Virginia Bars Free Black People from Owning White Servants (1670)

Virginia's 1670 law prohibited free Black people from owning white indentured servants, a direct legislative attack on figures like Anthony Johnson who had built economic lives within the colonial system. The law began constructing a racial hierarchy in which whiteness conferred economic privileges denied to all Black people regardless of their freedom status. Combined with other restrictions of this era, it systematically dismantled the small community of free Black landowners that had existed on Virginia's Eastern Shore.