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bondage." In other words, even though a black slave could technically become a Christian, his blackness was still the crucial factor in determining his freedom, or complete lack of it. A law of 1670 "favored the Indian . . . and fixed the status of the non-Christian African as that of slave for life." The same law "anticipated later judicial and legislative pronouncements that all Africans [i.e., whether baptized and Christian or not] to be slaves" (Higginbotham, 1978, p. 37).

Therefore, what had been a local and

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