RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDeeply researched and accessible ... A substantial entry in Yale’s Black Lives series, focuses primarily on the activist-turned-politician’s public life and is successful on this score.
Dylan C. Penningroth
RaveThe Washington PostA deeply researched and counterintuitive history of how ordinary Black Americans used law in their everyday lives from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s. Penningroth reframes the conventional story of civil rights, shifting the focus away from iconic figures, mass protests, strategic lawsuits and federal legislation to highlight a neglected history of deeds, divorce petitions, corporate charters and other legal rights ... Penningroth makes expert use of underutilized sources, including deed books, civil and criminal cases, and corporate registries stored in the basements and backrooms of county courthouses ... From this archive of private-law civil rights, Penningroth persuasively argues that historians and legal scholars have overlooked how extensively ordinary Black people understood and used the law in the century before the modern civil rights movement.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
