Before the Movement
May 5 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the hidden history of Black civil rights. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In a brilliant rethinking of civil rights, Dylan C. Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023) changes the way we think about Black history itself. Interweaving his own family history with long-forgotten documents found in county courthouse basements, he reveals how African Americans thought about, talked about, and used the law long before the marches of the 1960s. In a world that denied their constitutional rights, Black people built lives for themselves through the “rights of everyday use.” Before the Movement recovers a rich vision of Black life–a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle. Please use this link to purchase the book.
About the Speakers
Dylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and history at the University of California–Berkeley, currently serving as Associate Dean of the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. He specializes in African American history and legal history. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, published by the University of North Carolina Press, won the 2004 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award from the Organization of American Historians. His articles have appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of American History, and the American Historical Review. Penningroth has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Frederick Knight is professor of history at Morehouse College. He specializes in the history of African Americans and the African Diaspora before 1900. Dr. Knight has held fellowships at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia; the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University; and the University of California, Riverside, where he held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American history. He has also served in various capacities with scholarly organizations including Imagining America, the American Historical Association, and the Omohundro Institute. Professor Knight has published numerous book chapters and articles in his field. Prior to this current book, Black Elders (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), he published Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010). Professor Knight received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside.