In highlighting the commonplace rights of property and contract, Penningroth broadens our vision of the historical meaning of civil rights. “For African Americans, property and contract were civil rights,” he writes. “African Americans hammered out their relationships with one another and with white people within the law, not just in struggle against it. And in doing so, they helped make and remake the law.” For too long now, Penningroth contends, we have forgotten just how regularly Black Americans made use of the law, legal institutions, and legal processes to live their daily lives.
By uncovering this “hidden history,” Before the Movement addresses an apparent paradox about the standard legal history of the Civil Rights Movement: how did a group historically subjugated by the legal system come to rely on it as a vehicle for full citizenship and social change? Part of the answer rests with the long history of Black legal lives. Penningroth argues that African Americans did not come to the law in the early or mid-20th century as naive supplicants seeking refuge in its protections. Law did not just fall out of the sky for them. Rather, throughout much of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Black people were active legal agents familiar with a vernacular sense of individual rights and jurisprudential principles. They exercised those rights and adhered to those principles in the shadow of cautious courts, which, for the most part, upheld the rule of law. Thus, when the mid-20th-century freedom struggle turned to law, African Americans were familiar with its untapped potential.
Penningroth is clear to state that his evidence does not suggest that Black Americans in the earlier periods were able to overturn white supremacy in the South. The law remained, for the most part, a hostile, fearsome, and sometimes lethal power. A legal system dominated by racism often refused to recognize not only Black people’s civil rights but also their basic human dignity and full citizenship.
But there was much more to the law. By focusing on how Black Americans used the legal system in their everyday interactions, mainly with each other, Before the Movement recovers a lost past—one that helps us see how legal relations were integral to Black daily life. In this sense, Penningroth’s recovery of this forgotten history is a major contribution not only to US legal history but also to our broader understanding of African American and US social history. Before the Movement essentially recenters the history of race relations away from a myopic focus on Black/white entanglements and toward a more panoramic vision of the everyday interactions of Black commercial and social life.