Massacre in Boston, Panel 2, 1954, Inscription: No 2 Massacre on KING STREET, Jacob Lawrence, from Struggle: From the History of the American People, 1954–56, Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross, © 2019 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This composite image of 1930s articles from The Guardian, a black newspaper published in Boston, shows how a clipping file on Crispus Attucks would have looked at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Citizen researchers read through press there to look for articles relevant to black history and culture, and then they cut out, organized by subject, and pasted the stories into albums known as clipping files. Lawrence used these files to center Attucks in the midst of revolt in Panel 2 and position him as the first martyr of the American Revolution.
Excerpt from George L. Ruffin, “Crispus Attucks,” The Guardian, 1942
Of the Boston Branch of the National Equal Rights League and others, for legislation to authorize an annual proclamation by the Governor of Massachusetts for the observance of the 5th day of March as the anniversary of the death of Crispus Attucks, Colored american, first martyr to the founding of the United States.
Paul Revere’s widely distributed 1770 engraving of the Boston Massacre was used as propaganda during the revolution and does not depict Crispus Attucks, who is central to Lawrence’s composition. Attucks is also the primary figure in Herschel Levit’s mural Crispus Attucks—First Patriot Killed in Boston Massacre March [5], 1770 commissioned for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC. Lawrence diverged from these precedents in scale and composition.
