September 1630
Court decisionBook sources
Virginia court punishes Hugh Davis for sex with a Black person
Colonial Virginia
Virginia’s court ordered Hugh Davis whipped publicly and required him to acknowledge an offense framed as dishonoring Christianity through sex with a Black person. The order shows racialized regulation of sexual relations before Virginia’s later interracial-marriage statutes.
Dates preserve the source’s precision. This entry is part of a selected historical record; its qualifications and sources are retained below.
Context / qualification
The brief surviving order does not identify the other person by name or gender, establish Davis’s ancestry, or describe consent. It cannot support a reconstructed biography of the couple.
Sources
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, chapter 2, p. 30; supplied print pages, edition/year unidentified
- Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases (1926), vol. 1, pp. 77–78; McIlwaine court extracts and notes ↗