacks through the Civil War and beyond. It also considers how William Cooper Nell's call for black citizenship was — and was not — fulfilled in the formation of the Fifty‐fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1863. Drawing on the famous monument to the Fifty‐fourth and other post‐Civil War memorials in Boston, the epilogue assesses the ongoing significance of commemorative spaces and activities in Massachusetts.