Virginia’s racial slave laws were hardening into segregationist form by 1770

Evidence

Even after he lost his seat, Jefferson actively participated in the growing hostilities to England and to slavery. He took the freedom suit of twenty-seven-year-old fugitive Samuel Howell. Virginia law prescribed thirty years of servitude for first-generation biracial children of free parents “to prevent that abominable mixture of white man or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell was second generation, and Jefferson told the court that it was wicked to extend slavery, because “under the law of nature, all men are born free.” Wythe, the opposing attorney, stood up to start his rejoinder. The judge ordered Wythe back down and ruled against Jefferson. The law in the colonies was still staunchly proslavery, and racial laws were becoming staunchly segregationist. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 230

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s core scheme: segregationist law hardening even as antislavery ideas circulate — the policy-vs-idea tension Kendi’s inversion must explain. — connects to: Seventeenth-century Virginia law decoupled Christian conversion from slave emancipation
• DEFINE: Shows the segregationist category operating on actual colonial law, grounding the three-way scheme in a concrete statute.