Black Civil Rights before the Civil Rights Movement

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. When did the Civil Rights Movement begin? Was it on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus? Was it on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court decided in Brown v Board of Education, that, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal?" Of course, neither of those moments was born in a vacuum. The Congress of Racial Equality was founded over a decade earlier, in Chicago in 1942, and the NAACP, which calls itself, "the nation's largest and most widely recognized civil rights organization," was founded much earlier on February 12, 1909. As today's guest will show us, Black Americans were exercising civil rights long before even the NAACP existed, in many cases, even before the Civil War. The federal government's assurance of those rights dates back to the end of the Civil War. After the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were voted on by Congress and ratified by the states. These three amendments, known collectively as the Reconstruction Amendments, were designed to ensure the rights of Black Americans, especially those who had been enslaved. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States and its territories, "except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to, "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," which included formerly enslaved African Americans, superseding the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had stated that Americans descended from African slaves could not be US citizens. The 14th Amendment spoke not just to citizenship and congressional apportionment, but also to privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection. And it has been widely cited in Supreme Court decisions, including in such landmark cases, as Brown v Board of Education in 1954, Roe v. Wade in 1973, and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote, "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Of course, it said nothing about denying the right to vote based on sex or gender. It would be another 50 years until the ratification of the 19th Amendment extended the same rights to women of any race. These three amendments, monumental though they were, did not stand alone. After the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a full 98 years before the more well known Civil Rights Act of 1964. Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull introduced the bill early in 1866, the first federal civil rights bill in United States history. After the House and Senate passed it, President Andrew Johnson vetoed it, arguing that the safeguards established for African Americans in the act, "go indefinitely beyond any that the general government has ever provided for the white race," and that it would, "sap and destroy our federative system of limited power and break down the barriers which preserve the rights of the states." Congress disagreed and overrode the veto. The civil rights outlined in the act were not the political or social rights that the later civil rights movement would agitate for. Instead, the 1866 Act granted to nearly all people born in the United States, citizenship, and said that they, "shall have the same right in every state and territory in the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens." Prior to 1866, many Black Americans had already enjoyed these legal rights, but the act ensured that they extended to everyone and provided enforcement mechanisms. Some of the other provisions in the 1866 Act would later become the template for the 14th Amendment. Andrew Johnson wasn't the only person opposed to the 1866 Act, and as the 14th and 15th Amendments extended rights to African Americans, some white Americans, especially in the southern states, fought back. In particular, members of the Ku Klux Klan or KKK violently prevented or tried to prevent Black Americans from voting or running for office. In response, in 1871, Congress passed another Civil Rights Act, this one, signed into law by President Ulysses S Grant. This was the third Enforcement Act passed in two years by Congress and also became known as the KKK Act. The 1871 Act empowered the president to use armed forces and even to suspend habeas corpus if necessary, to protect the civil rights of African Americans. Supporters of the act argued that enforcement was necessary to ensure the 14th Amendment's promise to equal protection under the law. Part of the 1871 Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1883 decision in United States v. Harris, which argued that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the authority to enforce only acts of the states, not acts of individuals. Other parts of the law still stood though, and were incorporated into United States Code in Section 1983 and 1985. Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, and without federal enforcement, Black Americans, especially in the south, were often forcibly kept from exercising their political rights throughout the Jim Crow Era. Even while those rights were denied, however, Black Americans continued to make and enforce contracts, to sue the parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth, Professor of Law and History and Associate Dean in the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of, "Before the Movement: the Hidden History of Black Civil Rights."

Hi, Dylan, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  9:55  
Thank you for having me.

Kelly  9:57  
I would like to start by asking a little bit about the inspiration for the book and your family connection to this, this research that you've embarked on.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  10:06  
It's it's something that has stuck with me for a long time. I think all of us have a personal connection to our work in one way or another. Mine was probably family stories that I heard over the years at cookouts and family reunions, and so forth. But the specific thing that kind of launched me on this journey was a cassette tape that my uncle, Craig Baskerville recorded in 1976, of his great uncle, talking about his father, Jackson Holcomb, who was a slave in Cumberland County, Virginia. And in 1865, Jackson Holcomb had a boat. And the Confederate army was running through the woods after they lost the battle in Richmond. And they came to Jackson Holcomb standing on the banks of the Appomattox River, and he ferried them across the river. And then when they got to the other side, they paid him. You know, my Uncle Thomas Holcomb says all this on the tape to my Uncle Craig. And I had always heard this story and thought to myself, "That's kind of strange, because it sounds like these soldiers were treating an enslaved man as if he had the right to make contracts, and the right to own property." So I wanted to know more about that world. And that's kind of what launched me on this journey.

Kelly  11:25  
And it was a long journey, right? You'd spent quite a long time researching this book. And it's obvious why as you're reading it, because it's such a lot of work to find these cases to talk about, figure out as you say, which ones are actually involved Black people and which ones don't. So I wonder if you could talk some about that research process, what you had to do, and you cover quite a lot of history in this book. So what it meant to be looking into all of this, synthesizing it, figuring out how to put the story together.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  12:00  
Right. So just as you say, the book is about how Black people used law, talked about law and thought about law over a very long period of time. It's called, "Before the Movement," and what it really covers is the period from the early 1800s-1830s, through the 1970s. And the goal of the book is to look at Black people's legal lives, and use that as a window onto Black life itself. So it's really at bottom, a book about African American history, where Black people are at the center. In order to get at that story, I looked at a whole lot of different types of sources. So some of them were legal sources. Some of them were things like diaries, church sermons, but the main one that I looked at was the records of local county courts. And these courts exists all over the United States. They're the place where, you know, when you buy a house, your mortgage title company will go or your lawyer will go and record a title to the house, the recorded deed, that becomes part of the chain of title. It's where contracts are recorded. It's where all sorts of things happen that matter to people in their daily lives. All of those things that I just described, involve civil rights. So property law, contract law, those are civil rights, as is the right to go to court. And so I thought to myself, well, if I want to write a book about African Americans' use of law, I might look at the US Supreme Court. But since so many African Americans were, you know, economically not that well off, probably the only kinds of cases that I'm going to find if I go there are famous cases. So I wanted to find cases that weren't famous. So I started going to county courthouses. So I went to Virginia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Illinois and Washington, DC. And each time I went, I wanted to find cases involving Black people. So I would go into the courthouse, I'd talked to the circuit clerk or the deputy clerk, they're usually very nice people. They're not archivists. They're not there to serve me historical records. They're basically there to process traffic tickets, and help title searchers. And so I would go in and explain what I was doing. And usually they would say, "That's fine. You can go in the back," and what you'd find in the back is this big wall full of heavy ledger books, these dockets. And on the dockets are the names of all the cases that the court has ever heard, going back as far as the court exists. What the records don't tell you is what race the people are. They'll tell you who the names of the people involved. Sometimes they'll tell you what the case was about, that give you the filings, you know, they'll say there was a motion for this motion for that, the dates on which those things happen, but they don't mark anything as colored or white or anything else. And so this is a real problem, if you want to write a book about African American history, and you can't tell what race the people are in your main source. And so what I did is I started looking up the names on ancestry.com. And so most of us know, ancestry is the place where you can swab your cheek, send it in and find out that you're, you know, 15% Irish, or something like that. But the main thing that they have always done is they have made the United States Census and other censuses around the world, digitized and searchable by name. And so that's what me and my research assistants did. We copied down by the end 14,000 cases. And we looked up something like 28,000 names. And we wrote down the information that we could find on the census for each one of those names. And what we found, we ended up finding matches for some about half of the 14,000. And of those we could find 1500 That involved African Americans, either as plaintiffs, or respondents. And so that gave me the foundation to go back to the courthouse and pull the records and read the testimony of what was happening. It's happening in each one of these cases. And that testimony is frankly, amazing.

Kelly  16:54  
Yeah, it's it's incredible. You talk in the book about how different aspects of the law, different areas of the law, maybe treat race differently. It's easier in some of them to be overtly white supremacist than it is in others. I wonder, you know, especially since I'm sure a lot of people listening are not lawyers, if you could talk through a little bit like what those different areas of law are, and and maybe even a little bit why they are so different in the way that they might change or not change over time?

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  17:30  
It's a great question. So you know, just as you said, there, lots of different areas of law. There's criminal law, there's constitutional law, there's contract law, property law, if you go to law school, that's how things are organized. Before the Civil War, many different areas of law had specific provisions and even whole sections that basically were marked off by race. So, you know, there, there were various laws within the law of property that only applied to enslaved people. And there were laws within the criminal law that only applied to enslaved people and people of color. Congress, after the Civil War, passes the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and then bolsters that with the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. And those two acts of Congress, they're national law. They do one very important thing, and that is, they bar the states from discriminating on the basis of race, in certain areas of law. And the areas of law that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 specifically singled out as being a place where the states can't discriminate by race, are contract, property, and the right to sue and be sued, essentially the right to go to court. And so what that means is this, that the states by and large, stop making separate laws for Black people in those areas of law. And then they begin allowing Black people to approach the courts, much more than they had been doing before. And so what that winds up producing is this world where, you know, you can't get on a bus next to a white person, you can't vote right, the states are free to discriminate in the area of voting, you can't practice law, they're free to discriminate against, you know, lawyers practicing on the basis of race and sex for that matter. But it's very hard for them to write an explicit law that says Black people can't own property. And it's very hard for them to write a law that says Black people are going to be treated a certain way that whites aren't treated in contract law. And so, white people, in order for them to get through their daily lives, actually have to recognize Black rights. Like if they want to sign contracts, economically speaking, they need Black people to work. And if they can't fit them into the fields, they need to do it through contract law. So they actually need to recognize Black civil rights. They need to respect Black civil rights because their whole economy depends upon it. So that is an insight that some of your listeners may recognize that Derrick Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory, came up with. He called it interest convergence. He didn't talk about it in the context that I was talking about it. He was thinking of desegregation, but it's the same thing. And I borrowed that insight to figure out, why would white people, let Black people own property? Why wouldn't they just go and take it? Why would they make bargains with Black people? Why would they respect Black people's contracts? And I think it's because, as Derrick Bell said, it was in white people's interest to do so.

Kelly  21:01  
And white lawyers, even, that was one of the things that I found really surprising was, as you're discussing, in some cases, these white lawyers, especially in the south, who are themselves pretty racist, but are perfectly willing to take on Black people as clients to fight on their behalf. Could you talk through that a little bit because it's such an interesting tension.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  21:24  
It's, it's fascinating to me. There was a guy in Mississippi, Clarksdale, Mississippi named John W. Couture. He was one of the delegates to the 1890 Constitutional Convention for Mississippi, that wound up disenfranchising all the Black people in Mississippi. Once another white man accused him of having Black ancestry, and Couture went out and shot that man. So this is not a man who's really, you know, he's not big on Black rights. But he represents Black clients in property disputes, in accident cases, in contract disputes, he helps them probate wills, He has a significant number of Black people, as his clients. And I think it's basically pretty simple. He made money doing it. And in fact, enough, white lawyers made money representing Black clients, that that became one of the big motivating factors behind their push to drive Black lawyers out of the legal profession in the 1890s. You think about, why would white lawyers do that? And it's easy to assume that they just sort of instinctively had a desire to make lawyering a white man's business. That, that doesn't really explain it. It was about money.

Kelly  22:57  
Yeah, it's fascinating. You mentioned earlier, civil rights, and that the kinds of things that we're talking about that people aren't, are not considering civil rights today, not the way people think about it. But that these are civil rights. And so I wonder if you could talk some about the, the way that that term civil rights sort of evolves in meaning and the way that people think about it, maybe not meaning exactly, but the sort of way that people popularly conceptualize what civil rights are?

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  23:29  
Yeah, so that that ends up being a really fascinating story. The term civil rights doesn't really get defined in national terms, as I said until 1866. Before the Civil War, it has a number of different meanings. They generally sort of cohere around this sphere that I described earlier, about the right to go to court, the right to own property, the right to make contracts. Some people think it also includes the right to move from state to state. So mobility, personal liberty, is often considered part of civil rights. Some people also think it includes political rights, like holding office and voting. After say, you know, the 1850s, that idea that civil rights includes the right to vote falls out, in part because people like Abraham Lincoln, realize that they they can win elections by defining civil rights in this narrow way that doesn't include the right to vote or hold office but only includes contract, property, and standing. That's what enables Lincoln to win the White House in 1860. And it's the meaning that comes through American history from the 1860s until the early 1900s, when a number of activists you know, cause lawyers, as well as popular culture begin to resurrect these meanings of civil rights that go far beyond that. So activists are, they're pushing all along to make it mean something more like protection from discrimination, right. They never give up on that broader vision. But the courts and popular white culture generally still keep that narrow definition for a long time. But what happens starting in the 1920s, and 30s, is that Black lawyers, and other cause lawyers begin pushing to make it mean something more. So there are labor lawyers who want it to mean something like economic rights, like the right to a job or the right to a decent living. There are other people who want it to mean something like the right to go to school, on an equal basis with white children, or the right to go to the same schools, as white children. Those, there are people pushing to make those part of what is understood as civil rights. And in large part, that's kind of what the civil rights movement is about. It's not just fighting for civil rights. It's fighting to define what civil rights are, and the definition that they end up on, which is generally about this principle of non discrimination, and non subordination on the basis of race. That vision is both powerful and narrower than visions that had been kicking around off and on for the previous 150 years. And so that that's the vision that we sort of have today. But it's different than the ones that people that our ancestors actually held in the past, they were much more variable and complicated than we realized.

Kelly  27:00  
So I want to ask about incorporation. And I think reading your book helped me finally understand something. So I live very near the national headquarters of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and on the sign right out front, it says Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, comma Incorporated, and that has puzzled me for a long time because I thought, "This isn't like a for profit corporation. What's going on here?" So could you talk some about corporation what that what that actually means? And how a lot of Black people used that and used that type of law, that that realm of law to really make progress in some ways?

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  27:38  
It's a great question. So a corporation broadly speaking, is a legal tool. It's a tool that empowers a group of people to pool their energies and resources, in support of a common goal. At the at its at its most basic level, that's what a corporation is. And Black people after the Civil War, and even before the Civil War, formed corporations. Some of the earliest corporations that any Americans formed, were Black corporations. They were Black churches, so Bethel AME, and Philadelphia, incorporated in 1796. Sally Gordon at University of Pennsylvania has shown this. And after the Civil War, you see this blossoming, of Black people incorporating stuff, right. And, you know, some of what they incorporate is for profit businesses, so North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. But some of what they incorporate are fraternal organizations. And so those include sororities like Alpha Kappa Alpha, or the fraternities that my cousins and uncles were part of A Phi A, Kappa, Alpha Psi, the Omegas. Those are all incorporated, which means that somebody went, filed a set of papers with the state. You know, this could be Washington, DC, could be the state of Alabama. And then they received a charter from the state that empowered them to do certain things. So they can collect dues, they can have a president and a governing board that can make decisions and act on behalf of all the members of the corporation. And the members can only object at certain times in certain places. And so Black people founded these corporations, because it enabled them to do things in this world. Some of the most famous corporations that we recognize as players in the Civil Rights Movement, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that argues the Brown versus Board of Education case, that's a nonprofit membership corporation. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference that Martin Luther King is the head of, that's also a corporation. So was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church that he preached at, that was a corporation. And so was the Montgomery Improvement Association, which is the organization that spearheaded the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the one that Rosa Parks so famously initiated with her brave stand on the bus. All of these are corporations. The Black Panther Party was incorporated. Black people are forming corporations for a very simple reason, which is that it enables them to get stuff done.

Kelly  30:33  
I found it interesting in the discussion of religion, though. So you just mentioned that a lot of these churches are incorporated. But that sometimes, you know, that helps the organization perhaps it doesn't always help the membership, because sometimes the way things are structured was is more of a top down. Wonder if you could talk through that a little bit. Because you know, especially you discuss Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ways that we think of him as this bastion of democracy. And you know, really, maybe that wasn't always the case. And in his dealings in certain areas, because of the way things were incorporated. 

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  31:09  
No, that's right. Whenever you form a corporation, you are using law, you're using the powers delegated to you by the state, to channel resources in a certain direction to put them into certain people's hands and take them out of other people's hands. One of the things that incorporation does, especially in churches, is it takes certain kinds of powers, such as the right to property, and the right to governance, and it puts them in the hands of leaders. But it also makes those leaders responsive in some way to the members, if the members choose to appeal to the state. So members can, in certain limited circumstances, go to a judge at a local county courthouse and complain about what their pastor or their corporate leader is doing. And then a judge will come in and decide whether the judge has the power to decide this question. When it comes to religious corporations, judges over the years have tied their own hands. And they do that for a simple reason. It's that they felt that they as secular judges, are not the right people to decide spiritual matters. So anything that has to do with the spirit, with theology, with theological doctrine, the courts typically take a hands off stance. They leave it to the highest governing authority in the church, or the mosque or the synagogue, what they say is the law within that mosque. But that sets up a little bit of a problematic dynamic, potentially, which is that the leaders of churches and mosques and synagogues are much less accountable to the members than the members sometimes might want. And in Black churches in particular, this also means that there's a real gender dynamic, because in the church that I grew up in, and in most Black churches down to this day, most leadership positions are held by men. And most of the members of the churches are women. So the members are the ones who are putting in most of the money, they're the ones who are doing the outreach, they're taking meals to the sick and shut in, they're going to the hospitals, most of those members who are doing that work are women, but they don't have the offices in the churches that control the property. And it's even more complicated than that. Because remember, I said a bit ago that when there's a dispute that someone brings to a court and says, you know, "I've been mistreated by the church," the court will typically look to the highest governing authority. And that often means the minister and the Board of Trustees, usually a bunch of dudes. And so then you have this dynamic where men can rule inside the church because of their leadership positions. But even when women go and appeal to a secular judge outside the church, they may still run into male authority because the judge will kick it back and look, first and foremost, to what male leaders have said, or are saying about what church law is on a given subject. 

Kelly  34:53  
One of the things you start talking about toward the end of the book is the way that the legal profession trains new lawyers, and the way that for the past 50 plus years, the law cases that people are reading in law schools actually do involve cases that have Black litigants in them, and yet that is kind of hidden. Could you talk a little bit about that and why it's so important to think about revising those law books and really actually demonstrating to these budding lawyers, what the race of the people involved in the cases is?

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  35:38  
It's a really important question. And I should preface my answer by saying that American law schools have been wrestling for quite some time with the question of race in their curriculum. Going back to the 1970s, late 1960s, early 1970s, when American law schools first began to admit Black students into law school, they realized that well, you know, they didn't have very many Black law professors. And they looked at their case books, and they realized that there were a few cases in the case books that talked about race or talked about Black people, but those cases typically did so in a very derogatory way. They would refer to Black people as boys or as slaves. They were literally cases involving enslaved property, in the case books that American law students were reading, to become trained as lawyers. And so the case book authors and the law professors began to cast about for ways to rethink the case books. And basically what they did is that they took out the few cases that explicitly referred to Black people, and or they erased references to race in those cases. And they kind of called it a day, they didn't go back and rethink the structure of the law school curriculum, or even the way that the case books were built. So I come along, and I'm doing this big project where I'm thinking about the presence of Black people in local courthouses. And I kind of thought, "Well, let me look and see whether there are any Black people in these case books that seem to be all white." And lo and behold, there are some cases involving Black people already in the case books. It's just that they're not marked that way. So the one case that everybody reads, that involves a Black person, and the students know that it's a Black person is Williams versus Walker-Thomas Furniture. That's a case about unconscionability, a Black woman who gets sold a furniture set and some  appliances, on time. She's buying on the installment plan. And there's this really punitive clause in the purchase contract, that basically means that if she misses any payments, she forfeits the whole thing, she forfeits the property and her payments. And this is basically predatory lending. And so this case, is it still in every case book in America. And although it doesn't actually say that she's Black, it talks about things. It says that she's on welfare, it says she has seven children, that she lives in Washington, DC in an urban setting, and everybody knows that she's Black. And in fact, she was Black. But that's the only case that students get taught where they know that the person is Black. But there are other cases. So one case that that they read, is about contract formation. So there's this doctrine that says that past consideration is no consideration at all, in forming a contract. So you can't sort of go to court and say that I made a contract with somebody. And that the quid in the quid pro quo was something that person did for me, before I made the agreement. And the case, one of the cases that gets used to teach this doctrine is a case called Harrington versus Taylor 1945 from North Carolina. And the case books teach it as a case where there is a domestic dispute. One person gets injured, her hand is maimed and she sues and the court holds that the agreement she made with the man whose life she saved by sticking out her hand and blocking the axe from hurting him, killing him, the agreement that she made with him orally is not valid. It turns out that all of the people in that case were Black, and that the case was not only about a contract between Black people, it was about domestic violence, where a Black woman had been attacked by her husband repeatedly, was dropped off at her neighbor's house who was also Black, because the police in that little town of Hamlet, North Carolina, didn't take her seriously. Essentially, she was using contract law to replace a criminal justice system that did not punish Black men for the things they did to Black women. And so that's a context that's a case that I think, needs to be told differently in the contracts case book, not because not just because it allows Black students to see ourselves in the casebook, but because it will allow all students to understand the doctrine of past consideration better. 

Kelly  41:01  
Yeah. I'm gonna ask you a different kind of question, if that's okay. In your acknowledgments you say that you donated a kidney and that you've been told that it's important to talk about that more. I wonder if you would want to talk about that now?

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  41:15  
Oh I appreciate the opportunity to do that. Yeah, I did that back in, what was it 2021, I think it was the middle of the pandemic. I had, I have a family member who had diabetes. And I had always wanted to donate to her, to my sister, for years. And she always had said, you know, she put me off. But it became time to do that. And so I was very grateful, very blessed that when I took the tests at Tampa General Hospital, I wasn't a match, but I was able to donate. I was suitable for candidate for donation. You know, it's kind of, you know, a battery of tests, it takes about a day, day and a half, you go home. And then you wait for a call for a match from another donor, they can actually, you don't need to be a perfect match with the person you want to donate to. You can actually pair with another couple of people, or you can donate in a chain where they use the supercomputers to kind of match you up with up to 20, or even 40 different people. In our case, it was just us and two other people. And so you know, when we got the call, we were ready. And so we scheduled this, I flew to Florida, and had the operation and then my sister had the operation next morning, everything went fine. I, you know, ate a lot of ice cream over the next several days. I was home and back at work within a couple of weeks. And I was I like to run I'm a runner. And so I was back to running within I'd say about four to six weeks, and fully recovered, running wind sprints, and hill training within a couple of months. So it was an experience that's so precious to me. And I'm grateful to all the people who made that possible. And I highly encourage all of your listeners to consider it. It doesn't necessarily need to cost any money, there are programs to defray the costs. All it takes is you know, a willing donor.

Kelly  43:31  
That's incredible. Thanks for sharing that. So we're not gonna be able to talk about everything in the book, of course, it's a really detail- packed book. So I wonder if you could tell listeners how to get a copy of the book.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  43:44  
Anywhere books are sold. You can go to wwnorton.com. And they have a number of links, where you can buy books, or you can google my name. It's an unusual name, Dylan Penningroth, and somewhere in there you will find links to purchase a copy of "Before the Movement."

Kelly  44:02  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about? 

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  44:05  
I guess maybe the one thing that might be worth mentioning is, I guess, some listeners might be wondering what the takeaways might be or what lessons all of this might hold for today. And I guess I point to a couple of things. One is just that it's important for us to see the diversity of Black life. I think that it's it's something we all know that American history is, in large part a story of racial oppression. And that is absolutely true. And it has created a commonality of experience among African Americans. But that shouldn't detract from the basic humanity of African Americans. And part of that humanity is the differences among African Americans, including differences of opinion, differences of background. Sometimes Black people argued with each other. Sometimes we were petty with each other. We joked with each other, all sorts of things that don't necessarily conform to a narrative that I think, has tended to dominate the way we think about African American history, which is that it's a struggle for freedom. So that's the first thing I'd say. And then the second thing I'd say, is more in the form of a question. We often think of African Americans as being alienated from law before the Civil Rights Movement, and perhaps even today, but especially if we think of a Black person in 1900. The last place that we would imagine that person wanting to be would be in a local courthouse in Mississippi. And yet we found people there, me and my team found Black people in southern courthouses using their rights, talking about law in all sorts of creative ways. And it makes one wonder, "Why, if African Americans were so alienated from law, before the Civil Rights Movement, why did they put their faith in law when the activists came to the south? Why did they think of law as something that might do right from them?" I give one answer in the book. But I think that that question is something that we really as Americans should be asking ourselves again, and again, because we now have one of our major political parties, and its leader, who are openly questioning the rule of law.

Kelly  46:34  
Well, this was such a perfect fit, I think, for this podcast. I've said before that one of my goals when starting was to know like, what did people eat for lunch in Kansas in 1900? And this is exactly that, that sort of story. What were people doing on the ground, not the famous people, but the everyday people? So I'm so thrilled to have read the book, and it's been just great talking with you. Thank you so much, Dylan.

Dr. Dylan C. Penningroth  46:59  
Thank you, I really appreciate it.

Teddy  47:27  
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