Dylan C. Penningroth - Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is with Dylan Penningroth, who teaches in the Department of History at University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His newest book is entitled Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). It explores how ordinary Black people used and thought about law in their everyday lives, and how Black legal activity and Black legal thought helped shape American law and Black social movements from the 1830s to the 1970s. The book tries to recover a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle. Before the Movement was awarded eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more.

He has written on a wide range of themes, from the troubled history of race in contract law to the history of police power to the legacy of slavery in Ghana, to how Black churches used civil rights. My first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the MacArthur Foundation

What is The Black Studies Podcast?

The Black Studies Podcast is a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.