Dylan C. Penningroth: “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights”

This event will also be live streamed to the library’s YouTube channel.

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.”