John Punch (slave)

John Punch (c. 1605 – c. 1650) was an Angolan-born resident of the English colony of Virginia who became its first legally enslaved person under criminal law. In contrast, John Casor became the first legally enslaved person of the colonies under civil law, having committed no crime.

Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.

In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper suggesting that John Punch was a twelfth-generation great grandfather of U.S. President Barack Obama on his mother's side, based on historical and genealogical research and Y-DNA analysis. Punch's descendants were known by the Bunch or Bunche surname. Punch is also believed to be one of the paternal ancestors of the 20th-century American diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.