1650s

Elizabeth Key, the daughter of an enslaved African mother and a white English father, successfully sued for her freedom in a Virginia court in 1656, arguing that as a baptized Christian and the daughter of a free Englishman she could not be held in bondage. She won her case and married her attorney William Greensted, becoming one of the first people of African descent to win freedom through the colonial court system. Her victory prompted Virginia legislators to pass laws in 1662 explicitly making the status of a child follow the mother's status — directly codifying hereditary racial slavery in response to cases like hers.

Records from Massachusetts and Rhode Island document free Black families — including descendants of the first Africans brought to the colonies — owning land, operating farms, and paying taxes. In Narragansett, Rhode Island, some Black landowners hold substantial acreage. These property-holding families establish a precarious but real economic foothold that persists through the colonial period.

A 1652 Massachusetts law required all men between 16 and 60, including Black and Native American men, to participate in the colonial militia — one of the earliest formal recognitions that Black men could bear arms and serve in a military capacity in the English colonies. This stands in contrast to the later systematic exclusion of Black men from militias as racial slavery hardened. The policy reflected the early colonial period before rigid racial hierarchies were fully established in New England.

Once an indentured African, Johnson gains his freedom and owns 250 acres on Virginia's Eastern Shore — among the first free Black landowners in the colonies.