Boston harbor on a summer evening |
Crispus Attucks has been on my mind lately. Considering the long-view context of his death at the hands of British soldiers in 1770 has been helping me find my footing in light of recent events.
Given my home is in the mountains, it’s no
surprise that when I try to make sense of the world around me and the people in
it, I shift my gaze to high altitude to gain valuable context, stepping back and climbing up to get a better view. In the case of our
recent Presidential election, I’ve had to step very, very far back in order to regain
my balance and have a sense of what is happening. I stand by my conclusions though
they have brought me no satisfaction. In essence, my view is that the arc of
our American society and political history alternates between three steps
forward and two steps back, and three steps forward four steps back (or five, or
six).
Crispus Attucks was the first casualty of the American Revolution; the first person to die in the cause of American liberty. In an interesting historical wrinkle, he was of Wampanoag Nation and African descent, and it is unclear whether he was an escaped slave or had been freed by his owners. In Boston, he was well-known in his community as a free man and a working sailor. He was shot and killed by uniformed British troops outside the Customs House at the Boston Massacre. Though his race was happenstance to the means of his death, it does lend interesting punctuation to the timeline of the relationship between African Americans and the nation Attucks's ultimate sacrifice helped create.
In 1783, slavery was abolished in the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts on the basis that it was inconsistent with and repugnant to the state's new constitution. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the United
Kingdom. In 1848, slavery was abolished in France and its colonies. In 1858,
the United States Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott decision that
African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States of
America, and that would have applied to Crispus Attucks's descendants despite his place in history. Dred Scott was decided 88 years after Attucks’s killing.
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery was ratified in 1865, 95 years after Crispus Attucks’s death; the 14th Amendment providing equal protection of the laws was ratified in 1868, 98 years after his death; and the 15th Amendment prohibiting discrimination with respect to the voting rights of citizens on the basis of race was ratified in 1870, 100 years after Crispus Attucks was gunned-down by British soldiers. Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregating on the basis of the race was constitutional, was decided in 1896. 126 years after Attucks was killed, his descendants would have been segregated in every aspect of their life as Americans.
Shall I continue? Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson in a stirring, succinct, and unanimous decision declaring that racial segregation was unconstitutional was decided in 1956; 176 years after Crispus Attucks’s death and 60 years after Plessy was decided. 176 years after so famously dying in the cause of liberty, Crispus Attucks’s descendants finally could attend school, drink out of a water fountain or sit at a lunch counter without a “whites only” sign – at least according to the United States Supreme Court. The March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King etched the words “I have a dream” into the American psyche wasn’t until 1963, and John Lewis had his head cracked open by the Alabama State Police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge while marching to secure voting rights for all Americans in 1965. Those seminal events were 193 and 195 years respectively after Crispus Attucks was killed at the start of the American Revolution.
To be clear, the British regulars who fired on a crowd of unarmed
protesters in Boston on that March day in 1770 did not care about and did not
discriminate against Crispus Attucks on the basis of race. Bullets and musket
balls, of course, are race blind. In 2023, the State of Florida provided a new
curriculum for the public schools there that speaks glowingly of the skills and
self-improvement provided to African Americans while enslaved; and today numerous
leading figures in the political life of our nation openly express their view
that America does not have a racist history while they openly consort with
White Supremacists. Crispus Attucks died 254 years ago, and the constant and ongoing struggle and painful history of his people, our nation, have been white-washed in Florida. Pun intended.
Of course, the same pattern applies to women’s rights,
reproductive rights, civil rights and voting rights. It certainly applies to
blatant antisemitism in our society including in my own professional life.
Two steps forward, four steps back.
I have friends and family, people I respect and who are very dear to me, who clearly and regularly vote to move us backward. I have vowed not to spend time or expend energy disavowing them of their beliefs or the rationales they use when in a voting booth. I do reserve the right, however, to acknowledge whether they are moving our society backwards rather than forwards. If and when they start to see and understand the larger ramifications of their myopic political choices, I will listen. In the meantime, I’ll continue to search and prepare for every opportunity to inch our society forward along the path to a better future for all Americans - whether it’s on the Edmund Pettus bridge, on a segregated bus, inside a women’s health clinic, on the grounds of a public school, at a polling place, or otherwise. Crispus Attucks, so many others and many more to come will have died in the cause of liberty, and we’ll only know whether their sacrifice will have been in vain after a very, very, very long time. And many more hard-fought steps forward and the inevitable numerous steps back.
Time will tell. Until then: patience, peace, and love for us all.