The 1976 bicentennial brought greater mainstream attention to Attucks and black participation in the Revolution as well as increasing opportunities to disseminate interpretations of Attucks and other African American heroes in schools and through ever-expanding mass media exposure over the subsequent decades. Attucks was becoming a standard figure in most popular American history textbooks and was featured even more visibly in mainstream culture outside the classroom. Of all the competing versions of Attucks circulating at that time, it was the taken-for-granted Revolutionary token that seemed most prominent in the nation’s collective memory; for many, he was a bland symbol of a romanticized American Revolution and an unthreatening black patriotism. By the end of the twentieth century, Attucks had, to a large degree, become a black American hero of the Revolution, though one who was still marginalized within the nation’s story.