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IN SEARCH OF A COLOR LINE

An Examination of Colonial Law in Virginia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2021

Larry L. Hunt
Larry L. Hunt*
Affiliation:
Research Scientist, Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park
*
Corresponding author: Larry L. Hunt, 732 Dividing Road, Severna Park, MD21146. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

This research examines laws in the colony of Virginia created by a powerful landowning planter class that attempted to draw a color line separating three descent groups: an indigenous native population (Indian), an immigrant population from Europe (English), and an imported population from Africa (Negro). Textual analysis of the Laws of Colonial Virginia shows that the English lawmakers had to learn they were the White component of a color line; they did not, for many years, refer to themselves as White. Contrary to some widely held views that race relations began as soon as these groups came into contact at some point in the seventeenth century, the analysis of written law suggests it took over 100 years, until near the middle third of the eighteenth century in Colonial Virginia, before a definitive concept of race was socially-constructed and a color line was drawn in Black and White.

Keywords

Constructing RaceColonialismDescent GroupsLegal IdentitiesBonded LaborReligion
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Fall 2021 , pp. 203 - 219
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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Footnotes

This article has been corrected since its original publication. See doi:10.1017/S1742058X2100014X.

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