CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Dylan C Penningroth in conversation with Richard Thompson Ford

Описание: City Lights and Liveright Books celebrate the publication of

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
By Dylan C Penningroth
published by Liveright Books

Purchase the book here:
https://citylights.com/before-the-mov...

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 something like this: Once, the American legal system was dominated by racist officials who shut Black people out and refused to recognize their basic human dignity. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law—and soon, everyday African Americans joined with them to launch the Civil Rights Movement. In Before the Movement, historian Dylan C. Penningroth overturns this story, demonstrating that Black people had long exercised “the rights of everyday use,” and that this lesser-known private-law tradition paved the way for the modern vision of civil rights. Well-versed in the law, Black people had used it to their advantage for nearly a century to shape how they worked, worshiped, learned, and loved. Based on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses, Before the Movement recovers a vision of Black life allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. Recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and author of the award-winning The Claims of Kinfolk, he lives in Kensington, California.

Richard Thompson Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He writes for both scholarly and popular audiences and has published in newspapers and journals such the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Review, Esquire.com and Slate as well in such scholarly journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Dress Codes: how the laws of fashion made history. Two of his other books were selected as Notable Books of the year by the New York Times: The Race Card: how bluffing about bias makes race relations worse which The New York Times Sunday Book Review selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2008 and Rights Gone Wrong: how law corrupts the struggle for equality, which The New York Times selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2011. He has appeared on national television and radio programs including The Colbert Report, the Rachel Maddow Show, The New Yorker Radio Hour and All Things Considered. He was the co-host with Joe Bankman of the Sirius XM Radio program Stanford Legal from 2020-2022.

What has been said about Before the Movement:

“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.”
-Kenneth W. Mack

“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.”
-Martha S. Jones, author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

This talk was originally broadcast on Wednesday, October 11, 2023

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/