Never forget Crispus Attucks, Black patriots

Every year, we remember Paul Revere’s ride. As we should.

We should also reckon with Paul Revere’s picture.

His engraving of the Boston Massacre helped light the fire for revolution. It showed British soldiers firing into a crowd. Men fell dead in the street.

Yet the first man killed that night is hidden in plain sight.

His name was Crispus Attucks. He was a sailor of African and Native ancestry. John Adams later described the crowd as sailors, Irishmen, “negroes and mulattoes.” But Revere’s engraving did not depict Attucks as who he was. It transformed a multiracial, working-class crowd into one that appeared whiter and better dressed.

That was more than artistic license. It was a distortion that endured for generations.

It taught Americans to picture the Revolution as a struggle led and borne almost exclusively by wealthy white men with portraits, property and papers.

That was never the whole story.

Prince Estabrook was enslaved in Lexington. On April 19, 1775, he stood with his neighbors as British troops arrived and was wounded before Congress declared independence — before Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal.”

Salem Poor bought his freedom and fought with distinction at Bunker Hill. Peter Salem also fought there. James Armistead, enslaved in Virginia, became a spy for the Marquis de Lafayette, helping gather intelligence that contributed to the British defeat at Yorktown. The First Rhode Island Regiment, made up of Black, Native and formerly enslaved soldiers, later helped hold the American line near Newport.

Women were there, too. Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, heard the Revolution’s words and used them in court. She sued for her freedom and won. Deborah Sampson, poor and indentured as a child, disguised herself as a man and served in the Continental Army. Margaret Corbin took over a cannon after her husband was killed.

That history is personal in my family.

My adopted grandmother, Dr. Margaret Barnes, was an osteopath with Revolutionary roots. As a girl in the 1910s and 1920s, her father dressed her as a soldier to march in New England Fourth of July parades.

When people objected, he told them not to worry. During the Revolution, some fathers knew their daughters had gone off to fight dressed the same way.

He was right. History made room for daughters in uniform. Memory pushed them back out.

I still have the bow she used to teach me archery. In our family, women did not just remember courage. They passed it down.

The Revolution was not made by one class. It was sailors, servants, farmers, shoemakers, soldiers, spies, mothers, fugitives and the enslaved.

On my father’s side, nine of my ancestors fought the British in Massachusetts. One was a 16-year-old fifer at Lexington. They knew Black patriots were there from the first morning.

On my mother’s side, we descend from Richard Bland, a cousin and mentor to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal.” But the same impulse that diminished Attucks’ place in the nation’s memory also narrowed that promise in practice to white men.

Erase Black patriots, women patriots and poor white patriots from 1776, and you shrink the nation’s image of itself.

That temptation to erase inconvenient history did not end with the Revolution.

In 2025, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s anti-DEI purge swept through military websites. Pages honoring Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen and Native American Code Talkers were removed, though some were later restored after public outcry. The system even flagged the Enola Gay bomber because it contained the word “gay.”

That was not strength. It was cowardice with a search function.

My grandfather’s first cousin, Howard Lee Baugh, was a Tuskegee Airman. He flew more than 130 combat missions against Nazi Germany. There is a word for men like him: hero.

This Fourth of July, let’s remember Revere’s ride. But let’s redraw Revere’s picture.

Put Attucks back in the center. Put Estabrook on Lexington Green. Put Salem Poor and Peter Salem at Bunker Hill. Put James Armistead behind enemy lines. Put Mum Bett in the courthouse. Put my adopted grandmother in the parade, dressed as the soldier memory tried to deny.

Then look again.

That is America.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

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