So they often would boycott businesses whose owners were loyal to the British.

On February 22, 1770, a protest occurred outside a British customs house. A man named Ebenezer Richardson, who worked there, tried to break up the protest. Instead of stopping, the crowd took their protest to his house. To ward off the protesters, who were throwing rocks, Richardson fired a musket shot into the crowd from his window. He wounded a teenager, and murdered an 11-year-old child.

After this, tensions escalated quickly between the British and the colonists. Not 11 days later, on March 5, 1770, was the Boston Massacre. What started out as an exchange of words between two men ended with a British soldier striking a colonist over the head with his musket. As a result,a large crowd of colonists appeared outside the customs house the soldier was guarding. One eyewitness account from historian William C. Nell’s “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution” reads:

The people were greatly exasperated. The multitude ran towards king street crying, ‘Let us drive out these ribalds; they have no business here!’… a band of the populace led by a mulatto named ATTUCKS… advanced to the quarter, the military were challenged to fire. The populace advanced to the points of their bayonets. The soldiers appeared like statues… at length, the mulatto and twelve of his companions, pressing forward, environed the soldiers, and striking their muskets with their clubs, cried to the multitude: ‘BE NOT AFRAID; THEY DARE NOT FIRE…’ The mulatto lifted his arm against Capt. Preston, and