BEFORE THE MOVEMENT

Broad-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.

Penningroth, a Berkeley professor of law and history and author of The Claims of Kinfolk, evokes an enslaved ancestor who, after the Battle of Richmond in 1865, ferried Confederate soldiers to safety. He was paid for his services, and though enslaved, everyone involved agreed that he owned the boat he used, a fact of property rights that did not need to be stated because it was locally acknowledged. Basing his narrative on more than 1,400 court cases, the author argues that the usual tropes of civil rights “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.” In fact, he insists, Black people understood the law: “African Americans had a working knowledge of formal legal rules, theories, and concepts, and…put that knowledge to everyday use.” White people may have been grudging, but in general, they obeyed the formal rules of law. Before emancipation, many of the relevant laws forbade bad behavior on the part of slaveowners, such as manumitting elderly slaves (Penningroth makes careful distinctions between slave and enslaved and between slaver and slaveowner) so that they would become wards of the state. The “certain rights” of enslaved Blacks—including property, which amounted to $8.8 billion in today’s money in Virginia alone—would not be extended until they achieved fully equal rights upon emancipation, whereupon other rights, such as the right to vote and to divorce, came into contest. 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.