DIGITAL PANEL:
Imagining Attucks
Watch →
These pieces meditate on the figure of Attucks in more intimate and immediate ways, bringing us face to face with an imagined Attucks. A figure of dignity, these images often draw on period notions of respectability.
What do we gain and lose when we bring Attucks to life in our own time and place?
PORTRAIT OF CRISPUS ATTUCKS
Artist unknownUndated
Reproduction
Click image to view larger.
The exact date and artist of this portrait of Attucks are unknown. However, it is perhaps the most frequently used picture of Attucks and has come to shape people’s image of him.
CRISPUS ATTUCKS: PATRIOT
Black American book series1995
Holloway House
Museum purchase
Click image to view larger.
CRISPUS ATTUCKS
Maker unknownc. 1897
Half-tone photomechanical print
Reproduction courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Click image to view larger.
CRISPUS ATTUCKS: BOY OF VALOR
by Dharathula H. Millender
Childhood of Famous Americans book series1965
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
Museum purchase
Click image to view larger.
PHOTOGRAPH OF CRISPUS ATTUCKS PLAQUE
Maker unknown1976
Bronze
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces
Click image to view larger.
This bronze plaque was presented to the Bostonian Society by the Boston Equal Rights League on October 17, 1976 for the Bicentennial of the United States. The Bostonian Society merged with the Old South Association in January 2020 to form Revolutionary Spaces. The new organization will re-dedicate and re-install the plaque in the Old State House in 2020.
COMMEMORATIVE COIN AND STAMP SET
United States Mint, Department of the TreasuryMarch 5, 1998
Collection of Revolutionary Spaces
Gift of the Black Revolutionary War Patriots of America
1998.0004
Click images to view larger.
This framed commemorative coin and stamp set was given to the Bostonian Society by the Black Revolutionary War Patriots of America. It includes a Crispus Attucks dollar coin, produced by the United States Mint in 1998, as well as stamps produced by the United States Post Office featuring Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and Salem Poor (1747–1802). Currently, the only nations that have a stamp commemorating Attucks are Grenada and St. Christopher Nevis.
More in this Section
- Attucks in Art
Artists portrayed Attucks to remind the nation that people of African and Native descent are central to the American story.Read more → - Facing Attucks
With no confirmed portrait of Attucks, artists draw on their imaginations to bring him to life.Read more → - Imagining the Massacre
Artists draw on the memory of Attucks’s role in the Massacre to help navigate moments of national crisis.Read more → - An American Hero
Attucks takes his place in the pantheon of national heroes in the popular consciousness.Read more →