John Casor

John Casor was the first person of West African descent, to be made a slave for life, in a court ruling. In 1662,the Virginia Colony  passed the legal principle, Partus sequitur ventrem, which said children would have the legal status of their mother. If their mother was a slave, they would be slaves, regardless of their father's race or status.Taunya Lovell Banks, "Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia", 41 Akron Law Review 799 (2008), Digital Commons Law, University of Maryland Law School, accessed April 21, 2009 This was in contradiction to English common law for English subjects, which based a child's status on that of the father.

References

Category:Slaves
Category:People from Virginia
Category:17th-century people