Publishers Weekly
08/21/2023
In this meticulous study, Penningroth (The Claims of Kinfolk), a professor of history and law at UC Berkeley, draws on hundreds of archived county court records and other sources to uncover how African Americans have made use of the law in everyday affairs from the days of slavery to the present, demonstrating that Black communities’ robust engagement with the law set the stage for the civil rights gains of the mid-20th century. In the slavery era, for example, Penningroth documents the “privileges” that slaves had (as contrasted to “rights,” which they did not have), such as owning small garden plots, chickens, tools, and similar possessions. If owners tried to take away these privileges, they were often met with work slowdowns or other forms of resistance. Elsewhere, Penningroth describes free African Americans’ use of “associations,” or organizations formed with by-laws and constitutions that fall under “corporate” laws. These associations (which proliferated in the 19th century and included insurance groups, charitable organizations, and professional societies) provided a potent workaround for attaining legal standing for Black individuals, since the associations had more rights under the law than individual Black people. Penningroth adroitly explains complex legal concepts in accessible prose, turning case histories into vibrant narratives. This revelatory account of Black self-determination opens up a neglected aspect of African American history. (Sept.)
Merle Curti Award
"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."
Martha S. Jones
"With sweeping elegance, Before the Movement reveals how for Black Americans law has been neither a cudgel of white supremacy nor a torch of liberation. Dylan Penningroth instead takes readers inside the everyday life of law – much of it unfolding in local courthouses. Long denied the protection of the Constitution, Black Americans fashioned common-law civil rights. The heroes here are only sometimes credential lawyers or black-robed judges; Penningroth foremost celebrates how together ordinary Black folk wangled rights from rules about property and contract, earning them a faith in law that undergirded the modern Civil Rights movement. Penningroth is tireless researcher and gifted storyteller who elevates Black American’s everyday legal struggles to their rightful and enduring place in our national story."
N. D. B. Connolly
"Whether buying a house, marching to the courthouse, or tithing at the Lord’s House, Black people grace these pages in what I’d consider the most masterful treatment yet written on the business of African American freedom. Dylan Penningroth challenges our tendency to limit Black struggles for justice to their pursuits of national belonging. The result is an incredible and transformative book that has given the history of civil rights its proper and fullest accounting."
James Willard Hurst Prize
"Penningroth’s Before the Movement masterfully achieves an impossible feat: it uses a wide and unwieldy archive alongside personal reflective narrative to offer a clear and compelling argument about law’s experience in the lived world. ... engaging and accessible."
Matthew F. Delmont
"[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 . . . [he] makes expert use of underutilized sources, including deed books, civil and criminal cases, and corporate registries stored in the basements and backrooms of county courthouses. Before the Movement is at its best when it gives readers a glimpse of Penningroth’s historical detective work, searching clothbound docket books and neat rows of gray file boxes . . . Penningroth’s tenacious focus on the ordinary is a rejoinder to ongoing efforts to limit African American history. As he concludes, ‘The basic premise of this book is that Black people’s lives are worth studying in themselves.'"
BookPage - Roger Bishop
"Sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written . . . [Before the Movement] gives us a new way to look at Black lives throughout American history... extraordinary."
KQED Forum - Alexis Madrigal
"A brilliant reframing of African American history that centers the everyday lives of Black people. This book is on my short list for a Pulitzer."
Chicago Review of Books - Mimi Borders
"Overall, the lasting impact of Before the Movement will be its centralization of often sidelined contours of Black life, such as how Black people loved and experienced pleasure, faith, and grief through the robust records of Black legal lives. Black lives matter not because of their relation to white oppression, but on their own terms. As Penningroth writes: 'In this history, Black people—not race relations—are the center of gravity.'"
John Fabian Witt
"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."
Wall Street Journal - David J. Garrow
"[A] cogently subversive book. . . . Mr. Penningroth’s powerful thesis may seem strikingly counterintuitive, but his detailed exposition is convincing, drawing on the prior work of dozens of scholars who have explored smaller aspects of the vast canvas Mr. Penningroth seeks to paint."
Ellis W. Hawley Prize
"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."
Kenneth W. Mack
"This deeply researched book completely rewrites the history of African Americans and their struggles law from the close of slavery through the 1960s. Even at the height of the Jim Crow era, Black Americans went to courthouses, used law in their everyday lives, formed churches and legal associations, and forced white Americans to contend with important legal rules that they helped create. 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."
New York Review of Books - Eric Foner
"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."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-07-13
Broad-ranging study showing the many ways in which Black people, enslaved and free, used custom and law to assert their rights in the years before the Civil Rights Movement coalesced.
Penningroth, a Berkeley professor of law and history and author of The Claims of Kinfolk, evokes an enslaved ancestor who, after the Battle of Richmond in 1865, ferried Confederate soldiers to safety. He was paid for his services, and though enslaved, everyone involved agreed that he owned the boat he used, a fact of property rights that did not need to be stated because it was locally acknowledged. Basing his narrative on more than 1,400 court cases, the author argues that the usual tropes of civil rights “make Black history almost synonymous with the history of race relations, as if Black lives only matter when white people are somehow in the picture.” In fact, he insists, Black people understood the law: “African Americans had a working knowledge of formal legal rules, theories, and concepts, and…put that knowledge to everyday use.” White people may have been grudging, but in general, they obeyed the formal rules of law. Before emancipation, many of the relevant laws forbade bad behavior on the part of slaveowners, such as manumitting elderly slaves (Penningroth makes careful distinctions between slave and enslaved and between slaver and slaveowner) so that they would become wards of the state. The “certain rights” of enslaved Blacks—including property, which amounted to $8.8 billion in today’s money in Virginia alone—would not be extended until they achieved fully equal rights upon emancipation, whereupon other rights, such as the right to vote and to divorce, came into contest. In a fluent narrative, Penningroth shows how these rights were negotiated and developed in sometimes unlikely contexts, all foregrounding the advances of the 1950s and beyond.
A closely argued addition to our understanding of the origins of the Civil Rights Movement.
