UC Berkeley Professor Dylan Penningroth presents in Free People of Color series
This week, the Aoki Center/History Department continued its colloquium Free People of Color: Race, Law and Freedom in the 19th and 20th Century Seminar Series. This week, the series hosted Professor Dylan Penningroth
from UC Berkeley
, who discussed his paper
"Everyday Use: A History of Civil Rights in Black Churches."
The article seeks to revise the history of civil rights by closely examining one strand of Black people’s long engagement with legal rules, legal ideas, and legal institutions: the private law of religion. Two mid-20th century religious leaders, Joseph Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr., publicly fought about the role Black churches should play in the fight for American democracy, yet embraced the anti-democratic possibilities of the deference doctrine when it came to the internal affairs of their own churches.
The King Hall community was fortunate to hear from Professor Penningroth.
Professor Penningroth specializes in African American history and in U.S. socio-legal history. His first book,
The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Professor P
enningroth now is working on a study of African Americans’ encounters with law from the Civil War to the modern civil rights movement. Combining legal and social history, the study explores the practical meaning of legal rights for Black life. His next project is a study of the legacies of slavery in colonial Ghana.