Person · 1600–1670
Anthony Johnson
An Angolan brought to Virginia as a captive around 1621 who gained his freedom, acquired land, and became one of the first documented Black property owners in English America.
Included as one of the first documented free Africans in the English colonies — a foundational figure of free Black community life in Virginia.
Anthony Johnson arrived in Virginia about 1621, listed simply as "Antonio a Negro," and survived a period when the line between servitude and slavery was not yet fixed in law. He completed a term of service, married, took an English name, and by mid-century farmed 250 acres on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Mary headed a small free Black household.
His story captures both the openness and the hardening of the era: he could sue and be sued as a free man — but in the 1655 Johnson v. Parker case, a court allowed him to hold John Casor as a servant for life, one of the earliest civil rulings to recognize lifelong servitude. Within a generation, the legal door that had let Johnson rise was being closed to others by race.