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.”

MacArthur Genius fellow, Dylan C. Penningroth, Associate Professor at Northwestern University and research professor for the American Bar Foundation, talks about getting the grant of a lifetime and how it will impact his research of African American life under and after slavery.