Mitch Kachun's "First Martyr of Liberty"

Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is author of Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 and co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins.

Here Kachun dreamcasts an adaptation of his latest book, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory:

It would be challenging to make a film based on the life of Crispus Attucks since we know almost nothing about the man’s life that can be confirmed with documentary evidence. This is a big part of what makes Attucks such a fascinating figure—he is pretty much a blank slate, so over the nearly 250 years since his death in the 1770 Boston Massacre various people or groups have constructed a wide range of versions of his life to suit their purposes—sometimes a hero who was the first to give his life for American independence; sometimes a good-for-nothing rowdy who was a threat to the social order; sometimes an irrelevant nobody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would be doubly challenging to make a film based on my book because, while my analysis does suggest the most likely framework for Attucks’s life, family, and experiences, it is primarily an exploration of the stories and myths that have grown around him over the past quarter millennium.

There actually have been several efforts to make films based on Attucks’s life, and several playwrights have developed scripts as well. In the 1940s one African American writer claimed to have gotten Paul Robeson to agree to portray Attucks on the silver screen, and in the 1980s a playwright contacted the agent for James Earl Jones regarding the role. Neither project came to fruition.

If I were to cast an Attucks biopic today, my choice for the mature Attucks—who was 47 years old when he died—would be Shemar Moore, who has the presence and power most people would want to see in the First Martyr of Liberty, and Moore is also light-skinned enough to play the mixed-race, African/Native American Attucks. For the younger Attucks—who was in his 20s when he escaped from slavery in 1750—I think Noah Gray-Cabey, from the TV series Heroes, could be good. For the child Attucks, I’d have to go with Miles Brown from the TV series Blackish.

Now I’ll just wait for the offers to start rolling in!

Learn more about First Martyr of Liberty at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue