Event Details:
Joining Stanford professor James T. Campbell and former SHC Fellow Dylan C. Penningroth to discuss his recent book "Before the Movement" as part of the Inside the Center series, which highlights the writing and research of current and former Humanities Center fellows.
Through an empirically-rich historical investigation into the changing meaning of civil rights, Before the Movement seeks to change the way we think about Black history itself. Weaving together a variety of sources—from state and federal appellate courts to long-forgotten documents found in county courthouse basements, from family interviews to church records—the book tries to reveal 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 common law “rights of everyday use.” Before the Movement recovers a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.
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.
James T. Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History at Stanford University. He previously taught at Brown, where he chaired the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. His publications include Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005, Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies, and Mississippi Witness: the Photographs of Florence Mars. He is currently completing a book on the Mississippi Freedom Movement in history and memory. A committed public historian, Campbell has served as an historical consultant for numerous curricular projects, documentary films, and museum exhibitions, including the “Power of Place” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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