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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we're devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

Today's Friday, September 12th.

My name is Dan Moulthrop I'm the chief executive here.

And I am pleased to introduce our forum today, which is part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series.

Big thanks to our partners at Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library for their support of this series.

Today we start with two simple questions.

What if the fight for civil rights in the 1960s didn't actually begin in the 1960s with famous marches and courtroom cases?

And does the conventional narrative, the one with which we are all familiar?

Does it actually limit the success, legal achievements, and persistence of Black Americans for generations?

Our speaker today, author Dylan C. Penningroth challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history in the United States.

In his latest book, Before the Movement The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, Pendergrass research stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s.

He draws on long forgotten sources in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, and sheds light on their centuries long tradition of legal knowledge black Americans have tapped to assert their rights, protect their families, and shape their communities.

Doctor Penningroth is professor of law and Morrison professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley.

He specializes in African American history and legal history, and happens to also be a MacArthur fellow.

That deserves a little applause.

I think you're right.

You're right about that.

His book, Before the Movement, won 11 book prizes and was shortlisted for four additional book prizes.

He's the author as well of an award winning book, The Claims of Kinfolk African-American Property and Community in the 19th Century South.

Also joining us on stage are Isabel Hadaway, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

She's our moderator for today's conversation.

A reminder for our live stream and radio audience if you have a question.

Oh, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you indeed.

Asia has a lot of fans in the room, including one right here at the Electronics.

A reminder for our live streaming radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794 and we will try to work it into the program on your behalf.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming welcoming Dylan Penningroth and Ayesha Bell Hardaway.

Thank you all for being with us today.

I've had the great pleasure of following Dylan's work since I started writing legal scholarship.

Honestly and truly my very first law review article.

I felt like claims of kinfolk.

I told you this was the linchpin to me solving the case.

All those years ago.

And so it's really a pleasure and a treat for me to be in this space with you today.

I feel the same way.

Yeah.

Thank you, thank you.

So, finding your new book that's now one year old right at the end of this month.

Before the movement, was a great treasure.

We appreciate all of the hard work that you had, put into it in order to make it happen.

You have to be a MacArthur geniu So, I want to just say, thank you for for taking the time to, uncover this rich history, that otherwise would go unknown.

And I think that alone requires a great deal of recognition, and I really do.

I know being a scholar is not easy.

And I really appreciate everything that you sacrifice to make it happen.

Yeah.

Q solutely so, my first question, like you, many people, either listening or watching this broadcast here in the, some in the, here in the audience.

Have deep roots in the South.

And you opened the book with the story from your own family.

That I know will be both familiar and at the same time, remarkable, right.

To those of us in the black community.

Will you share a bit with us about that story?

And what set you on the journey to write this book?

Sure.

Well, first of all, thank you all for having me.

Thank you, Aisha, for moderating this conversation.

And to Dan and Cynthia.

It is such a pleasure and honor to be here in a place that's so important to the free speech tradition in this country.

The story that you're that you're referencing is one that comes from my own family.

My great, great great uncle was a man named Jackson Holcomb, and, his son was interviewed.

I can't think of any other word to call it.

He was interviewed by my uncle, Craig Baskerville in 1976, when I was five years old.

And for whatever reason, my Uncle Craig decided to record it.

And on that tape, which is I still have it, it's very precious to me.

Thomas Holcomb talks about his father, Jackson Holcomb, and how Jackson Holcomb had a boat, and he would use that boat to ferry people across the Appomattox River in Cumberland County, where he lived at the time.

During slavery in 1865.

One day, a bunch of Confederate soldiers came running through the woods, running away from Grant's army, and they asked for a ride across the river.

And so Jackson Holcomb carried them across the river in his boat.

And when they got to the other side, the soldiers paid him.

And so I was listening to this story, you know, years and years later and I'm thinking, well, why in the world with these Confederate soldiers pay an enslaved man to carry them across the river?

What's going on here?

They have all the guns, and they're literally fighting a war to keep him in slavery.

And after years of research and thinking about this, not just this story, but thousands of other cases that I've looked at in the archives and courthouse basements over the past 20 years or so.

I came to understand that the reason the soldiers paid him after he took them across the river is because it was not unusual for an enslaved person to own property.

It was not unusual for an enslaved person to make bargains with free white people, with other black people.

It was part of the common sense of law in the South.

And in fact, you can even see Frederick Douglass talking about interactions like this as being contracts.

You actually use the word contract.

Now, my great great great uncle Jackson Holcomb, didn't actually have a contract in the sense that he couldn't have gone to court to defend it.

He couldn't have sued these Confederate soldiers if they had refused to pay him.

But they did it because they assumed that that's what you do when someone performs a service for you, whether that person is free or enslaved or otherwise.

And that sort of set me on the journey to think about, you know, what kind of a country where are we living in, where people could take it for granted that even people without rights could nevertheless have something like privileges that entitled them, in the eyes of the community, to be paid for taking someone across the river.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that contribution, your contribution around this distinction of privileges at a time when legal rights didn't exist, for black people.

I think that that is a profound contribution of this book.

And the distinction comes out clearly in the way that you describe associations.

Right?

For instance, in the black church.

Can you share a bit with the audience about how black people exercised privileges through associations?

Yeah, this is a really interesting story.

So, the distinction that, Professor Hardy was drawing a bit ago between privileges and rights is a really important one.

Right.

So a right is something that you can go to court to vindicate.

A privilege is something that can be powerful.

You can assert it, you know, in ways that other people might recognize, but it's limited in the sense that it only applies within the community where people are members.

So if you're a member of a church, then you have privileges as a member of that church.

If you're a member of a corporation like the NAACP, a voluntary membership corporation, you have certain privileges.

But those are not quite the same thing as rights.

And so again and again after emancipation, and even before you see African-Americans founding associations, a lot of them were churches, right?

So the first one of the very first corporations of any kind in the United States was Bethel African American Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, Mother Bethel Church, Bethel.

It was incorporated in 1796.

So the tradition of African Americans forming a associations goes back a long way.

And some of those associations they actually incorporated.

So you think about, you know, the kinds of, you know, organizations that we think of today, Alpha Phi Alpha, Kappas, Omega Phi side, these are black fraternal orders.

They're all incorporated.

Dexter avenue Baptist church, Montgomery, Martin Luther King's church.

That was also a corporation.

The Montgomery Improvement Association, which ran the boycott for more than a year in Montgomery, Alabama.

That was a corporation because they formed the corporation halfway through the boycott.

Why did they do it?

Because forming a corporation gives the members of the corporation powerful protections.

Right.

If the if the corporation if the if the entity does something that hurts other people, then the members are shielded from liability to some extent.

And it also enables one leader to speak for the corporation in that case, it was king.

He would get up and he would say, this is what the people of Montgomery, Alabama want.

You know, we want freedom or we want desegregated busses.

He was speaking for the media.

And so this, corporate form, which we so often, many of us so often think of as something that, you know, is like a shorthand for, environmental misconduct.

You know, it can be all those things, but it also for more than 100 years, more than 200 years has been a powerful tool that African-Americans have used to organize themselves and get things done at the same time, because members of corporations don't have rights against the corporation for the most part.

Leaders of corporations were constantly trying to assert authority, sometimes infringing on what the members thought were their rights.

So Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, you know, they may or may not have wanted to get their church involved in the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King, the very first thing he did when he gave his inaugural sermon was he centralized authority in himself, right?

He became the pastor.

He knew that this was a church.

It was a deacons church that kept throwing out the minister.

And he was like, I'm not going to have that.

And so he said, all the money has to come through me.

I'm the final decision maker.

In other words, he kind of behaved in an anti-democratic way in order to promote his vision of democracy in the United States.

And so this is real tension betw right, and the authority and centralized authority that it takes for collective action to actually get something done in the world.

And for individual members, especially women who make up more than half of the members, sometimes two thirds of the members of any black church.

For them, the question is especially acute because they find themselves fighting a two front battle.

They're fighting against white supremacy in this direction and often against male supremacy in this direction.

Yeah.

That's right.

Well, I can take that question out of the list.

You went straight for it, and I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

That's a fascinating part of the book.

And I encourage you, if you guys buy this book, you will be in for, some real truth, and some real revelations that resonate deeply with our lived experience.

But the way in which you were able to glean them from 20 years of research, right.

Why don't you describe for everybody sort of what your process was and how you got here?

Sure, sure.

So, a lot of the evidence that I use to write this book comes from local courthouses scattered around the country.

So every county has a courthouse, and in that courthouse, there's a circuit clerk.

And in the back, somewhere in the back, maybe the basement or the attic.

There are stacks and stacks of docket books.

These big, heavy, leather bound or cloth bound books.

They're about this big.

They weigh, I don't know, like 5 pounds each.

So I would get in a rental car and I would drive out to the courthouse, and I would basically try to sweet talk the circuit clerk into letting me go in the back.

And you have to do that because they they're public records.

They have to let you see them, but they don't have to let you see them.

And so I would go in the back for the most part.

They said, fine, this looks like a very nerdy person and I'm just let him go in the back.

And I was and so, and I would go in the back and I would pull down the docket books and I would take a sample from the docket books.

So I would look at each page and I would take maybe every 50th case or every 100th case, because I wanted to answer a basic question from the beginning.

Did black people go to court?

Did they go to court?

It turns out that it's kind of difficult to find out the answer to that question, because these courthouses did not mark black people by race, even in Mississippi.

So you can go to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, you can go to 50 courthouses, and you just will not find any or very many records that say, you know, Dylan penning Roth Negro, suing so-and-so.

It's just not there.

So this is a problem, right?

I want to write a book about African-American history, and I can't tell who's black.

So what I did is, I took that sample, and, I brought it back.

And with me and my research assistants back in Evanston, and now I'm at Berkeley.

We typed the names into big, big database, Excel spreadsheet, and then we went and did something else with it.

And then we went to Ancestry.com and we typed in the names.

So I'm talking about the ancestry where you type in your ancestors name, not the one with the swab, right.

But the one, where you're typing in the name and we would try to match the people on the docket book to the people in the census.

And about half the time we were able to find a match about 50%.

That's pretty good.

I was really good.

Yeah.

And in the end, we, we looked up 14,000 cases, from five states plus the District of Columbia from the years 1872 to 1962.

So about 100 years and so we were able to tell a story about that.

And in the end, we found that more than 1500 of those cases involved at least one black litigant.

So just a standard sample, more than 10% of the people who were going to the courthouses in that period, including in Illinois, Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey, were black, and they were going there for all kinds of reasons.

Any anything you can think of, they were there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, the book does a magnificent job of talking about the reasons why black people were in court records.

Right.

A significant part of it is around, vis a vis sort of their interactions with white people, and the need for that.

But there's also a big part of it that chronicles sort of what black people, their interactions, the black interiority with, within the community.

And I'd love for you to share, a story or two about about those interactions.

Yeah.

I'm so glad you raised that.

So in my field, African-American history, we typically traditionally have focused on race relations.

You know, how did black people resist the attempts of white people, to oppress often through law.

And so the story of blacks and the law traditionally has been told as a story of what white people did to black people.

And that's true.

Like, there's a lot to tell.

Yes, about that story.

And there's a lot to tell us about how African-Americans pushed back against white people resisted legal oppression.

But what I found and I just point to two things.

First is that black people, when they resisted, they often resisted through law, not by going outside the law.

They were not hiding from the law.

They were pushing back through law, often through what I call rights of everyday use, rights of property, contract and standing.

We can talk more about that later.

But the other thing that's important about the ways that black people use courts is that for the most part, they were.

If there was a black person in court, usually it was another black person on the other side.

That's one piece of the answer.

Why?

Why white people let black people go to court.

But what it did for me is it it encouraged me to think about black people's relationships with one another as the center of the story.

Yeah, a story I wanted to tell, a story about black history where black people were at the center.

Yeah.

I don't think that African-American history needs to be told always through the prism of race relations, as if there needs to be a white oppressor somewhere in the picture.

And so the stories that I was finding about black people's relationships to one another, they ran the gamut.

And they were often, very emotional.

You can find really all facets of everyday life in these courthouse records.

You can find joy.

You can find, pettiness, family drama.

You can find lots and lots of family drama.

And so one story that I just want to tell you about really quickly is a story about, someone named Maria Herbert.

And this comes from Washington, D.C., and it involves a woman named, Henrietta.

Jefferson, and Euphemia Stuart.

And in 1865, this this enslaved woman moved out of Maryland, and she moved to Washington, D.C., and she began washing clothes.

And she washed clothes so long that she was able to accumulate a little bit of property.

She bought a house, I think, somewhere around the U Street corridor.

I don't know how many of you been there, but around the U Street area.

And she owned this house.

And as she got older, she decided that she wanted to pass the property on to her best friends daughter because she said her own relatives never did anything for her, never cared for her, never came to see her.

And so she went to a white lawyer who then wrote out for her a pocket deed.

In other words, something that he would write out a deed and he would not put it on the record until after she died.

That way she could continue living in the house.

So things go on, and her best friend's daughter continues to care for her.

And then eventually she dies.

And the lawyer, James Civil, goes and puts the deed onto the record.

Well, one of the cousins up in Baltimore gets wind of this when she's clearing up her aunt's estate and she comes down and she's like, who is this person?

She's not part of the family.

And so she goes to court and she sues to set aside this will in the course of deciding the case, all kinds of testimony comes out about what this elderly woman Eliza Brown went through in her last years.

And some of this stuff just, you know, it really brought tears to my eyes.

For those of you who have taken care of a relative who is sick, who needs help, who needs someone to to to care for them, to massage their legs.

If the circulation goes, you will be touched when you see these things, all of these things come out in the court cases.

But what comes out more than anything else is that black people didn't take family as a given.

It wasn't just something that depended on biological.

It wasn't just blood.

It was something that black people made and remade and made again.

And sometimes when they did that, they got into fights.

Yeah, that's the family drama.

That's the family drama.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I also loved how the book spends a good a good bit of time talking about, lawyers, and the work of the legal work that people did even when they weren't lawyers.

Cleveland is a big lawyer's town.

And we have some pretty prominent black lawyers that are connected to this base that call it home.

I would love for you to share a bit about sort of the the types of ways in which black people enlisted, not just the services of white lawyers.

We could talk about that, too, at some point.

If you want.

But also, in the black community early.

So most of the lawyers who represented black clients in most of the cases that I looked at were white.

Right.

And that's worth thinking about.

But black lawyers were there, and there are two stories, two, two ways that I think about the role of black lawyers in this book.

One is that a lot of them, especially in the early period, like the 1860s, 70s, 1890s, a lot of them weren't lawyers in the sense of having a license.

They weren't barred lawyers.

They were people who knew something about law.

You know, if you're an African-American farmer in Alabama or Mississippi in 1890, there's a certain amount of legal knowledge that every grown up has.

And at a certain point, you exhaust that knowledge and you know it, and you know you need to talk to somebody about it.

Often.

The first person they consulted was a black person who knew something about law.

Only later did a white lawyer come in.

So that's the first kind of black lawyer I'm talking about.

The second kind of black lawyer that I'm talking about comes along later in the 1940s and 50s, people like Thurgood Marshall, who we know as civil rights litigators, but who actually spent most of their time handling cases like Eliza Brown's, like these rights of evidence.

Why?

Because modern civil rights cases like fighting, anti-discrimination fighting, an anti-discrimination case, fighting to integrate the Topeka City schools as Linda Brown wanted to do.

There's no pay in it.

What the what what?

Marshall in the LDF legal defense fund were asking for was an injunction ordering the school district to desegregate.

There's no damages, there's no money.

And so Marshall and people like him, this whole generations of black lawyers, they had to figure out how to balance their civil rights work with a capital C, capital R with their civil rights work, these rights of everyday use.

And it's a constant balance.

And you can see the lawyers navigating that all the time.

Yeah for sure.

So we'll do we'll spend a little bit of time on it because it's come up a bit.

Many know it as white supremacy.

I like to call it white malfeasance.

And the way that it impacts, everyday life of black people.

And so even though black people were living, thriving, using the courts, in everyday ways.

Right, we know that there was indeed domestic terrorism happening in the South, right?

That made living very, very difficult and often took the lives of people.

So understanding and recognizing that.

Right.

What are your thoughts on why it would be that white people would allow us to use that word, allow in light of Jim Crow and, the state of the law at that time, right?

Black people to have property to enter contracts and the like.

It's a great question.

And I like the way that you you used the word terrorism because I think often that that was the point of the violence.

It was to send a message to scare people.

You don't have to actually go and physically restrain every black person.

You can send a message through a spectacular lynching.

Yeah.

So all of that violence is taking place.

Strange to say that violence peaks between the years about 1890 and 1920.

It just so happens that those are exactly the years when black people own more real estate in the United States than they ever have and ever did.

Yeah, that was the peak of black land ownership.

How could that be?

I mean, it really is kind of a conundrum.

And, you know, I don't have a full answer to that question.

But I think one important part of the answer is that white people didn't think that there was any law against black people owning land.

There wasn't a separate law of Negro property.

There wasn't a separate law of Negro contract.

And there are lots of reasons for that.

But that made it difficult for white people to categorically rule out the idea of black people owning property.

You remember at the beginning that Jackson Holcomb made a contract, owned a boat, and white people really didn't care.

They didn't really think twice about it.

And that continues to hold true through the years of Jim Crow.

But I think an even more important reason that white people allow black people to own property and make contracts, have these rights of everyday use, is because their own rights depended on it.

So you think about if a black person buys a farm, that black person has now entered the chain of title for that land.

If a white person then comes and kills that black person, mobs them out, they can do it.

And it did happen, but it creates a mess that somebody has to clean up.

It's an expensive mess.

And you can actually see some cases where one example is the Sun Oil Company gets into this huge fight, for 20 years over land that had belonged to a black family whose elder, patriarch got lynched in 1912.

And so the Sun Oil Corporation just get they have to fight it out for decades.

But, that means that black people are in the chain of title.

When you think about sharecropping, which so many black people did, sharecropping is a contract.

So white people's rights depend in large part on black people's rights.

Now I'm going to sort of give you a shorthand here.

You all have heard a lot about CRT critical race theory.

I've just given you critical race theory.

Derrick Bell yeah, black people will exceed.

They will, they will, they will be given.

They will be afforded rights.

So long as white people also gain through that process.

Simple CRT and it helps me make sense of what's happening in these courthouse records.

Yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

The interest convergence.

Right.

It's interest convergence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Of of, Derrick Bell scholarship.

When I hear you talk about the ownership of property and your process for doing this, I just have to call out that as someone who has tried to find records for my own family and been the nerd in turning the the county courthouse, right, with my book bag and all of the things every family has to have.

One of us.

You in opening the big binder.

The surprise that I had to see that my big mama had a 100 acres of land in Twiggs County, Georgia.

Right.

And the process by which that that land was whittled away.

Right.

And then to drive on the street and see what it looks like now.

It looks like Twinsburg.

Right.

For those of you who know it, which is a, enclave of a suburban community here, so it's really interesting, right, to think about in that way.

We have a few more minutes here, and I want to ask you two more questions, if that helps you.

I'd love for you to think about, and share with us your thoughts on how this current moment, that we're living in and how it connects to the history of, of black people's, commitment and how the the rule of law was really important as, from a historical standpoint and the lives of black people.

I think it's such an important question, as many of you may feel very deeply today, we live in a moment when political leaders are often openly questioning the very principle of the rule of law.

And it is a precarious moment for our country looking at these court records, looking at the the oral histories, the things that I learned, you know, at family cookouts.

In a way, it kind of gives me hope, because I think about all the things that happened 100 years ago, 150 years ago.

And then I think black people still put their faith in rule of law at some level.

Not always, not always.

And they were clear eyed about it.

It's not like they were sort of blindly walking in and saying, the courts are always going to treat us fairly.

No, they had a very clear eyed, often cynical view about what judges might do in a particular case involving them.

But nevertheless, when the civil rights marchers came, when snick came around to register people to vote, they found an audience that was still ready to believe that there is this thing called rule of law, and that they had a role in maintaining it, in maintaining our democracy.

And to me, that that gives me hope, especially since the the faith that they had and rule of law was not grounded in federal statutes.

It wasn't grounded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It wasn't grounded in Brown versus Board of Education.

It didn't have anything to do, really, with anti-discrimination law.

It didn't have anything to do with the federal government.

It was grounded in rights that they used every day that were as close at hand as the front gate.

It was grounded in their experience, their everyday experience of law.

And that, I think, is something that is both more precarious but also more sturdy and closer to home, and therefore harder to take away.

I'd also like to ask, so, we're both law professors and my students.

Some of my students happened to be in the room today.

If the way you explain the contracts and property, and, the, the actors that were engaged historically and developing contract, and property law, if I had been taught contracts and property like that, boy, it would have been a whole different scenario.

And I would love for you to share just thinking about legal pedagogy, you know, and, and, and and curriculum moving forward, what do you hope your research adds to that?

I think what I would hope is that, research like mine, which begins in the county courthouses but goes all the way up to state supreme courts, it goes into case books that first year law students get taught from and shows that there are actually cases in there involving black people that aren't identified as such.

They're kind of hidden in the pages.

That's like one, 2 or 3 of them in all the major case books.

What I would hope is that, in effect, law professors would begin to desegregate the curriculum, because right now, the way that law is taught to law students tends to put race over in certain parts of the curriculum.

You get it in constitutional law, some, you get maybe 20 minutes of it in contract law in a case called Williams versus Walker Thomas Furniture.

Yeah, you get that right.

You get a fair amount of it in criminal law.

But what I want to suggest is that, law professors, because law professors can actually teach race as a regular part of contract law of property law without even resorting to a new casebook.

But what you can do is you can look at the historical context, figure out who the people really are, and then decide when and how race mattered to the people who were arguing that case and the people who brought the case.

Once you start to get inside their thought process, why did they reveal the race of the plaintiff here and cover it up there?

You can start, I think, to teach law students about the decision making that any legal professional has to make about what is a material fact.

Yeah.

And what counts and what should not count, and why we make those decisions as we're practicing.

Yeah.

No, it's so it's so important.

And I appreciate everything that you did to make, those points clear in the book.

I encourage you guys, please buy this book.

There's we tried to do a lot with the time that we have.

But there's a lot, there that I think will be really, really informative and also help not just law students and law professors understand how race matters in the development of American law.

But for all of us to understand and recognize that black people are a part of American law, and not just the traditional concept of civil rights.

Yeah, yeah.

I think is it time for me to stop, or do I have time for one more question?

No one came to the stage, am I good?

I can give one more question I would love.

Okay, so this is my bonus question because I told you I had to.

I get to call a friend.

I really would love for you to, share.

Generally, we've talked a lot about things that are in the book, but if we could get a little bit closer in personal to Dylan, the person and not the scholar, what what really motivated you to devote the time, the attention?

And the focus, to do a project that took take has taken or did take 20 years.

That's an enormous amount of discipline.

And I imagine that it's not just because you want it, accolades from academia.

No, it's true, you know, it was a labor of love.

Really?

You know, part of it is I'm a nerd, and I love going in and finding out stuff that nobody else has found out.

But, you know, there's a reason that, my great, great great Uncle Jackson Holcomb is at the front, and it's because, you know, at a certain point, my editor said, you know, this is clearly very personal to you.

You you can put that in there.

And, you know, the process of researching the book, it actually brought me closer to family members, some of whom I hadn't seen since I was five.

You know, I went down and visited with my Uncle Henry and Aunt Margaret, and he turned out to be that guy who knows everything.

And you just point to a fence and he's like, oh, I so and so this and that.

And the other thing.

And so, you know, I just talked with him and I talked with other other relatives and I talked with my own mother.

And I remember one time we were driving around Cumberland County, Virginia, and I said, mom, I'm going to do you mind if I turn on my tape recorder?

I'm going to interview you.

And she said, you mean interview me?

We're just talking.

I turned it on and I still have that recording and it's very precious to me.

So that is sort of the reason it, it took me so long is because I was having fun.

Good.

And because it was bringing me closer.

It's a very personal book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that you had fun with it.

Well, I think we're about to begin.

Q and A, for those just joining us via our live stream and radio audience, I'm Aisha Bell Hardaway, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University and the moderate for today's conversation.

Joining me on stage is Dylan C Penning Roth, writer, author of Before the Movement The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guest and those joining us via our live stream at City club.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7.

You ideas stream public media.

If you'd like to text a question to Dylan, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794.

And city club staff will work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Hi.

My question is about, kind of the more modern narrowing of the term civil rights.

And I'm wondering if that created sort of a blind spot for organizations like the NAACP to sort of track more insidious forms of, discrimination, for example, redlining.

Yesterday you gave the example that they might not take a case where it was just a foreclosure, but we know that a lot of those foreclosures were part of a larger pattern.

So I'm curious your thoughts on that.

You know, it's a great question.

It it gets that these these decisions that lawyers like Thurgood Marshall, like W.E.B.

Dubois, who's heading up, the or an officer in the legal department of the Legal Defense Fund have to make for many years.

There is much more need for legal services from African Americans than there is capacity to provide it.

One important thing that we didn't really talk about that much is that although African-Americans were often able to find lawyers to represent them in cases, they typically could only find lawyers who were white, and those white lawyers wouldn't represent them.

In cases that challenged Jim Crow segregation, they weren't about to challenge the system.

And so black people who had lawyers are typically litigating these cases either against other black people or they're litigating cases against white people where it's not seen as a challenge to the system of segregation.

So there's a there's a gap.

And cause lawyers like lawyers who are fighting for a cause are the ones who end up feeling that gap, people like Thurgood Marshall.

But in doing so, as you said, what they end up doing is they end up narrowing what the 19th century Americans understood to be covered by the term civil rights.

So if you were in 1830 and you asked a person what our civil rights, they would have said property contract, the right to go to court, sue and be sued.

But by 1960, people don't think of the term civil rights that way.

They think of it as the right to be protected against discrimination on the basis of race or sex or some other protected characteristic, and that, in effect, narrows the frame of vision that Thurgood Marshall has.

So even as he's making the money that keeps the lights on in his law office from those kinds of everyday use cases, he no longer refers to them with the term civil rights.

And that creates a kind of creative tension for black lawyers and for cause lawyers in general, one that I think they're still navigating.

But, you know, I don't know that I'm in a position to prescribe or tell people what to do.

I'm a historian, and we tend not to do that.

But I can tell you that those small c small r civil rights were very powerful for African-Americans, for a very long time.

And in fact, it's what enabled them to form corporations like the NAACP and SNICK and SClc, all those civil rights organizations, they're hidden in the background, but they're not really talked about quite that way anymore.

A good afternoon.

Thank you for being here today.

I'm an educator, and, I always think of how students would be able to relate to what you're talking about.

I want you to imagine you're sitting in a classroom of middle school students, and there's so much being done now in the country to cause black people to feel like we're less than human, and especially coming from the white House.

And so what story from your book would you share with these middle school students to let them know, the humanity and the resilience of our people back in the day?

Yeah.

You know, it's a great question there.

There are lots of stories that one could tell.

I think maybe, maybe the, the one that springs to mind most readily, is about, a woman named Vernita Wimbush, who in 1966 went to she wrote a letter to the, the bishop of her denomination, the AME church.

And in her letter she said, in effect, do you remember three years ago you told us all to go to the march on Washington to stand up for our rights?

Well, you're trying to take away this minister who everyone in the church loves, and you're trampling on our rights as church members.

We're organizing a march on your house.

We're going to we're going to march on your house to fight for our rights as members of the church.

Now, that's not a story that's, per se, about, fighting against white supremacy, but.

Her willingness to stand up for what she saw as her rights reveals, I think, volumes about the way that black people carved out a space to express themselves to to think about themselves as something other than dehumanized, as people who not only have certain kinds of rights, but are so sophisticated about their rights that they're willing to argue about it in a forum that really doesn't have anything to do with white people.

And so, you know, I think when we're faced with this dehumanizing rhetoric, I think that it can it can be helpful in one sense to to think about the ways that black people have pushed back against white supremacy and at the same time, to look at the ways that black people have had had our own thing going on for a very long time.

My question for you, it took us almost, over a hundred years to go from after the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act and the current administration and the changes that are taking place.

How long do you, as a historian, think that'll take us to come back to this place that we are today?

I think it depends on what, if anything, we have learned from that 100 year history going from the Civil War to the civil rights movement.

I mean, I would hope that, our country is mature enough and attentive enough to its history to remember the lessons, the lessons of reconstruction, how anti-democratic forces usually allied with big business interests overthrew democratically elected governments in every state in the South, and how they then enacted a low tax, low services agenda that lasted for 100 years.

And then how, in during the civil rights movement, marchers, civil rights litigators, they empowered not just African-Americans, but Americans more generally to demand real democracy.

I'm a historical sociologist, and I did a dissertation on the property tax exemption.

And perhaps Ashburn, we can talk about the black church in the South and property tax exemptions or what I want to ask you about was I saw from my friend who has your book and with her that you cite the book Southern Diaspora, which I just happened to start reading the other day.

I'm descended from what Dubois called the black and white workers.

You know, in northeastern Arkansas, the sharecroppers who decided to pick up and go north.

And they came up through Akron to Cleveland, white and black.

They were in Hof.

Now, my grandmother was white.

They all work together in the downtown kitchens.

But because she was white, she could sell Fuller brushes door to door and buy a house on West 77th Street and still worked in the kitchens as the only white lady until the 50s.

I just wondering if you could comment a little bit about this, what you learned about the southern diaspora, and it's the role of that migration north.

And, you know, did black people bring property with funds from their property with them?

How did that whole thing work?

Thank you.

Thank you for that question.

And I'm so glad that you that you brought out the fact that the great migration out of the South, which traditionally we think of as being a black thing, it actually involved millions and millions of white people, too.

You know, that's how you get the Bakersfield sound, right?

Like you, you know, there's all these white people who are bringing their food where it's bringing their cultural ways into, places out west and up north for black people and white people when they move, they bring not just their cultural traditions with them, but they bring memories of the South, sometimes idealized memories.

And they also often bring investments in property that they still own down South.

So when I was growing up, we used to go back to Cumberland County, would get in the powder blue Plymouth Valley, and we drive whatever, I don't know, hours and hours down to visit, you know, Uncle Thomas Holcomb and Nana down there on the farm.

And when they died, we went down to the funeral.

And I can still remember that a little bit.

But why did we do that?

And why did Nana and Uncle Tom, want to come home in their old age?

Well, it's because they never really left the South.

They moved to South Orange, new Jersey, but they kept their pew in Midway Baptist Church in Cumberland.

That's where they kept their land.

And indeed, as they got older, they started buying out some of the relatives to come back in their old age.

And so there's this way in which African Americans of that generation really thought of themselves as being sojourners in the North, not not people who were there to stay.

That's right.

But to come home and I think that's a really important thing.

And it didn't always it wasn't always a happy story, because sometimes people would argue, after all the people down south, that the ones who are looking after the land.

Yeah.

And maybe they're taking care of elderly relatives and the people up north aren't.

And so you can get into these arguments.

My relatives certainly did.

But it's a really important part of our history that I think, is something that white and black people share.

You, explored the social agency that's taken place with black Americans?

I'm here with our German Marshall fellows.

From across the the globe in Europe.

And so I'm curious, are there any parallels that you could draw on globally?

That happened.

Maybe it's post-colonial.

We're we're still seeing that same type of agency that took place outside of the US.

And so I actually had, when I went to graduate school, I did part of my training in African history, and I've maintained an interest in the history of Ghana.

And one of the things that I write about in Ghana is how former slaves made claims to property in Ghana.

The interesting thing about that story is that former slaves in Ghana legally could actually make claims, not just a property that they themselves had earned, but also to property owned by the families, the kin groups the was that owned them because they became one of the family inferior members.

Right like way at the bottom.

They actually called them like children of the clan, used all kinds of nasty names to call them, but nevertheless members of the family with inferior rights to property.

And so part of the story that I try to tell about Post-Slavery Ghana slavery ends there around 1874.

Part of the story that I try to tell there is how people created family, argued about the limits and boundaries, and through lines of family, not just biology, right, but constructed family and how those arguments fit into claims to property.

You know, if you're a member of the family, you have rights in the United States.

There's a similar kind of thing.

You all probably have heard.

You know, people on the news say things like, well, you know, my family back in the day, they owned slaves, but it wasn't that bad.

They were just one of the family.

They were like one of the family, like Mammy Gone with the wind.

Right?

It's a similar kind of thought process that's going on.

And again, you know, it's hilarious.

She wasn't really part of the family.

And unlike in Ghana, she couldn't claim, you know, Scarlett O'Hara's property.

But nevertheless, there's this parallel that I think is really important because, again, people are not taking family for granted.

And why?

Because it's connected to access claims rights to resources.

Thank you very much Dylan panning wrath and I used about Hardaway.

This was a wonderful conversation.

Very enlightening forums like this one and made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like all of you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian.

A free speech at City club.org.

As I mentioned earlier, our forum today is part of our Authors and Conversation series presented in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Book sales are made possible by a third space reading room.

I know many of you had more questions for our author today, and you can find him signing books afterwards.

We'd like to welcome students joining us from Case Western Reserve University College of Law.

Hello.

As well as guests, a table is hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and Eileen M Burkhart and Company.

Coming up next week at the City Club on Friday, September 19th, Jonathan Schroeder, author and Anna Field Wolf Book Award winner, will join us.

He's discussing his book, The United States Governed by 600,000 despots, a firsthand Account of Slavery from Jonathan John Swanson.

Jacobs.

This wasn't all intentional to do all this history.

All and all in September.

It just happened.

It's all part of Cleveland Book Fest.

Be sure to, to join us for the Anna's Field Wolf Book Awards 90th anniversary celebration on Saturday, September 20th.

The award ceremony is Friday night, the 19th at the Mullins Performing Arts Center.

Saturday, September 20th events kick off at the Martin Luther King Branch of the Cleveland Public Library at 9:00, and then continue to the Near West Side for a series of events in the afternoon.

Book signings, free events, all of it.

Join us please more information at City club.org.

Also at Cleveland Book fest.com.

Once again thank you to Dylan Penning Roth and I usually Bill Hardaway.

Thank you all for joining us today.

Our forum Adjourned.

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