America turns 250 this week. We should be proud. We should also be honest.
Every year, we remember Paul Revere’s ride. As we should.
We should also reckon with Paul Revere’s picture.
His engraving of the Boston Massacre helped light the fire for revolution. It showed British soldiers firing into a crowd. Men fell dead in the street.
Yet the first man killed that night is hidden in plain sight.
His name was Crispus Attucks. He was a sailor of African and Native ancestry. John Adams later described the crowd as sailors, Irishmen, “negroes and mulattoes.” But Revere’s image did not show Attucks as who he was. It turned a multiracial, working-class crowd into a whiter and better-dressed one.
That was bad art. It was a lie with a long life.
It taught generations to picture the Revolution as a fight led and suffered by wealthy white men with portraits, property, and papers.
That was never the truth.
Prince Estabrook was enslaved in Lexington. On April 19, 1775, he stood with his neighbors as British troops arrived. He was shot before Congress declared independence. Before Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal.
Salem Poor bought his freedom and fought at Bunker Hill. Fourteen officers petitioned to honor his courage. Peter Salem fought there too. James Armistead, enslaved in Virginia, spied for Lafayette. His work helped trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.
The First Rhode Island Regiment, filled with Black, Native, and formerly enslaved men, held the line near Newport.
Women were there, too. Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, heard the Revolution’s words and used them in court. She sued for her freedom and won. Deborah Sampson was poor and indentured as a child. She dressed as a man and served in the Continental Army. Margaret Corbin took over a cannon after her husband was killed.
That story is personal in my family. My adopted grandmother, Dr. Margaret Barnes, was an osteopath with Revolutionary roots. As a girl in the 1910s and 1920s, her father dressed her as a soldier to march in New England Fourth of July parades.
When people objected, he told them not to worry. In 1776, some fathers knew their daughters had gone off to fight dressed the same way.
He was right. History made room for daughters in uniform. Memory pushed them back out.
I still have the bow she used to teach me archery. In our family, women did not just remember courage. They passed it down.
Poor white men carried the war, too. Joseph Plumb Martin was a teenage soldier. He froze, starved, marched, and later wrote the Revolution from below. Ebenezer Mackintosh was a Boston shoemaker and street organizer. Before gentlemen took seats in Congress, men like him made resistance impossible to ignore.
The Revolution was not made by one class. It was sailors, servants, farmers, shoemakers, soldiers, spies, mothers, fugitives, and the enslaved.
On my father’s side, nine of my ancestors fought the British in Massachusetts. One was a sixteen-year-old fifer at Lexington. They knew Black patriots were there from the first morning.
On my mother’s side, we descend from Richard Bland, Jefferson’s cousin and mentor. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal. But the same racist hand that scrubbed Attucks from the picture shrank “all men” to white men.
Frederick Douglass scraped that veneer away. In 1852, he asked what the Fourth meant to the slave. In 1869, he called for a “composite nation” — one people made of all peoples. Douglass was not inventing a new America. He was restoring the Revolution to itself.
Who we picture fighting for freedom shapes who we believe deserves it.
Paint Black patriots, women patriots, and poor white patriots out of 1776, and you shrink the nation’s image of itself.
Today’s whitewashing should alarm us.
In 2025, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s anti-DEI purge swept through military websites. Pages on Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Native code talkers were removed, then some were restored after public outcry. The system even flagged the Enola Gay bomber because it contained the word “gay.”
That was not strength. It was cowardice with a search function.
My grandfather’s first cousin, Howard Lee Baugh, was a Tuskegee Airman. He flew more than 130 combat missions against the Nazis. There is a word for men like him: hero.
This Fourth of July, let’s remember Revere’s ride. But let’s redraw Revere’s picture.
Put Attucks back in the center. Put Estabrook on Lexington Green. Put Salem Poor at Bunker Hill. Put Mum Bett in the courthouse. Put Joseph Plumb Martin barefoot in the snow. Put my adopted grandmother in the parade, dressed as the soldier memory tried to deny.
Then look again. That is America.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
Based on reporting by Milwaukee Community Journal.
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