Dylan C. Penningroth

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"Penningroth's conclusions emerge from an epic research agenda. . .. Before the Movement presents an original and provocative account of how civil law was experienced by Black citizens and how their 'legal lives' changed over time . . . [an] ambitious, stimulating, and provocative book." Eric Foner, New York Review of Books

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

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. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn't join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.

In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly 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. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these rights of everyday use, Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itselfthe laws all of us live under today.

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 storytheir 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 lifea vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Liveright
• Seitenzahl: 496
• Erscheinungstermin: 26. September 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781324093114
• Artikelnr.: 67345713

Autorenporträt

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Prize fellow and author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, he lives in Kensington, California.