From the publisher:
The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: Once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives.
In “Before the Movement,” historian Dylan C. Penningroth revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery.
Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story — their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. “Before the Movement” is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life — a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”
Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California – Berkeley who specializes in African American history and legal history. His first book, “The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South,” published by the University of North Carolina Press, won the 2004 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, and the American Historical Review. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Penningroth grew up in Princeton’s John Street/Witherspoon neighborhood and was educated in the Princeton Public Schools. Currently serving as Associate Dean of the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley, he lives in Kensington, California, with his family.
Wallace D. Best
Wallace Best specializes in 19th and 20th century African American religious history. His research and teaching focus on the areas of African American religion, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, and Womanist theology.
Hendrik Hartog
Hendrik “Dirk” Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus. For a decade, he was the director of Princeton University’s Program in American Studies.
This event was recorded April 21, 2024.