Lecture reveals how ordinary legal acts built the foundation for 20th-century civil rights
October 6, 2025
Press Release
PORTLAND, Ore. — Reed College proudly announces a public lecture by Dylan Penningroth, Alexander F. & May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley. His talk, “Before the Movement: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights,” will take place on Tuesday, October 14, at 4:45 p.m. in Vollum Lecture Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Penningroth is the author of the award-winning book Before the Movement: Hidden Histories of Black Civil Rights, which explores a vital question: What did law mean to African Americans before the civil rights movement?
Drawing from family interviews, church records, and long-forgotten courthouse documents, Penningroth uncovers how, as far back as the 1830s, Black Americans used everyday “rights of use” to build lives, families, and communities in a country that denied their constitutional rights. Their engagement with law in daily life, he argues, laid the essential groundwork for the activism and legal victories of the 1950s and 60s.
Before the Movement reveals a deeply textured vision of Black life—one that was allied with, yet distinct from, the mid-20th-century freedom struggle.
This event is sponsored by the Anthropology Department, the History Department, the Political Science Department, the American Studies Program, the Office for Institutional Diversity, and the Office of the Dean of Faculty.
For more information, contact:
Sheena McFarland, Chief Communications Officer, Reed College
smcfarland@reed.edu; Cell: 801-510-5567
About Reed College
Founded in 1908 in southeast Portland, Oregon, Reed College is a coeducational, independent liberal arts and sciences college. Referred to as one of the most intellectual colleges in the country, Reed is known for its high standards of scholarly practice, creative thinking, and engaged citizenship.
Reed College is devoted to the intrinsic value of intellectual pursuit and is governed by the highest standards of scholarly practice, critical thought, and creativity. Its undergraduate program of study, leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, is demanding and intense and balances breadth of knowledge across the curriculum with depth of knowledge in a particular field of study. The goal of a Reed education is that students learn and demonstrate rigor and independence in their habits of thought, inquiry, and expression.