User:Nic Karnoupakis/sandbox

Boston Massacre

Fact: It emphasizes Crispus Attucks, the black man in the center who became an important symbol for abolitionists.

Kachun, Mitchell A. “From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon: Crispus Attucks, Black Citizenship, and Collective Memory, 1770–1865.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 29, no. 2, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 249–86, doi:10.1353/jer.0.0072.

DOI: 10.1353/jer.0.0072

Quote: Historian Roy Finkenbine has determined through an extensive examination of the Black Abolitionist Papers that Attucks -- along with AME Church founder Richard Allen and Revolutionary veteran, entrepreneur, and activist James Forten -- was one of "the most popular early figures identified by antebellum black reformers," notwithstanding the absence of any abolitionist references to Attucks prior to 1839. By the 1870s Attucks was so closely associated with African Americans' demands for citizenship that black historian, novelist, and activist William Wells Brown, not recognizing Attucks's recent reemergence, could write that "for half a century after the close of the [Revolutionary] war, the name of Crispus Attucks was honorably mentioned by the most noted men of the country, who were not blinded by foolish prejudice, which, to say the most, was only skin-deep."