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.