Elizabeth Key Grinstead was born around 1630 in Virginia. Her mother was an enslaved African woman; her father, an English planter.
When the owner of Coan Hall died, the administrators of his estate classified her as a slave. She did not accept that fate. With William Grinstead as her lawyer, she took her case to court in the mid-1650s and relied on arguments that carried weight at the time: her English father had acknowledged her, she had been baptized in the Church of England, and she had been bound to indentured servitude, not slavery.
She won. Her case is considered one of the first in which a woman of African descent secured her freedom through a lawsuit in the English colonies.
Nearly four centuries later, according to genealogical records, Johnny Depp is her eighth great-grandson. A young woman who risked everything in a 1650 court left a legacy that reaches all the way to Hollywood today.
