Elizabeth keys attorney
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Elizabeth Key Grinstead
Enslaved woman in colonial America (1630–1665)
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (or Greenstead) (c. 1630 or 1632 – 1665)[1][2][3] was one of the first Black people in the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win. Key won her freedom and that of her infant son, John Grinstead, on July 21, 1656, in the Colony of Virginia.
Key based her suit on the fact that her father was an Englishman who had acknowledged her and baptized her as a Christian in the American branch of the Church of England. He was a wealthy planter who had tried to protect her by establishing a guardianship for her when she was young, before his death. Based on these factors, her attorney and common-law husband, William Grinstead, argued successfully that she should be freed. The lawsuit was one of the earliest "freedom suits" by an African-descended person in the English colonies.
In response to Key's suit and other challenges, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law in 1662 establishing that the social status of children born in the
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Elizabeth Key was a slave who successfully petitioned for freedom in early colonial Virginia.
Key was born near present-day Newport News, Virginia, to a (probably African-born) slave woman and Thomas Key, a white Englishman and burgess in Virginia's colonial assembly.
In seventeenth-century Virginia, the precise legal status of Elizabeth Key and others like her was not clearly defined. Before he left for England in 1636, Thomas Key bound his daughter as a servant of Humphrey Higginson for a period of nine years. Sometime before 1655, perhaps because Higginson had died, Elizabeth Key came to be a ward of Colonel John Mottram, a justice of the peace in Northumberland County.
When Mottram died in 1655, Key sued for her freedom in the Northumberland County Court, arguing that she was a temporarily indentured servant, not a slave. Her lawyer, William Grinsted, argued that Key was a free English woman (inheriting this condition from her father) and Christian, and thus ineligible for enslavement. Furthermore, under the terms of her father's contract, Key's term of service
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Elizabeth Key Grinstead was one of the first women of African American ancestry in the North American colonies to sue for her freedom and win. Key won freedom for herself and her infant son, John Grinstead II, in the colony of Virginia on July 21, 1656. Elizabeth Key was born in 1630 in Warwick County, Virginia, only eleven years after the first Africans arrived in the colony. She was the product of an interracial union; her mother, Martha, was Black, and her father, Thomas Key, was white. Since slavery was not legally established in Virginia at that time, Key was considered an indentured servant. She would later base her claim for freedom on the fact that her father was an Englishman and that she was a baptized Christian.
Born in England, Thomas Key had come to the Virginia colony in 1616. He became an early tobacco planter and was eventually elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Key fathered Elizabeth with an indentured African servant in 1630. The daughter was considered “illegitimate” because Key was married to another woman who lived in a different county. Although at
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