Before the Movement

"""[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.'"" -- Matthew F. Delmont - Washington Post ""[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."" -- David J. Garrow - Wall Street Journal ""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."" -- Alexis Madrigal - KQED Forum ""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.'"" -- Mimi Borders - Chicago Review of Books ""Sweeping, extensively documented and elegantly written . . . [Before the Movement] gives us a new way to look at Black lives throughout American history... extraordinary."" -- Roger Bishop - BookPage ""[This b]road-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 . . . 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."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""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."" -- Publishers Weekly ""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."" -- N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida ""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 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 ""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."" -- John Fabian Witt, author of Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (Pulitzer Prize Finalist and winner of the Bancroft Prize)"