ar. The result of his death has been that he has been held up for generations to admire as a man not only courageous enough to die in a fight for the long-dead idea of democracy and republican rule but a man forgiving enough to die for a country that considered his complexion sufficient reason to enslave him.
But was he really the man that schoolchildren learn about? Is this story as apocryphal as George WashingtonÆs wooden teeth or that little episode with the cherry tree?
Certainly, at some level, the story is true, for a man by that name was killed in the Boston Massacre and he has no doubt inspired many black men to sign up to serve their country in ways that have exposed them to the risk of death or terrible injury. He continues to stand as a symbol both of bravery and of forgiveness. But it is also true that little is actually known of Attucks's life prior to the Boston Massacre. It is uncertain even whether he was black, of mixed black and white descent, or of both African and Native American ancestry. Many historians believe that he was a runaway slave, but no one knows this for certain, and his blackness may well be a construction used to encourage black men to join in defending the United States against foreign enemies even as they have faced discrimination and violence at home. If no Crispus Attucks had existed, it would have been very useful indeed to invent one.
As Berry and Blassingame (1982, p. 295) note, military service has historically served as a critical test for the status of blacks in American society, although the same might also be said of Native Americans as well as of Asian Americans and Latinos and even to some extent for women. All groups who have been treated as being less than full citizens (in either a legal or more amorphous cultural sense) have at some point tried to prove their worth to American society through military service.
Although it was ôthe rare period in American history when th...