Penningroth, Dylan C.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Dylan C. Penningroth stretches the timeline of African American civil rights back to 1830, illuminating “how ordinary Black people used law in their everyday lives” through to the 1960s. (xiv) He analyzes court documents alongside diaries, sermons, and more, to show how African Americans thought about, utilized, and shaped the law. He encourages thinking of civil rights as any “rights that a court could protect.” (xxiii) This broad definition shows that even enslaved Black people possessed civil rights, especially through informal labor contracts and personal property claims. After emancipation, contracts and property remained the primary civil rights exercised by Black Americans. These were also the main realms in which Black civil rights were challenged, tested, and confirmed in court. By the start of the twentieth century, civil rights expanded to substantially include divorce and inheritance cases. Black conceptualizations of family thus moved “from the sphere of privileges to the sphere of rights.” (103) African Americans also utilized the law of associations to form churches, businesses, and more. When white southerners implemented Jim Crow policies starting in the 1880s, Black people pushed for legal bans on public racial discrimination. Starting in the 1930s, Black women increasingly empowered themselves by exercising their civil rights over their husbands through divorce proceedings. The Great Migration extended many Black legal claims across the country.