Elizabeth Key: Crash Course Black American History #3

The legal system can seem like a complicated tangle of arcane rules and loopholes, and it can sometimes seem like it is designed to confuse. But it is possible, with the right application, for the legal system to rectify injustices. Today we’re going to tell you about one instance of this, the story of Elizabeth Key, who in 1665 won her freedom in a court in Virginia.

Clint’s book, How the Word is Passed is available now! https://bookshop.org/books/how-the-word-is-passed-a-reckoning-with-the-history-of-slavery-across-america/9780316492935

VIDEO SOURCES
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998).

TAUNYA LOVELL BANKS, Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia (2008), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=672121 (last visited Aug 20, 2020).

Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1629-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Anthony Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2003).