“Before the movement” magazine: civil rights at the courthouse

There was a time when “civil rights” did not have the same meaning as it does today. “In the century following emancipation,” Dylan Penningroth tells us in his decidedly subversive book “Before the Movement,” “civil rights went from being the fundamental rights of free people to being the rights of minorities not to be not be discriminated against. ” Mr. Penningroth, a professor of law and history at the University of California at Berkeley, goes on to write: “In 1866, ‘civil rights’ meant contract and property rights,” while in 1954, ” civil rights meant ending racial rights.” discrimination at work, at school, when voting.

This profoundly altered sense of what we know, or think we know, as a simple and obvious term has major implications for African American history in the century before the modern civil rights era. “The notion of black history as a struggle for freedom,” the author asserts, “has reduced our view of black life to the few areas of black life where federal law and social movements have makes the difference. . . . Overshadowed are many other aspects of life that black people might have cared about just as much, but which do not fit into a story of freedom – things like marriage and divorce, care of the elderly, property ownership, management churches and businesses.