Before the Movement
My talk will outline some of the ways Black people used, talked about, and thought about law from the 1830s to the 1970s. It draws on a variety of legal sources, including a large sample of cases held in county courthouses around the country. Looking at the history of Black legal lives can open up new ways of seeing key areas of legal doctrine and legal theory and the law school curriculum. It can also challenge some of the ways historians and law scholars have come to talk about civil rights—and about African American history more generally. In the era before the Movement, for most African Americans, most of the time, civil rights had little to do with federal law or principles of anti-discrimination. Instead, it meant rights of property, contract, and the right to go to court. In a world that denied their constitutional rights, Black people built lives for themselves through these “rights of everyday use.” Before the Movement recovers a rich vision of Black life―a vision allied with, yet distinct from, the freedom struggle.
