Ep 81: Dylan Penningroth on the Hidden History of Black Civil Rights

“If we want to understand Black people’s demands for the rights that America denied them, we must pay more attention to how they talked about and used the rights that were not denied them—the associational privileges and common-law civil rights they had been exercising for generations in county clerks’ offices and church basements—rights of everyday use.”Dylan Penningroth joins the podcast to talk about his recent book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of the Black Civil Rights. We explore the many ways Black people understood and navigated the law across different periods of U.S. history, including slavery, Reconstruction, and the civil rights era. We also discuss the rights exercised—and the abuses endured—by free Black people before the Civil War; why some organizations, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made strategic use of incorporation laws while others, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), did not; and what the struggle for rights can teach us today, including about contemporary Black conservatism and opportunistic uses of race. The photo above shows Freedom Summer volunteers and locals canvassing in Mississippi in 1964.