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Andrew J Lanham, Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, American Journal of Legal History, Volume 64, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 235–237, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/njae014
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In September 2011, Dylan Penningroth was combing through file boxes ‘in the back room of the clerk’s office at the Coahoma County courthouse in Clarksdale, Mississippi’, when he came across the 1903 case of Ben Houston (185). Houston was ‘a Black tenant farmer’ who ‘went and sued two of the most powerful white men’ in the county for ‘forcible entry’ on his land (185). Houston ultimately lost the case, but he litigated it extensively, and he did secure an injunction along the way (185). The suit, Penningroth writes, demonstrates that both Houston and his opponents ‘had a working knowledge of leases’ and ‘behaved according to [their] commonsense knowledge of property law’ (189). Borrowing a phrase from a Black tenant farmer named Nate Shaw, Penningroth calls such everyday legal knowledge ‘goat sense’ (152), a grasp of law based on ‘daily experience’, even if it ‘didn’t always match the law on the books’ (348). Penningroth’s new book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, tells a sweeping story of such everyday legal knowledge and the myriad ways it shaped Black lives across US history.
