Revolutionary Citizens: African Americans 1776-1804

It is not entirely clear who provoked the British musket fire at the Custom House in Boston on March 5, 1770, but the volley wounded eight men and killed five. Crispus Attucks, a tall, young mulatto, was one of the men who died in the confrontation. He would later become a revolutionary hero, celebrated as "the first to defy, and the first to die" in the cause of colonial liberty that went down in history as the Boston Massacre. When the American Revolution broke out six years later, African Ame…