Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Before the Movement with Dylan Penningroth

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

In today’s episode, Sharon’s guest is Dylan Penningroth, whose new book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, brings to light a new narrative of Black life in America. It’s a fascinating history of how African American communities used law, talked about law, and thought about law for almost two centuries, in ways that enabled the Civil Rights Movement before it even began. Pulling back the curtain, it explores how race actually works in American law, and does so by looking at local court cases that are not directly about race. When we zoom out, a new more complex story emerges of how law impacted Black Americans in ways that stretched far beyond segregation and race relations.  Special thanks to our guest, Dylan Penningroth, for joining us today.  Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Dylan Penningroth Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you join me today. My guest is Dylan Penningroth, who has a new book out called Before the Movement, which is an absolutely fascinating take on Black history and how African American communities used the law in ways that enabled the civil rights movement before it even got started. So I can't wait to have you listen to this conversation. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Well, I am very excited to be welcoming Dylan Penningroth to the show today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

I am delighted to be talking about your new book, Before the Movement. When I saw it come out, I immediately was excited to read it. And I really learned so much. It wasn't just a, here's a list of facts of things that happened before the civil rights movement, but it really explored themes that I think are so important to keep in mind when we're studying history, when we're studying Black history, we're studying the history of the civil rights movement. And so I would love to have you give the listener who maybe hasn't read before the movement yet, just a general overview of what

your new book is about. So my book is a history that tells a story about how African Americans used law and talked about law and thought about law for almost two centuries from roughly the last decades before the end of slavery through the 1970s. And what I try to do in the book is to tell a story of Black legal lives that pulls back a curtain on Black life itself. So the first thing to know about the book is that it's not a story about race relations, but it does reveal really interesting things about how race actually works in American law. And it does so by looking at cases that are not necessarily about race and which sometimes don't even mention race. you know, just being able to look at a topic maybe you're well versed in, or you've heard a lot about, I love being able to look at it through a new lens or consider it in a different way, which I think your book does really beautifully. I would love to hear you expand on this idea of how African

Americans have been using the law for centuries, because we tend to think about just in relationship to cases like Dred Scott, or Brown versus the Board, or we tend to think about the law as Thurgood Marshall. And he's an important component, of course, but the history is much richer and deeper than that. I think that's right. So often when we think about Black people's relationship to law, we think first about what the law did to Black people and how Black people struggled, usually against the odds, to fight back against the oppressive force of law or to change unjust laws. But there's another really important part to the story, which is about how African Americans used law. But we're not talking here about the laws of segregation. We're not talking about the US Supreme Court.

The place where I did my research is the local county courthouse. I went to about two dozen county courthouses scattered across the South and the Midwest and the North. And I looked at what people were doing in their local courts. And the first order of business was to figure out whether Black people were actually going to court. That, it turns out, is a little bit of a complicated story. Because when you go into the courthouse basements and you look at the records, these big cloth-bound ledger books, loose papers wrapped and tri-folded. And you take them down and you look at them and you realize that almost none of them say what race the people are. So you have litigants, you have lawyers.

None of them are marked that way. It just says the name and what the case is about. So there's an interesting story to tell about the research method. How do you find out who's who? But there's another story that I think is important, and it gets at the question you were just asking, which is that once you realize that Black people were using the courts, and once you start to see what they were using the courts for, a really different story emerges. It's not just about fighting segregation. It's about making contracts to buy land. It's about marriage and divorce. It's about a church

hiring someone to fix the roof. All of these things mattered enormously to Black people. And that's a story I think that hasn't really been told, in part because of our focus on race relations and this sort of dominant way of thinking about Black history as a long freedom struggle. I'm curious about your methodology of going to county courthouses instead of focusing on the Supreme Court, which is where a lot of learning happens when we're talking about emancipation or other issues related to Black history. We tend to focus on Supreme Court cases. And it's understandable if you are an undergrad or you teach high school, you only have so much time, right? And you really do need to hit the highlights.

But I'm curious about what made you think, you know, where I need to be are the county courthouses. And then tell us a little bit more about what that process was like. It's absolutely true that the Supreme Court matters. The Congress matters. that the Supreme Court matters. The Congress matters. And I do spend a good deal of time talking about things that the Supreme Court did. One of the really interesting things is what happens to race when a case goes from the trial court up to the state Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. Essentially, race drops in and out of the case file, depending on what the lawyers and the judges want the case to do for them.

There's not some sort of conspiracy going on to keep Black people down, playing out in this opportunistic story about race appearing in the transcripts. It's really about winning the case. But what made me gravitate toward these local court records in the first place, I think, was just a realization that the story I wanted to tell was really kind of a personal one, in every sense of the word. I wanted people to be the center of the book, of the word. I wanted people to be the center of the book. And my motivation for writing the book, it really sort of started with my family, hearing family stories. And the kinds of stories that at least were told at family reunions in my family, nobody in my family knew any major activists, And nobody in my family knew any major activists, but they did own a little bit of farmland.

They did get married. Some of them got divorced. One of them, while he was a slave, owned a boat and ferried Confederate soldiers across a river toward the end of the Civil War. This is my great, great, great uncle, Jackson Holcomb. And once the soldiers got to the other side, they paid him. And when I heard that story, I thought, this is very strange. I mean, it almost seems as though they're treating him as if he has a right to make contracts. They're treating him as if he has a right to own property. Now, of course, he didn't own property,

and that wasn't a contract, but they paid him almost casually without really thinking about it. And I wanted to know why. How could an enslaved person who has no rights own a boat and be treated almost as if he does have rights? What does that say about slavery? What does that say about rights? And that opened up a really strange world that I didn't quite recognize, and I wanted to know more. And the first thing to recognize about property and contracts is that they're fundamentally local law issues. So if you want to tell a story about that, you have to start at the local county courthouse. How did you decide which county courthouses you were going to go to? I mean, there's literally

thousands. There sure are. You could probably throw a dart and be like, that one sounds good. What criteria did you use when you were choosing which ones to visit? And what was it like to go there? Did you just call them up and be like, hello, I'm coming over. Please open your archives for me. It is an underrated part of research, making contact with the people who hold the records. These are public records, but of course they don't have to show them to you, or at least they don't have to show them to you when it's convenient for you. When you want to see them. When you want to see them, right. And so first I'd try to find out whether they had them. A lot

of these records have been lost to floods. Sometimes they're taken care of well, but county budgets being what they are, it's not unheard of for them to be lost, burned, lost to vermin. But once I figured out whether there was a good chance there would be records there, I would just go. I'd get on a plane, I'd rent a car, and I'd drive around to maybe four or five county courthouses in a week or two's time, and then I'd fly home and go back to teaching. So it's really time consuming. Once I was on site, I would try to collect a docket sample. I would try to copy down the names or photograph the names to copy them down later back home. And from there, I started building up a big data set of names, cases, what they were about. After we did that, me and my research assistants began to look them up

on Ancestry.com. Now, many of your listeners may know Ancestry as the place where you can go to swab your DNA and find out who you're related to that way. It also is a genealogical database that allows you to look up individuals in the U.S. Census. That's how I figured out who in the court records was African American. By the end of the study, I had about 14,000 cases coded, and we had identified about 1,500 of them involving African Americans as plaintiffs. So that's a lot of cases. I mean, the research process is slow. It takes time, but the rewards are enormous because once you have the names, you can actually go and sometimes find the case file that's behind that case. And sometimes you can actually read

testimony. You can see people telling stories in court about things, real things that happened to them. And that's just incredible. Yeah. You say in the book that slaves participated routinely, energetically, unequally in the world of law, the fact that they had no rights, no prerogatives that a court would protect, did not mean that they lived outside the law because law was not just for people with rights and because rights themselves existed in a thick network of shared understandings and symbolic acts, recording, talking, using, and showing. I love that. And I'm also curious about why it is important to study this topic. Why is it important to know how slaves were using the law? What can we learn from this? One of the biggest things that I learned from studying slaves' relationship to law

is it helped me think differently about how free people engaged with law. It's true that freedom made certain things possible for Black people. This is a real turning point to have civil rights. But because slaves had privileges of owning property, making agreements that looked like contracts, making agreements that looked like contracts, because they participated in the world of legal understandings that white people also participated in. 1865 isn't the radical break with the past that I think we've come to assume it was. There's a lot of continuities from slavery to freedom, and those continuities have a lot to do with those basic civil rights that I mentioned. So, for example, in 1866, the National Congress passes a Civil Rights Act. It's the first national Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And what it says is that states cannot discriminate against citizens on the basis of color or previous

condition of servitude, and they can't discriminate with respect to certain basic rights, and those rights are property, contract, and the right to sue and be sued, which we'll just call standing. It turns out, though, that most of the southern states had already passed in 1865, just after the Civil War ended. They had already passed their own laws recognizing slaves as having those basic rights. Now, the state laws, which we know as the Black Codes, were incredibly discriminatory against Black people, relegated them to second-class citizenship. But it seems to have been relatively easy for these states to recognize Black people as having those basic rights. And I think it's because white people were used to making deals with slaves. They were used to seeing slaves own property. And those things were not a threat to white supremacy. They didn't necessarily undermine white people's domination of the economy.

In a sense, it wasn't that big a deal for them to recognize these basic rights. I'm curious if you can talk more about something you just said, which is that 1865 was not that big of a break with the past as maybe we imagine it to be. Tell us more about that. So there's a tendency, I think, not just in African-American history, but in American history generally, to see emancipation as the beginning or sort of the midpoint of a long journey toward first-class citizenship, full citizenship. So you think about slavery as being the absence of rights. That's how most people think about it. And then Jim Crow is usually presented as a period when Black people enjoyed second-class citizenship. And so it's easy to think of

African-American history as a journey toward full citizenship. And that's essentially how civil rights activists presented it repeatedly, especially in the 1960s. But if slaves had privileges that, although they weren't rights, white people respected. If emancipation wasn't such a sharp break with past practice, if enslaved people participated in the same network of legal understandings, then what does that say about this story we've been telling ourselves for so long, that there's something radically different about a free person as opposed to a slave person? What if, in a sense, many of the opportunities and disabilities of slavery carry over into freedom? carry over into freedom. And you can see that starkly in some of the contracts that get made with newly freed people in 1865-66. So one of the places I went was the Virginia Historical Society,

and there I stumbled across a file folder that contained a contract between a white man named William R. Baskerville and a few dozen of, and I'll just quote, Negroes formerly his slaves. And they're all listed with their first names. And basically, the contract says that these Negroes formerly his slaves agree with him to work for a quarter share of the corn crop. And in return, they're going to work as they did while they were slaves. This is a pretty common contract. And after 1866, they take out the words Negro or former slaves. And what's left is just, you're going to work for this white man for very little pay. And in return, you're going to agree to give up all sorts of

privileges and opportunities. You're going to work incredibly hard. This is what eventually evolves into the sharecropping system. In order for sharecropping to work, in order for this contract to be binding on Black people, they have to be recognized as citizens. William R. Baskerville can't make a contract unless he recognizes Black people as having the right to make a contract. There are a couple of things that are really important to recognize about this. Every right that African Americans gain from emancipation comes with certain duties that can be thrown back at them. Some of those advantages, some of those rights and duties have to do with their relationship to white men like William R. Baskerville, but then some of those relationships

that they have through contract have to do with one another. So if you look at that contract, William R. Baskerville has a lot of people signing for themselves, but then there are all these men who sign for one woman and three children. So black men gain certain rights over black women and black children that they didn't have before during slavery. So there are all sorts of inequalities that come into play with emancipation. It really reorganizes power. It doesn't introduce sort of a new chapter in the story of the journey toward freedom. It rearranges the relationships of power, and in some senses, it points it inward as much as it does outward from the Black family.

That's really interesting. That's a really interesting thing to think about it, the way that power was reorganized and who then was at the top and who was at the bottom of this reorganized power structure. of this reorganized power structure. And it's obvious that white folks were at the top, but then within this reorganization, what I'm hearing you say is that prior to emancipation, you would have had one organization of power with the enslaved community. And after emancipation, of power with the enslaved community. And after emancipation, this reorganization created a system in which Black men were above Black women. Am I understanding you correctly? In a way, yes. Black men are given legal powers. They literally have property rights in their wives and in their children. It's the same as white men. This is sort of a standard part of state property law and the law of domestic relations. Now black men, because they're citizens, they have those rights too. What's also interesting is that black women,

wives who are married to men, they don't always go along with it. So they contribute their labor, but sometimes they fight back and they do it in part by exercising their right to divorce. They have this new right, a civil right, I would call it, not just to make a marriage, but to end a marriage. And when they do divorce, sometimes they say, well, that's not actually your property. I contributed half of the money for that, or sometimes all of the money for that. And sometimes they win. And these stories come out in these local court records. You won't find this in the Supreme Court of the United States. You can only find this in the county courthouse.

I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! It is my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests.

And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. What other effects did this sort of reorganized legal Black patriarchy have on Black women? I'm curious. You mentioned some of them fought back. Some of them fought back legally. Some of them probably fought back just privately. But what other effects, broader effects, But what other effects, broader effects, did this have on the newly emancipated Black community?

I've been talking about how it played out in Black families, and I'm glad you brought up the word community. One of the other major institutions in any community is religious institutions. The end of slavery marks a turning point in the history of Black churches. This is a time when millions of African Americans seize the opportunity to become independent from white people. So they've been worshipping all along, but they've been worshipping from the back rows and balconies of churches that were sometimes even majority black, but they were run by white people. White people's names were on the deed, on the title. So black people start founding churches. They get their own title, their own deed, and it's dedicated to the use of the colored members. And that means something. It has a specific meaning in property

law. It means that it can't be converted to the use of white people. So now black people have these independent churches, but that doesn't end questions of power because now they have to reallocate power among themselves. And what tends to happen is men take all the leadership positions. These churches, I don't know if you've been to black churches, but including the one that I grew up in, they're very patriarchal. Women are not allowed to preach. They're not allowed to serve in major church offices until very recently. Martin Luther King's, some of the women who worked with him in SCLC described him as being a typical minister who treated women as sort of pretty ornaments, people who were going to carry out the church's or the minister's wishes without complaining or objecting.

wishes without complaining or objecting. But again and again, what happens in these churches is that women, who are a majority of the members, object sometimes to what the ministers and deacons are doing. They don't have rights in the church. They don't have standing to sue in a court. You can't take this to the white man's court. And the women are left with this impossible choice. They object to a decision that the minister's made, but they're being told that all they have are privileges, the privileges of their status as members. But what they want is a say in the disposal of the church's property or to choose a minister. And those are not just privileges, they're rights. And so when you get a situation like that, what often happens is somebody goes to court, they sue. And that's where it spills into the

public record where a historian like me can come along and find it. And you see it again and again and again, women who are a majority of the church objecting to what their patriarchal leaders are doing, and then somebody ends up suing and taking it to court. That's so interesting. I have long thought that it, well, it's not just remarkable, but it's also very underplayed in U.S. history curriculum, in my opinion, exactly the nature of the striving that you referred to and the incredible burden of the striving that occurred during the reconstructionconstruction period, and the incredible amount of property and wealth and churches and schools that were built at an incredibly rapid pace after emancipation. It's absolutely remarkable. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit more about that striving that you mentioned. What actually did it take?

What did it take to be able to, in a few short years, accumulate millions of acres of property and churches and schools and monetary wealth? What did that take? It's a great question. take? It's a great question. First and foremost, it took organization. And the building block of organized Black work was the family. That's why this Black patriarchy matters so much. So much of this striving, this incredible labor is being done through the family. And what that does in the end is it puts a spotlight on family itself. There's this one story that sticks in my mind very vividly about a woman named Henrietta Jefferson,

who was given a house and a piece of property by an older woman named Eliza Brown in the early 1880s. Eliza Brown had been a slave. She had washed clothes. Somehow, she had managed to accumulate this property. And Henrietta Jefferson took care of Eliza Brown as Eliza Brown got older. And in gratitude, Eliza Brown wrote a deed to Henrietta Jefferson, giving her her property. Once that deed hit the books, Eliza Brown's biological niece, Euphemia Stewart, came down from Baltimore and said basically, hey, what's going on? This is supposed to be my property. And she sued to void this deed. She said essentially that Eliza Brown was crazy and that she had been unduly influenced by Henrietta Jefferson, tricked into giving her her property. In the end, Femi Stewart's lawsuit failed. The property went to

Henrietta Jefferson. But the story, I think, is important to me in a couple of ways because it really sort of shows vividly how difficult it was for African Americans to cope with old age, to cope with sickness. The state wasn't giving them anything. They couldn't count on their church. And Eliza Brown couldn't count on her own family. She said repeatedly that her family never did anything for her. And that's why she relied on Henrietta Jefferson. That's why she created a non-biological family to help her. It's often assumed that Black people are naturally family-oriented, that they naturally take care of one another. But to think about African-Americans that way is to treat African-Americans as somehow superhuman or less than human.

The second reason this story sticks in my mind, and this gets back to what we were talking about earlier about the sources, is that nowhere in the record of Stewart versus Jefferson, the court case, does it say what race these two women were. I had to find that out from Ancestry. You literally cannot see race in the record of this case. You can't see it, but it is definitely there. What implications does it have when you say you can't see race in the record of the case? What implications does that have? When I see cases from the period when segregation was legal, when it was the official policy of not only the state governments in the South, but of the federal government. When I see race literally not being written into the records of local county courts,

often being dropped out of the trial transcripts that go up even to the U.S. Supreme Court. America has never been colorblind. It's been opportunistic about when and how it talks about race, especially in the legal system. So the question is not whether we should talk about race. The question is, I think, how do we talk about it? When do we talk about it? And why do we talk about it? I know that I'm going to get some emails, Dylan, who are like, your entire podcast is about critical

race theory. This whole thing is about critical race theory. And I'm curious about, is what we're discussing in your mind, this concept of how the law has seen and used race and how people of various races have used the law, is this what critical race theory is in your mind? Critical race theory is just a set of tools for thinking. It's not a doctrine. It's not telling anyone what to think. It's just a set of tools like any other tool. One of the really interesting things that I see in critical race theory that I'm using in the book is this idea of interest convergence, which was put forward by one of the founders of critical race theory, Derrick Bell. And the basic idea is progress for racial minorities will happen if and only if it's good for white people too. If white people's interests converge with racial progress, then they will concede something.

This idea helps me understand what otherwise would seem to be really kind of nonsensical. Things like, how could my great-great-great-uncle Jackson Holcomb own a boat? The reason he can own a boat is because not only was it no sweat off white people's noses to let slaves own boats, it actually benefited masters. Because if Jackson Holcomb could earn a little bit of money ferrying people across the river, then the masters could tell him to feed himself out of that money. And that's exactly what thousands and thousands of slave owners had been doing across the South for 200 years by the time he was ferrying soldiers. So they're making profits. It's good for white people, and it's kind of good for Jackson Holcomb, but it's better for his master. You can see that playing out again and again. What allows African Americans to gain civil rights after the Civil War? Well,

slavery is over. You need African Americans to work the fields. You're not allowed to enslave them anymore. Allowing them or granting them these basic civil rights of property and contract is in white people's interests. So critical race theory, it's useful for thinking. And I hope that if there's any way to kind of demystify it, make it less of a buzzword, a boogeyman, and think about what it can actually do for us, I think that's all to the good. Well, we can't talk about this topic without talking about Thurgood Marshall. this topic without talking about Thurgood Marshall. He is a giant in this field. And we tend to think about him mostly in the context of Brown v. Board. But he was out there doing stuff way before 1954. He didn't just come fully formed out of nowhere in 1954. But I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the

impact of Thurgood Marshall on the American legal landscape before the movement. I think of Thurgood Marshall first and foremost as a working lawyer. He is the lead counsel in Brown v. Board of Education and many other cases like it that go up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He started his career the same way that most of the other Black lawyers of his generation started their careers, which was representing small-town people in small-town types of cases. small-town people in small-town types of cases, property, contract, church fights, what he called bread-and-butter lawyering. These lawyers come of age in a time when the meaning of civil rights is rapidly changing, in part because of these desegregation cases that they themselves are bringing. So civil rights in 1866 means

property, contract, the right to sue and be sued. By the 1940s, the term civil rights is coming to mean something related but different. It's starting to mean something like Negro rights, mean something like Negro rights, the right to protection against discrimination on the basis of race. Now, that meaning has always been there since 1866, but now it's taking pride of place and it's becoming endowed with almost sacred power. The mass movement, the activists, The mass movement, the activists, accelerate that process. They sacralize civil rights. Eventually, they begin to leave the term civil rights behind. It's too frumpy.

It's old-fashioned. But while the 1950s and 60s mass actions are taking place, while Marshall and his team are litigating the cases leading up to Brown, civil rights is taking on this almost religious quality. I don't even know if it's almost religious. I don't know if it's almost. And what that does is it lifts it away from the common sense of law that most Black people hold. It ends up prompting observers to think of ordinary Black people as being disconnected from law, as people who need to be taught about their rights. And that turns out to be a pretty useful way to organize activists, but it's not a really great way to approach ordinary Black people. What I find so fascinating about Marshall is that while all that is happening, he never loses sight

of his bread-and-butter lawyering roots. And there's this wonderful interview that he gives to a historian in the 1970s. There's this famous moment in Brown versus Board of Education where Marshall and his team introduce a piece of psychological evidence that suggests that Black children are being damaged by segregation. They do it by presenting Black children with dolls and asking them to choose the white one or the Black one. The children almost always choose the white one. And this suggests that they're psychologically damaged. Even at the time,

people were really upset and wondering, what's psychology doing in the Supreme Court? And so the historian Richard Kluger asks Marshall, well, why did you put that in? You must have known it would be controversial. And Marshall says, essentially, I never hesitated at once because I wanted to try this case, Brown versus Board of Education, just like any other case with damages. You see, if someone runs over your foot with his car, you're going to sue him. And the question is going to be how much damages should you receive? He's essentially saying that Linda Brown has been injured like a personal injury suit. He's acting like a personal injury lawyer, the kind that you see up on the billboards on the highway. This is not sacred at all. This is crass. It's the opposite of sacred. So why is he doing this? Why is he talking this way? I think it's because this is the world that he came out of, and he still has this instinctive understanding that when he goes in front of the Supreme Court, his audience is not just those nine justices. African Americans who are listening and watching, they know what civil rights is. They know that it's not just this sacred thing. It's also this really mundane thing that has to do with their

basic civil rights. What do you hope the impact of your book is before the movement? What do you hope the impact of your book is before the movement? What do you hope the reader takes away? What do you hope some of the enduring understandings are? There are certain elements in American society today who are openly questioning the principle that the rule of law should prevail. And that, to me, as an African-American historian, it throws me back on a question, which is this. African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens for so long. The conventional story has it that they were outsiders to the law completely, that they were

alienated, that the law was an oppressive force in their lives. But if that was the case, then why, when the movement activists came in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, did Black people turn to law? Why did they embrace this idea that law could do something for them? The answer, I think, is that they had been using and thinking and talking about law all along. But that also suggests to me that we need to think carefully about not only the roots of Black people's faith in the rule of law, but what might happen to that faith in the future. And that, I think, that's an important question, not just for African Americans, but for everyone. I guess the second thing that I would

want to take away from thinking about the book is that the law isn't just one thing. It's Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court, and it's also your local county judge. Law both enables Black patriarchy and it enables white supremacy. It motivates the March on Washington of 1963, but it also motivates Black women to threaten a march on their bishop's house in 1966 to keep the minister that they want. It's what allows Black people to accumulate 15 million acres of land, but it's also what enables their exploitation through sharecropping. So I think the second takeaway from me is to think more broadly about law and to think carefully about how law touches us in our everyday lives, not just at the Supreme Court. That's a great takeaway is if black people had no faith or interactions with the law, then why would they want to use it as a tool?

why would they want to use it as a tool? If they had no faith in it, why was it one of the primary drivers of the civil rights movement? It's a great question to think about and a great question to leave this on. And I'm really grateful for your time today. I really enjoyed reading Before the Movement. I took a lot away from it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Before the Movement. I took a lot away from it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. You can buy Dylan Penningroth's book, Before the Movement, wherever you buy books. And you can also support independent bookstores by ordering from bookshop.org. I'll see you again soon. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast

platform. And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.