LETTERS

What’s Race Got to Do With It?

In the opening paragraph of “Black Lives and the Boston Massacre” (Winter 2019), Farah Peterson characterizes Crispus Attucks as an unarmed black man, shot and killed by men in uniform who “got away with it.” This bald statement seriously distorts or disregards the historical evidence.

Attucks arrived at King Street heading a group of sailors, armed with clubs fashioned from the legs of marketplace stalls or from cordwood, each about the thickness of a man’s wrist—equivalent in heft to today’s baseball bats. The chaotic scene centered on a group of eight redcoats, armed with muzzle-loading muskets, facing not mere peaceful demonstrators but a rowdy, raucous crowd of at least 200 men and youths deeply hating the British government and its “hirelings,” throwing snowballs, ice chunks, sticks, and an occasional stone, all the while giving the fearful “mob whistle” and taunting the soldiers: “You dare not fire!” Therein lay the key to the tragedy.

For weeks before March 5, 1770, Boston buzzed with assurances that troops could not fire on civilians without authority from the civil authority. The assurances,