| Crispus Attucks (MA)
at the Boston Massacre | Boston Massacre Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, died in Boston on March 5, 1770 after British soldiers fired two musket balls into his chest.1 His death and that of four other men at the hands of the 29th Regiment became known as the Boston Massacre. Death instantly transformed Attucks from an anonymous sailor into a martyr for a burgeoning revolutionary cause. On March 5, 1770, witnesses placed Attucks at the head of a group of sailors brandishing clubs and marching toward King Street. A crowd formed around a small group of British soldiers, hurling snowballs, ice balls, and insults at the men. Observers noted Attucks leaned his tall frame on his cordwood club. Amid the chaos, Private Montgomery from the British Army and the rest of the soldiers fired into the crowd. In the 1800s, abolitionists in Boston, held up the death of Attucks as the first martyr of the American Revolution. Nell's seminal work, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, fought the erasure of Black people from the story of the American Revolution. Nell led this work with the story of Crispus Attucks, highlighting his death as the first in the cause for liberty. Though Black Bostonians have commemorated the anniversary of Attucks' death since at least the 1850s, it took until the early twentieth century when activists, including William Monroe Trotter, pushed the city of Boston to officially recognize March 5 as Crispus Attucks Day, a tradition which continues to the present day. National Park Service |
| Sipp Ives (MA)
at the Battel of Bennington | The Black Presence at the Battle of Bennington It will probably come as a surprise to most Vermonters that one of the 30 men killed at the Battle of Bennington, a member of Seth Warner’s Continental regiment of Green Mountain Boys, was black. His name was Sipp Ives, and he was recruited into Warner’s ranks from the town of New  Providence in the northern Berkshires in 1777, the year of the Battle. Nor was he the only patriot of African descent who played a role in the fighting and its aftermath. Military records in combination with early town histories furnish the primary sources for this presentation. Original discoveries, notably in the unpublished work of historian Lion G. Miles, in combination with scholarship old and new, from William C. Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) to more recent studies of the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War and the early history of Vermont, paint a more diverse picture of Vermont’s iconic battle and its Green Mountain Boys than that depicted in most histories – an exception being the mural “Prisoners Taken at the Battle of Bennington” by Leroy Williams (1938) in the Bennington Museum, which depicts a black youth on horseback triumphantly leading tied-up Tories on the Bennington town green. Source: Vermont Humanities |