Before the Movement

”[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”[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“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“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“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)

Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley. A MacArthur Prize fellow and author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, he lives in Kensington, California.

Winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, Winner of the Beveridge Award, American Historical Association, Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association, Winner of the John Philip Reid Award, American Society for Legal History, Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award, Winner of the Charles Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association, Winner of the Scribes Book Award, Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historian, Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History, Winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize, Finalist for the Cundill History Prize, Shortlisted for the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History, Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize, Columbia Journalism School, and Shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa.

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