Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights: Author Dylan C. Penningroth 9.12.2025

Описание: What if the conventional narrative of the 1960s civil rights era, by its very nature, limits the success, legal achievements, and persistence of Black Americans for generations? In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, author Dylan C. Penningroth maintains that the fight for civil rights didn't begin with famous marches and courtroom cases of the 1960s. Instead, his research stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, and challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history as we know it.

Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth centers the everyday lives of Black Americans and sheds light on their centuries-long tradition of legal knowledge to assert their rights, protect their families, and shape their communities.

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and Morrison Professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and legal history and is a MacArthur Fellow. Before the Movement won eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more. He is also the author of the award-winning book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

Speaker
Dylan C. Penningroth
Associate Dean, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy / Legal Studies Professor of Law and Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley

Moderator
Ayesha Bell Hardaway
Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law