Black Voices

Author Digs Deep Into ‘Hidden History’ of Black Civil Rights in ‘Before the Movement’


African Americans were fighting for their rights through common law long before what many people know conventionally as the Civil Rights Movement.

That’s the conclusion award-winning scholar and author Dylan Penningroth came to in his book “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.”

Exploring a civil rights story that dates back to the early 1800s, Penningroth rummaged through county courthouses and interviewed Black Americans. His narrative partly traces the history of his own family.

Thanks to our sponsors:

View all sponsors

“Typically when we think of civil rights, or at least when I think of civil rights, I think of Martin Luther King, the March on Washington, I think of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott,” Penningroth said. “It turns out that Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, they are the heirs to a 150-year-long tradition of Black people using, thinking about and talking about civil rights. But they’re not the civil rights that you see in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They’re not about discrimination on the basis of race, sex or other categories. They’re about the right to own property, the right to make contracts, the right to go to court. Those are actually the original civil rights that are written into America’s first national civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And so it’s that tradition of Black people using those civil rights that actually forms the foundation for the civil rights movement that we know so well.”

Penningroth will discuss his book from 1:30-2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.


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

What hasn’t been rethought is the fundamental moral drama of the movement, in which civil rights—and Black history more broadly—are framed as an unfinished “freedom struggle,” a battle against the forces of “plunder,” a journey from humiliation to dignity, from second-class citizenship to full citizenship, from Black fear in the face of white lawlessness to Black people defiantly asserting their rights under the law. That moral vision gleams bright today, as police killings mercilessly continue and as Republican politicians knowingly enact policies that systematically hurt Black people. Movement-centered scholarship is as urgent and necessary today as it was in the 1960s.

But the notion of Black history as a freedom struggle has also cost us something. It has helped make Black history almost synonymous with the history of race relations, as if Black lives only matter when white people are somehow in the picture. It has laid a moral burden on African American history that few other scholarly fields must carry, urging us to judge our ancestors according to how well they advanced the freedom struggle. It has often infused a subtle romanticism into African American history, with Black people playing the role of humble folk heroes overcoming adversity against the odds, or “fugitives” defined by a common history of dispossession and “yearning for freedom.” Most of all, it has shrunk our vision of Black life down to the few areas of Black life where federal law and social movements made a difference. There are shelves full of books about the struggle for the right to vote, to open up the workplace, schools, and military, and to challenge a violently racist criminal justice system.

Overshadowed are many other parts of life that Black people might have cared about just as much but that do not fit into a story of freedom—things like marriage and divorce, old-age care, property-owning, running churches and businesses. Historians have echoed the racial justice advocates of the 1950s and 1960s, whose courthouse showdowns with hostile white officials have become canonized in films such as Selma and Just Mercy. Because African Americans were “‘afreaid to go to the court house to vote,’” as one Black farmworker wrote in a letter to the NAACP, scholars have assumed that they were afraid to go to the courthouse for anything else. It has been easier to imagine Black people fighting for “freedom” or “justice” or “full citizenship” than to imagine them arguing over alimony or a deed of trust. In the freedom struggle story, Black people are seen as ordinary and heroic precisely because they knew so little about law. But if that is so, then why, when a mass movement against racial injustice finally took hold in the 1950s, did so many Black people put their faith in law at all? Civil rights history has left Black people disconnected from our own legal commonsense, the way we actually think about and use law in our daily lives. It has made it harder to see Black people as people in full.

Reprinted by permission of Liveright. Excerpted from Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth. Copyright 2023 Dylan C. Penningroth. All rights reserved.

Thanks to our sponsors:

View all sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors:

View all sponsors