Getting to Know Elizabeth Key Grinstead

Have you ever heard of Elizabeth Key Grinstead? She’s someone you should know about, and I’m gonna tell you why.

First, you should know I’m on a mission to trace white nonsense - that is the invention of race and the arbitrary and unfactual classification of the white “race” as superior - back to its roots and understand how the fiction of race and the facts of colonialism have shaped the present day.?

Colonialism, via the Doctrine of Discovery, said that Europeans had the right to lands and people they “discovered” in the new-to-them world of North and South America. The concept of “race” with white Europeans at the top of that hierarchy said that other groups of people were “less than” and not quite as human as white Europeans.?

While all this white nonsense was taking shape, there are lots of stories of people circumventing that nonsense. The story of Elizabeth Key Grinstead is a great example.?

On July 21, 1656, Elizabeth Key Grinstead sued the colony of Virginia and won freedom for herself and her infant son, John Grinstead II. Born in 1630 to an African woman whose slave name was Martha (technically, they were indentured servants, as laws regarding slavery were not yet codified in Virginia) and Thomas Key, a white tobacco planter who was eventually elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. You guessed it, Key was married, and Martha was a servant, so this was no innocent tryst between consenting adults but a rape by a person in power against a person he exerted power over. That’s the reality Elizabeth was born into.?

Elizabeth was born just 11 years after 1619. Her claim of freedom was based on the fact that her father was an Englishman and she was baptized a Christian. Whatever it takes, Elizabeth. Good for you!

Without white nonsense Elizabeth would have served a term of indentured servitude as was required of “illegitimate” children of the time. She should have been freed from servitude in 1645, but had been passed along to several landowners in the intervening years. She eventually was placed with a man named John Mottram. When Mottram died in 1655, his children tried to reclassify Elizabeth and her son John as Negro slaves - property of the estate according to Virginia law that had by then figured out how to do race-based slavery. Without a white English father, Elizabeth and young John would have been shit out of luck. But because in English common law the legal status of the father determined the status of the children, Elizabeth was, at 25 years of age, finally granted freedom from what was supposed to be 7 or so years of indentured servitude.?

To learn more about her and other amazing people,?Black Past?is an exceptional resource. Elizabeth Key Grinstead kind of slipped through the cracks in the early days of white nonsense. But I love her story as an example of someone who looked at what was happening and found a way to circumvent the nonsense. It is work that continues for all of us who want to challenge white power structures that exist to this day.

I originally published this on a platform where some excellent conversations are going on, called Linked Inclusion. If you'd like to join the conversation, just follow the link: https://www.linkedinclusion.us/share/a2b59vLeN3VXILOY?utm_source=manual