{"id":5013,"date":"2010-02-05T22:40:10","date_gmt":"2010-02-05T22:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5013"},"modified":"2017-03-05T22:30:49","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T22:30:49","slug":"dangerous-woman-elizabeth-keys-freedom-suit-subjecthood-and-racialized-identity-in-seventheenth-century-colonial-virginia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5013","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Akron Law Review<\/a>
\nUniversity of Akron
\nVolume 41, Number 3 (2007-2008)<\/a>
\npages 799-837<\/p>\n

Taunya Lovell Banks<\/a><\/strong>, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
\nUniversity of Maryland School of Law<\/em><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Key<\/a>, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia<\/a> sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master\u2019s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth\u2019s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude \u2013 slavery in the mid seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry \u2013 English; her religion, Christian; and the inability to be enslaved for life that stems from the first two statuses. These factors, I argue, determined who was the equivalent of white in seventeenth century Virginia.<\/p>\n

I. Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Key, an Afro-Anglo woman, was born around 1630 in the Virginia Colony<\/a>. Twenty-five years later she sued for her freedom after the overseers of her late master\u2019s estate classified her and her infant son as negroes (Africans or descendants of Africans) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. \u00a0Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth sued for their freedom, and after protracted litigation she and her son were set free.<\/p>\n

A few historians and legal scholars mention her case in passing as proof that by the mid seventeenth century people of African ancestry were held as slaves in Virginia.<\/strong> \u00a0Only feminist historian Kathleen Brown<\/a> even mentions that Elizabeth\u2019s lawsuit involved not only her freedom, but that of her son.\u00a0To the rest of the historians she was simply a slave, her gender, son and mixed ancestry were irrelevant. None looked closely at the significance of her three interlinking legal arguments: (1) that she was a practicing Christian; (2) who was the daughter of a free Englishman; (3) who bound her out as an indentured servant for nine years which period had expired.<\/p>\n

Arguably Elizabeth\u2019s pleadings might be an early example of what Kenji Yoshino<\/a> characterizes as \u201ccovering,\u201d downplaying aspects of one\u2019s identity. In crafting her legal argument around her father\u2019s ancestry and subjecthood Elizabeth downplayed the African ancestry of her enslaved mother. Her argument also might be an example of \u201cracial performance\u201d where the extent one does things that English women and men did during the period becomes an important determinant of one\u2019s legal status. \u00a0But as I explain in this article other cases decided during this period suggest otherwise…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>\u00a0or here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master\u2019s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth\u2019s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude \u2013 slavery in the mid seventeenth century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,1467,8,6940,20,693,25],"tags":[2017,2019,2020,5879,5878,2018,20757],"class_list":["post-5013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-law","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","category-virginia","category-women","tag-akron-law-review","tag-elizabeth-key","tag-elizabeth-key-grinstead","tag-taunya-banks","tag-taunya-l-banks","tag-taunya-lovell-banks","tag-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52055,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions\/52055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}