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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.