Annapolis Jazz and Roots Festival: Seventeenth-Century Maryland - Slavery and its Lingering Legacies

About this event

White and Black Marylanders often worked shoulder-to-shoulder as indentured servants in the early 1600s—laboring for years until their terms expired and they were free to pursue their own wealth and status. As the century wore on, however, colonial lawmakers restricted Black life, establishing hereditary, race-based chattel slavery in the colony. Interracial relationships were restricted and Blacks seeking freedom were brutally punished. Enslaving became a status symbol embraced by Maryland elites like Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore. His official portrait from 1669 includes an unnamed enslaved Black boy. Why was the boy's image removed when the portrait was recreated in 1910? Learn more from Dr. William F. Kelly, historian and Research Archivist with the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project at the Maryland State Archives. Using sources preserved for public use at the Archives, he'll describe the history of enslavement in seventeenth-century Maryland - as well as its lingering legacies.