Crispus Attucks, an ex-slave from Framingham was the first to die in the Boston Massacre (1770), which some historians mark as the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Attucks led a small group of colonists to a British garrison on King Street in Boston. One of the British soldiers panicked and fired. Attucks was the first to fall. In 1851 Boston Black leaders William C. Nell, Charles Remond, Lewis Hayden, and Joshua B. Smith petitioned the state legislature for the erection of a monument in memory of Attucks. Thirty-seven years later, in 1888, their request was honored when a monument to the victims of the massacre was erected on Boston Common, where it stands today.