Author and professor of law and history Dylan Penningroth’s book “Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights” was released to the public Sept. 26.

The book spans from the 1830s to 1970s, containing stories of Penningroth’s relatives and centers Black people and Black life, as opposed to other civil rights books that focus on race relations, according to Penningroth.

“Historians tend to portray African Americans as being outsiders to the law, afraid of law, especially local law,” Penningroth said. “What I’m saying is different is that the federal government did play a pretty important role. Black people were already using the law. They were familiar with it and they weren’t afraid of it at all.”

Penningroth explained that historians specializing in civil rights and African American studies created a narrative of African American people having no knowledge of legal processes and going from having “no rights” to “struggling toward first and second class citizenship.”

Penningroth said this book has been in the works for 20 years and he started working on it in 2003.

He attributed this to a lengthy and challenging research process — combing through loose paper records in local county court houses across the east coast including Virginia, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and more.

He noted there were multiple moments of inspiration for writing the book, mainly stemming from going to family cookouts and hearing his relatives tell stories of his ancestors. One of these narratives is about his great uncle, Jackson Holcomb, an enslaved man who paddled confederate soldiers across the river after the Battle of Richmond in 1865.

In analyzing 14,000 court cases, he discovered around 1,500 of them were African American plaintiffs with cases that involved contract, property and inheritance law, among others.

These court documents did not list the race of those within the cases, which led Penningroth to turn to the genealogy website, ancestry.com.

Penningroth credits UC Berkeley graduate students and librarians for assisting his research process.

He noted he did his best to write the book in an “accessible and appealing” manner to cater to those that aren’t specialists in history and law.

Penningroth said he hopes professors in law, history and African American studies both read his book and share it with their students.

“(In the book) I tried to tell this sort of very strange story of what some people might interpret as colorblindness, but I call it color opportunism.”

He explained that he termed it “color opportunism” because the cases he recorded were during the height of Jim Crow and the South was “rigidly segregated,” yet these local court cases do not mark the races of those involved in the case.

Penningroth said we should pay attention to why Black communities turn to the law during a time of heightened institutional discrimination.

“It’s important for us to see the diversity of Black life along with the commonality of racial oppression,” Penningroth said. “Both of those things can exist at the same time.”

Penningroth noted African American people put their faith into the law because of the “tradition of familiarity.” He added that they probably didn’t have an extensive knowledge of the law, but they were able to mobilize their communities and create change through the legal system.

One of the takeaways Penningroth hopes people learn from his book is that the law is both the supreme and local court.

“(The law is) something that has enabled and still enables white supremacy and it also enables Black patriarchy or it has done that and it also has equipped people with the tools to fight back against those things.” Penningroth said. “It is many different things at the same time.”