At the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Dylan Penningroth (UC Berkeley) came away with two big book awards: the Merle Curti Social History Award ("recognizing the best book in American social history") and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize ("recognizing the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present").
His prize-winning book is Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright).
From the Merle Curti Award Committee:
Beautifully written, deeply researched, and brilliantly argued, Before the Movement shows how Black people used the law in everyday ways that shaped how they lived as people. Through painstaking research in county legal records, Dylan Penningroth, University of California, Berkeley, shows how Black litigants invoked the right to property and the right to contract to secure civil rights—a process that historians have overlooked because of modern conceptions of civil rights as distinct from private law. But not only did Black people engage with the law as an act of resistance against white supremacy but they also used the law, sometimes against one another, to secure everyday gains. Penningroth urges us to see Black history as more than a story of resistance. This is an agenda-setting book that both transforms how we think and teach about slavery, segregation, and civil rights, and also provides a model for how to use legal sources in social history.
From the Ellis W. Hawley Prize Committee:
In this beautifully written book, Dylan C. Penningroth shows how ordinary African Americans used the law in their everyday lives from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s. Even during the height of Jim Crow, indeed, even during slavery, Black people exercised a wide range of civil rights—what Penningroth calls “the rights of everyday use,” embedded in contract, property, marriage, and inheritance law. Through extensive archival research, conducted in courthouse basements, Penningroth unearths this neglected history of the movement. The book centers the story of Black people who knew, understood, and used the law generations before the mass marches of the 1950s and 1960s. Penningroth also engages readers by weaving in the narrative of his own family. This extraordinary book shifts our focus from federal courts to county courts, and from iconic leaders to ordinary people. Its excavation of the long history of Black legal life will broaden and transform our understanding of African Americans’ fight for justice.
Congratulations to Dylan Penningroth!
-- Karen Tani
