John Punch (slave)

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

Thought to have been an indentured servant with recent ancestry from present-day Cameroon, or possibly born there himself, 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. The 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.