Before the Movement: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights
Dylan Penningroth, University of California Berkeley
Tuesday, October 14 at 4:45 p.m.
Vollum Lecture Hall

What did law mean to African Americans before the civil rights movement? Weaving together family interviews and church records with long-forgotten documents found in county courthousebasements, Before the Movement tells a story about the changing meaning of civil rights, and about what it meant to be Black in America. As far back as the 1830s, Black people built lives for themselves through mundane “rights of everyday use” in a world that denied their constitutional rights. The things they did with law before the movement reshaped their families and communities. And it laid essential groundwork for the lawsuits and activism of the 1950s and 60s. The result was a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.

Dylan Penningroth is Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Fellowship recipient, he is the author of the award-winning book Before the Movement: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights.

Sponsored by the Anthropology Department, the History Department, the Political Science Department, the American Studies Program, the Office of Institutional Diversity, and the Office of the Dean of Faculty.