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WOW2: July's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History [1]
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Date: 2022-07-23
July 21, 1656 – Elizabeth Key Grinstead wins her lawsuit, gaining freedom from slavery for herself and her baby son, with the argument that her father was an Englishman and she is a baptized Christian. She was the illegitimate daughter of black mother who was the slave of her father, the white English planter Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Before moving back to England in 1636, Thomas Key made arrangements for Elizabeth’s godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. He stipulated that Higginson would be Elizabeth’s guardian, that she would be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen. But Thomas Key died later that year, and Higginson sold her to Colonel John Mottram, for whom she was required to serve another nine years before being released from bondage. Mottram took her to Northumberland County, where he built a plantation, Coan Hall. There Elizabeth remained until 1650, when Colonel Mottram brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. William and Elizabeth fell in love, and had a son together, whom they named John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture, and Elizabeth Key’s future was uncertain. John Mottram died in 1655, and Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom after the executors of Mottram’s estate classified her and her infant son as Negroes (and part of the property assets of the estate) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. With Grinstead acting as her lawyer, she won her case, but later t he Virginia House of Burgesses passed laws that the status of children will follow that of the mother, not the father, abandoning English Common Law, which determines a child’s status based on the father, following instead the Roman partus sequitur ventrem, thus condemning all children born of enslaved women in Virginia to slavery for life. In 1656 Grinstead and Key legally married and had a second son before he died in early 1661. Elizabeth Grinstead would remarry a widower, John Parse. Upon his death, she and her sons, John and William Grinstead II, inherited five hundred acres of land. Elizabeth Key Grinstead Parse died in January 1665.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/23/2111965/-WOW2-July-s-Trailblazing-Women-and-Events-in-Our-History-July-17-through-July-24-2022
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