The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
PRAISE FOR "BEFORE THE MOVEMENT"
“Beautifully written, deeply researched, and brilliantly argued, Before the Movement shows how Black people used the law in everyday ways that shaped how they lived as people....[A]n agenda-setting book”
MERLE CURTI AWARD
Organization of American Historians
“This extraordinary book shifts our focus from federal courts to county courts, and from iconic leaders to ordinary people. Its excavation of the long history of Black legal life will broaden and transform our understanding of African Americans’ fight for justice.”
ELLIS W. HAWLEY AWARD
The Organization of American Historians
“…a deeply researched and counterintuitive history of how ordinary Black Americans used law in their everyday lives from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s. Penningroth reframes the conventional story of civil rights.”
“This deeply researched book completely rewrites the history of African Americans and their struggles with law from the close of slavery through the 1960s. . . . Their story had been a ‘hidden history’ until Penningroth’s painstaking efforts brought it to light, and their engagement with law has left us with multiple notions of what it means to fight for ‘civil rights.’ ”
KENNETH W. MACK
Biele Professor of Law, Harvard University and author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer
“This stunning and iconoclastic book, grounded in extraordinary research, will transform how we see generations of Black families, churches, and property—and the law itself.”
KATE MASUR
Pulitzer finalist & author of Until Justice Be Done
“Penningroth is a tireless researcher and gifted storyteller who elevates Black Americans’ everyday legal struggles to their rightful and enduring place in our national story.”
MARTHA S. JONES
author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All (Winner 2021 LA Times Book Prize for History)
“Black people grace these pages in what I’d consider the most masterful treatment yet written on the business of African American freedom. Dylan C. Penningroth challenges our tendency to limit Black struggles for justice to their pursuits of national belonging."
N. D. B. CONNOLLY
Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins
“Dylan Penningroth’s new landmark book will forever alter the way we think about and write the legal history of the U.S. — an astonishing, decades’-long research effort. Not to be missed."
JOHN FABIAN WITT
author of Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (Pulitzer Finalist and winner 2013 Bancroft Prize)
"Dylan C. Penningroth’s pre-history of the Civil Rights Movement, which examines Black traditions of private law and “the rights of everyday use,” is the kind of work we need more of."