<P> Howard Zinn argues that Boston was full of class anger . He reports that in 1763, the Boston Gazette published that "a few persons in power" were promoting political projects "for keeping the people poor in order to make them humble ." </P> <P> John Adams wrote that the "foundation of American independence was laid" on March 5, 1770, and Samuel Adams and other Patriots used annual commemorations (Massacre Day) of the event to fulminate against British rule . Christopher Monk, the boy who was wounded in the attack and died in 1780, was paraded before the crowds as a reminder of British hostility . </P> <P> Later events, such as the Boston Tea Party, further illustrated the crumbling relationship between Britain and its colonies . Although five years passed between the massacre and outright revolution, and direct connections between the massacre and the later war are (according to historian Neil Langley York) somewhat tenuous, it is widely perceived as a significant event leading to the violent rebellion that followed . </P> <P> The massacre was remembered in 1858 in a celebration organized by William Cooper Nell, an African American abolitionist who saw the death of Crispus Attucks as an opportunity to demonstrate the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War . Partly because of this activism, artwork commemorating the massacre was produced that changed the color of a victim's skin to black (which in Revere's original engraving was white) to emphasize Attucks' claimed martyrdom . In 1888, a monument was erected on the Boston Common to the men killed in the massacre, and the five victims, along with Christopher Seider, were reinterred in a prominent grave in the Granary Burying Ground . </P>

British soldiers fire on american protesters in 1770