December 3, 2024 • 50 mins
MacArthur Genius Grant winner Dylan C. Penningroth explores the lesser known history of Black legal engagement and activism prior to the modern civil rights era. Through thorough research including combing through deeds, licenses, and his own family history, he sits down for a riveting chat with Aldon Morris, Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University.
SHOW NOTES
Read the podcast transcript.
PHOTO: Dylan C. Penningroth and Aldon Morris
Read:
Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movements:Black Communities Organizing for Change
Explore:
Kendra Field, The Privilege of Family History
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life And Labor in the Old South
Derrick Bell and "What is critical race theory?"
Live event programmed by Michael Green
Live event produced by Jesse Swanson
Live event stage managed by Devonte Washington
Live event produced and mixed by Loren Ames
Podcast edited and mixed by Alisa Rosenthal
Podcast story editing by Alexandra Quinn
Podcast copy assistance from David Vish and Katherine Kermgard
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[Theme music plays]
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:01):
There was a cost to forcing Black people out of their civil rights. In a sense, white people's rights depended on Black people having civil rights. And that is one of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this book.
[Cassette tape player clicks open]
ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all what’s going on, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m Alisa Rosenthal, and today, we’re bringing you a wonderful conversation from our Fall 2024 Festival
I’ll link to all the works referenced throughout in the show notes, so you can check those out below or at chicagohumanities.org.
This is Dylan C. Penningroth and Aldon Morris at the University of Illinois at the Chicago Humanities Fall Festival in 2024.
[Theme music plays]
[Audience applause]
ALDON MORRIS (00:08):
Well, let me start out by saying that it is a pleasure to be here. And it is a pleasure to see all of you on a beautiful Saturday. Now. It is a really, really great pleasure for me to reunite with my friend and colleague, Dylan Penningroth. We were both on the faculty at Northwestern for probably about ten years together and got to know each other. And now, of course, he left us, I think, in '15 and went out to the University of California, Berkeley, where he's a distinguished professor of law and history. And so, Dylan, welcome back to Chicago. And also, I want to start by saying congratulations, Dylan, for researching and writing this book, "Before the Movement
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:09):
Leads with the tough questions. First, I just want to say thank you so much for the Chicago Humanities Festival, Michael Green, Dean Road and also Bella Garcia for making all of this cohere so well. And it is an especial pleasure to be here with Professor ALDON MORRIS:. If it's not clear already, he's a legend, you know, in the field of social movements, sociological theory, and race, among other things. And so I'm just delighted to be here together with you. Thanks. It's a real honor. So my book "Before the Movement," it's it's a legal history of Black lives that tries to use law to open a window onto Black life itself. Right. So we're thinking about Black legal life to look at Black life more broadly. When we think about civil rights today, or at least when I think about civil rights today, I tend to think about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, people who were engaged in a freedom struggle, which was focused on forcing the federal government to force state and local officials to recognize Black people's rights, their civil rights. The civil rights that are typically referred to when we think about King and Parks and so forth, those are the rights to things like nondiscrimination on the basis of race. So the right to sit on a bus in dignity, the right not to be discriminated against. So if you think about what's in your pocket, if you bought a ticket today, you have a ticket and that ticket entitles you to be in this room. That ticket is guarded partly by federal anti-discrimination law, which says that you can't be barred by the University of Chicago, UIC, from coming into this room on the basis of sex or race or disability or veteran status. Okay. But there's another kind of civil rights that's lurking underneath that. When you think about what your ticket is, it's many things, but above all, it's a contract. You have a right to be here because you have formed a contract in purchasing this ticket. That kind of civil right is something that was the one that was widely understood for most of this country's history. It wasn't until the 1950s or 60s that civil rights came to be understood as the right to be protected against discrimination on the basis of race or other protected categories. So in a way, my book is about how we got from civil rights with a small c small r to Civil Rights, capital letter, Civil Rights. Okay. But the second thing that my book is about, is about trying to tell the story of Black life with Black people at the center of it. So when I was going through grad school, I read a lot of African-American history. It's what I trained in. And I came to realize that so much of the history I was reading was written in the framework of race relations. It was about Black people's struggle against white oppression from slavery to freedom. And you're going to sort of see this long arc, and it's kind of an arc of progress. From second class citizenship to first class citizenship from partial freedom to full freedom. But there's something I thought that there's a cost to that. That story is incredibly important even today. But there are other things that are lurking beneath it that are not just about race relations. In other words, I wanted to write a book where race relations were not at the center of it, but were very influential. Right. They're not determining the story, but they're heavily influencing the story. So what did I do in order to make that happen? So Professor Morris asked me to reflect on civil, social, and political rights. So in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is writing for the White House. And at that time Black rights were kind of a wedge issue. The Democrats were using it to split apart Lincoln from his supporters. And what Lincoln and the Republicans did in 1860 was quite brilliant. What they did is they appealed to white Americans' least common denominator sense of what the fundamental rights of a free person were. At that time, most Americans, or at least what most white Americans thought of rights in three parts
ALDON MORRIS (00:10):
Yeah. Okay. So as I read this book, as I read this book, Professor Penningroth talks a lot about his own relatives, great, great, great uncles and aunts and others and explained their encounters and entanglements with the law. So what I want, what I'm curious about is why did you decide to use your own relatives in this book? And were you not afraid that there would be some who was who would say that you were engaging in "me- search" rather than research, that you were not being an objective scholar?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:11):
It's a great question. I think I knew that my relatives were going to be in the book. For me, the question was more, how explicit would I be about acknowledging that fact. When I say that they're in the book, what I mean is my experiences with my family members, the stories I heard at cookouts. There's a cassette tape that I actually talk about at the beginning of the book. Stories that I heard helped me think about the kinds of questions I wanted to ask, the kinds of research directions I wanted to go in. They didn't give me the answers. But they helped me decide where I wanted to go when I walked into that archive or that courthouse and started looking at the shelves, those thousands of pages. So they helped me ask the right questions. But what you're asking is a really good question. I decided late in the writing process that I really kind of wanted to tell stories that were not only based on things I found in the archives, but that I would make explicit what I had learned from my family members. Some of those stories that I tell in the book come from the courthouse. They come from the archive. Some of them come from interviews that I did with my mother, with my great uncle. Of course, they didn't like to call them interviews. My mom when I was driving around and we talk in the car and I'd say, Can I interview you? And she would say, We're not interviewing, just we're just talking. And so but I would, you know, remember and I sometimes recorded it surreptitiously, and I have these notes and it helped me formulate the questions that I wanted to ask. So late in the process, I decide that, really, if I really want to be honest with myself, I think I can make some of that explicit on the pages. Just tell a couple of those stories. And so the first page of the book, I talk about my great, great great uncle, a man named Jackson Holcomb, who on a recording that his son, Thomas Holcomb, makes, Thomas Holcomb says on the recording that Jackson Holcomb owned a boat while he was a slave. And that Confederate soldiers toward the end of the Civil War came up to him, asked him for a ride across the Appomattox River. They were running away from Grant's army. They were desperate, fearful. And my great great great uncle, Jackson Holcomb, took them across the Appomattox River in his boat. When they got to the other side. They paid him. They paid him in real money. And according to my Uncle Tom, they didn't make any bones about it. It was just kind of casual. And I started thinking, like, what's that about? Now, I didn't get the answers from that story. But the question the question set me on the path to this book. I think the way that I want to answer the question about "me-story" – "me-search" is as follows. There's a really wonderful historian named Kendra Field who has recently recently written something called "The Privilege of Family History." And in it she points out that white historians had for a hundred years been basically doing "me-search." And sometimes doing it quite openly. So one of the most racist and also most brilliantly researched in books in my field Ulrich Bonnell Phillips.
ALDON MORRIS (00:12):
Yes.
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:13):
"Life and Labor in the Old South," 1918. I mean, you just it's painful to read this book because he uses language, but he's writing about slavery. And in the preface to the book, he says, basically, you can trust me for two reasons. One, I've been to the archives and two, I grew up in Georgia, and I know these people. I know something about how the Negro works. And I thought, you know, if U.B. Phillips can do "me-search," then why can't I? So I just put it in there and made it more explicit.
ALDON MORRIS (00:14):
Yeah, it is really a lovely addition to the stories that you tell. You know, reflecting back, remember that most slaves could not read nor write. They were prohibited from reading and writing. So then there's a common image that before the 1950s, 60s freedom movement, that is the Civil Rights Movement, that southern Black people were unschooled and alienated from the law. Yet Dylan, you found that Black people knew a lot about the law even during slavery, and that activists and lawyers actually counted on the fact that ordinary Black people knew something about law. Now, my question to you is that why did you challenge this narrative that Black people were largely ignorant of law before the Civil Rights Movement?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:15):
I think the reason I wanted to challenge it is that the sources were screaming it. So I mentioned a bit ago that I went to the courthouses and we can talk later about the research process. But, you know, the baseline finding and this is one reason why it took me 20 years to write this book. The baseline finding is that me and my research assistants found 14,000 civil cases in the archive. We looked at them, and of those 1500 of them involved Black people. And these cases came from Mississippi, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., New Jersey. They came from all over the country, really. And so when I looked at these cases, these are largely civil cases. It seems to me that at a minimum, what we have here is Black people exercising their civil right to go to court, their right to sue and be sued. We're seeing Black people exercising their right to own property. They're on the deed books. We're seeing they're seeing them exercise their right to make contracts. And you can see this in all these these court records. The reason I wanted to make it, the reason I wanted to challenge this legal ignorance narrative is because it said so in the records. But also because there's a story in the fact that we now think of Black people as legally ignorant and scared to go to court before the Civil Rights Movement. There's a story behind that. So one way to tell the story is to look at what white lawyers said about their clients when they went to court. And to make no mistake, white lawyers really wanted Black clients. It was business for them. And in fact, the profession whitened in the 1890s, in part because white lawyers wanted to kick out Black lawyers from the competition for Black clients business. So white lawyers, they they have Black clients. Including some of the most white supremacist people you can imagine, like James Eastland, who blocked the Civil Rights Act of 64 for something like 60 votes. He had Black clients. When you look at what men like him did, they wanted to win. And sometimes in order to win, they would deploy what I call "the trope of the ignorant Negro." This idea, this kind of stereotype of a Black client who has been taken in, who has been defrauded against his will without really knowing what he was getting into by a powerful white man. And you can see in the transcripts lawyers and Black clients positioning the Black clients as ignorant of law. And I thought that, you know, I'm sure that in some sense it's true. But in another sense, it's not true because they're not any more ignorant in terms of everyday knowledge of law than most white people. More white people can read and write. But in terms of just sort of everyday legal knowledge, like what it takes to sell a mule, what you have to do in order to convey a piece of land, how you inherit. Black people know about as much as white people. They know basically when you can do it on your own and when you need to go get a lawyer. And so these white lawyers, they're creating this trope of legal ignorance, which is not necessarily incorrect, but it's incomplete. And then in the 1960s, you see white liberal lawyers echoing that same trope of legal ignorance to protect Black people from exploitation and consumer contracts. So there's this whole area of law called uncouscionability law, which is about protecting people who cannot protect themselves in contract from being exploited. Right. And to this day in law schools, contracts professors teach a case called Williams versus Walker Thomas Furniture. And it's basically about that. And it relies on this trope of Black ignorance. The last thing I'll say about it, though, is that when activists go to the south in the 1960s, they also, for their own purposes, somewhat rely on this trope of Black legal ignorance. It's not so much that they that they actually necessarily believe that Black people are legally ignorant, but as political rhetoric, as a mobilizing strategy, as something to encourage donations, it actually works for civil rights activists in some circumstances to portray Black Mississippians, rural Black Mississippians, as people who need to be taught about their rights. So I'm kind of interested in the rhetoric, in the kind of intellectual tradition that has led people at different times in different places to portray people as, Black people as either legally savvy or legally ignorant. And they do it for pursuing their own interests.
ALDON MORRIS (00:16):
Okay. Well, given the long history of Black people employing their civil rights, as you point out in the book, one must ask
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:17):
It's a great question and it has troubled me for a long time. But the answer is no. But but the why of the no is the tough part because it gets into some fundamental ideas about freedom in a free market economy. Let me explain what I mean. I'm going to start by just drawing on a really wonderful concept put forward by Derrick Bell, a Harvard law professor who is one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. You've probably heard a lot about CRT, right? A lot of anti CRT laws. But Fox News never really stops to explain what CRT actually is. One of the things that it is, is it's a set of propositions about the way that legal change happens. Theory. And Derrick Bell in the 1970s comes out with this idea called interest convergence. What he says is that Black people's interest in civil rights, there would be advancements in the area of civil rights if and only if it coincides with if it converges with the interests of white people. Right. This is what he calls the interest convergence dilemma. In my sources. I see this again and again. And I'll just give you an example. In 1866, there was a woman named Rosa Baskerville. I'm pretty sure that she's related to me, although I can't be sure because it's hard to trace to this. I found a contract with her name on it in the records at the Richmond Historical Society. It was a contract between a man named William R. Baskerville and I think the Negroes formerly his slaves. Now, this contract, William R. Baskerville, lived in a town that I remember hearing when I was growing up. So my mother would often talk about, Someday we're going to go to Baskerville Junction, right? That was her name. Baskerville. And I would ask her like like, Is it named after us? She'd be like, No. Is named after the people who owned us. But William R. Baskerville in 1866, writes a contract, and I think something like 53 Negroes, formerly his slaves, sign their names with X marks to this contract. The contract provides that for the year 1866 they are going to work as they have heretofore as slaves. Right. Just let that sink in for a minute. They will work as they have heretofore as slaves. And in return, they get a quarter share of the corn crop. They get certain kinds of foodstuffs. Not a lot. So they're going to work 12 months like slaves, literally like slaves because they were his slaves before. And they're now promising to work as they have heretofore as slaves. And they do it through contract. It's an exchange of promises. They are exercising their civil rights. Their libertarian right of contract. Having contract rights isn't enough unless you know something about the pile of chips that each party brings to the table. Why did Rosa Baskerville sign that contract to work like a slave for 12 months in return for a quarter share of the crop? Because she had no better alternative. And that same dynamic I think, you know, you can see it all around us. If there's one sort of take away from my book, it should be something like, law is all around us. And this is one way in which law is all around us. When you sign a contract with Apple, all those, you know, those click thrus and so forth. You know, like, do you agree? Well, what choice do I have? I need to finish this word document so I can send it to my boss. Right. And, you know, that's sort of a small example. But of course, there are much worse examples, like Latino people working in packing houses in Iowa. Right. Exposed to horrific dangers, getting their hands cut off and with no compensation. Why do they do it? Because they have no better alternative. So my answer, if John Roberts were here in the room, I would say something like, well you need, Black people need those libertarian rights, but they're not enough.
ALDON MORRIS (00:18):
Got you. As I was reading through your book, there was an argument that just jumped up at me and said, Whoa. And that is that you argue that Black people desperately needed to know the law to protect themselves from each other. You argue this was true because class exploitation, agenda, exploitation as well as dictatorial leadership exist in the Black community. And you make clear that these negative forces operated largely independent of white supremacy. Thus, Black people, you argue, had to employ law to protect themselves from each other. So why was it important for you to make such an argument?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:19):
That's a great question. And I'll say at the at at the front of this answer that at times I have struggled with what to put in and what to leave out. And so when I went to the courthouses, I was looking at civil cases. And some of those cases involve Black people's intimate lives. So divorce. Right. What comes out in a divorce case? Things that are messy, things that are private, and the court forces people to air it out. Especially before the era of an era of no fault divorce. People actually have to be at somebody has to be at fault. So people say horrible things about one another in court. I found disputes within Black churches. So in 1867, one of the biggest Black churches in Washington, D.C., just tore itself to pieces. It was a dispute where the minister, Albert Bolden, was basically acting like a dictator. He seized control of the the books where all the money was accounted for and wouldn't let the trustees look at it, wouldn't let especially the members of the church examine the books to see what was going in and what was coming out. Just a side note
ALDON MORRIS (00:20):
Now, in the book, there's a theme that runs through it, and that is that Black people have been involved for a long time in owning corporations. And for example, the Black church is a prime example of such a corporation. So even if we think about the Black church, you argue that Black parishioners often needed to use incorporation laws against church leaders to protect themselves from dictatorial pastors, even including Martin Luther King Jr. So the question is, is that what was so important about the power of incorporation? And what tensions and risk did incorporation create for Black folk?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:21):
Let me start by pointing out the names of a couple of corporations you might recognize. The Black Panthers. Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The Montgomery Improvement Association. These were all corporations formed by African-Americans, and they had been forming corporations at least since 1796, when Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia was incorporated as a separate entity. Why did they form corporations? Because a corporation is a powerful legal tool for organizing resources, whether it's money, people's energies or anything else. It's a way of channeling resources in one direction that you want to get something done. And Black people took advantage of it constantly. It shields members and investors from risk. Right. So if you're in if you're an investor in a corporation and the corporation does something wrong, you're not liable for the damage that it causes. Limited liability. It also centralizes management, right? So one person can speak for the corporation. And then the third thing it does is it has a legal personality, which is a fancy way of saying that a corporation can own property, make contracts, like hire people. How does that play out in practice? Six months into the Montgomery bus boycott. So you all know you're familiar. Rosa Parks sits on the bus and they're fighting for six months. And then in June 1956, Martin Luther King and nine other people go to the Montgomery courthouse and they file papers to incorporate the MIA, King as the president. There are officers. And, you know, you might ask yourself, why did they do that? Well, one big reason is it legally empowers King to make decisions for MIA. So you might disagree as a member with what King is saying, but he speaks for the organization. It empowers the MIA. to accept donations. And to spend money on this enormous car pool that powers the boycott for like more than 15 months. The fact that MIA incorporated, I think is one reason that they were able to last so long and achieve the success that they did. So I think that's my short answer as to why they were so frequently forming corporations and the presence that Black corporations had in Black life and continue to have today.
ALDON MORRIS (00:22):
Good. Did I see a sign saying it's time for question and answer? Okay, that went really quick. Hopefully, Dylan, you'll get a chance to talk about the process of writing this book. Why did you go to so many courthouses? What did you find? Etc.. But perhaps that could come out in the question and answer period. All right.
Audience Member 1 Thank you. Hi. So speaking of corporations still, and at one point in your book, you talked about that, indeed corporation, a corporation is a person in a certain sense. Could you expand on that? That kind of caught me, and I would love to hear you talk about that a little bit please.
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:24):
I love that question. It gives me a chance to make fun of Mitt Romney again. But but the thing is, he was right. It's not good politics to say that corporations are people, my friend. Right. But but, you know, if you told a lawyer that, they'd say, well, of course it is. So what does that mean? It's just sort of a technical, legal meaning that a corporation has legal personality, that for legal purposes, it is a person. It's an artificial person. John Marshall says this in one of the early constitutional cases that sets the rules for corporations in the United States. It's a it's a person in contemplation of law. So it's not a physical person. You know, it doesn't have sort of physical presence. It's a legal construct. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful, of course, as we know. That's really all I meant by these corporations are people.
Audience Member 2 My question, so I've seen in my "me-story" a little bit as well, coming out of slavery I have, for example, a contract in a will that when my great great great grandmother is created on property transfer and one of the things that I noticed in looking at this is around Paducah, Kentucky is under the slave rules for slave workers that they had classified mulattoes and Negroes separately. And most of the mulattoes would understand that their fathers were the actual slave owners. And there was a big shift in the prison population under reconstruction, where Blacks were more in prison in the the during that period under slavery. But during reconstruction, more mulattoes were locked up. And there were you could see shifts in certain industries. I was wondering if you could see sort of those kind of shifts as well in the research. Maybe it's an entree to what you said, the process of going to the court records, did you see dynamics in communities like that that you could trace this way?
Thank you for that question. You're putting your finger on one of the most fascinating mysteries I discovered early in my research, which is that the records I looked at civil court records at the county courthouse level, they're not marked by race. So, you know, I would go to the courthouse. I would pull these big heavy ledgers down from the shelves. You know, they're like, this big, leather bound and I, you know, go through the page after page after page and it doesn't say whether they're Black or white or anything else. Right. The question is why not? Because these records are being produced at the very moment when the water fountains and everything else in southern life is being segregated by law. And it's also a big contrast to other sorts of records that exist at the time. So like voter rolls. Those are segregated by race. Like my great great uncle, Jackson Holcomb, Holcomb. In 1903, he appears on one of the colored voting rolls. But deeds, wills, contracts, court disputes. None of these are segregated by race. And it's because in the world of civil rights, legally speaking, race doesn't have a legal meaning anymore. Right. Like, there's no such thing as Negro property. Like, you know, people buy and sell farms. They don't buy and sell Black farms. They they make contracts. They don't make Black contracts. And that's true partly because it's efficient. You would have you would have had to make an incredibly cumbersome legal system if you were going to segregate those things. And and Black people enter into those contracts and they enter into those property relations not on the same terms as white people. Right. Because, again, substantively, they start off with a smaller pile of chips. They come to the bargaining table, usually unequal with the people on the other side. But yet and still, they are in the legal system. So again and again, what I see is Black people are being exploited through law, not outside of law, not in spite of law. They're being exploited through law. And because they are part of the legal system, they are able to pursue their interests through law. Does that make sense? I should say too that it turned out to be a real hassle to try and figure out who was Black from a bunch of records that don't say. And it has to do with ancestry.com. Not not this one, but looking up your ancestors on the electronic census. That's part of what took so long. Me and my research assistants, we looked up all 14,000 of those cases, 28,000 litigants. And that's how I know that there were 1500 cases out of our sample. I didn't look at every case but our sample, 1500 that involved Black people.
Audience Member 3 Hi. So you had mentioned that you had looked at cases across different states, and I was wondering if you found that in so, for example, like the Black community in Chicago has different cultures, different traditions than maybe the Black community in Mississippi. Do you find that Black people were arguing for and going to court for different things based on like region and geography, or did you find that across the board Black people were kind of, I guess, going to court for for similar cases and for similar reasons?
That's a great question. I I did not find big variations in the ways that Black people talked about and used property. Now the kinds of property they owned started to diverge after, say, about the 1940s. You get different kinds of property. People own less farmland and they are more like tenants holding leases to landlords. They also are, some of their wealth, all Americans wealth is, it consists not of tangible things, but of benefits. Right. Like all of us, you know, a lot of the wealth that we might call our own is from, you know, a pension or a 401k. So more and more Black people, as they enter into, to the extent that they're able to enter into that part of the marketplace, they start to own those kinds of property. But what's fascinating to me is not so much the differences between Mississippians' and Chicagoans' ideas about property, is the connections that property creates between people in Mississippi and Chicago. And maybe I'll just give an example from my own family. So Jackson Holcomb's son, Thomas Holcomb, he moves north in 1927. He moves to Redbank, New Jersey, and then eventually he moves to South Orange, which is where my mom grew up. And for many years, he maintained his membership in Midway Baptist Church, in Southside Virginia. He had land down there. He owns that land in common with some of his siblings. And so, you know, for 50 years he's living in the north, but he has property interests in the south. He has civil rights to land in the south. And that creates both opportunities and tensions among him and his relatives. Right. You know, he's far away. You know, we used to go south. We'd go back to the family land from time to time. But he's far away and he's sending money down south to pay the taxes. And so, you know, there are there are moments when family members disagree about what should be done with the land. And it's those disagreements as well as the loves and the the cooperation that I find so fascinating because it reveals something about the texture of Black people's lives.
Audience Member 4 All right. Thank you. I have another "me-story." My great grandfather owned land, at least according to census records, in Amite County, Mississippi. He and his brothers. And then over time, from family stories, they were forced off of that land and moved to Pike County. And in in answering the gentleman's question in front of me, I'm wondering is, when I view that land ownership in Ancestry.com, does that necessarily correlate or in your research correlate to the law reflecting that my you're the people that you research own the land? And was there anything you saw in your research showing their transition when whites pushed or forced African-Americans off their land, how it was portrayed in the law?
It's a great question. And so the deed books are where the official record of who owns what is recorded. And Black people are on those deed books, for sure. You referenced your family members being forced off the land. And that, I think, is one of the moments that is a real kind of analytical pivot point for me. Right? White people did that. It absolutely happened. There are some pretty important cases that have to do with white people forcing Black people off their land. But it created legal problems. Right. When you buy a house, you know, what's one of the things that you have to do? You have to get title insurance. And title insurance is it is something that the mortgage company requires to make sure that the title that you are going to receive is sound and will not be questioned down the line. And if it is, if somebody comes out of the woodwork and says like, this isn't really your house. My family owned it. The title Insurance is there to make you secure. White people did force Black people off their land. But I'll just give you one story about a man named Isom McGee, who was in Louisiana, and he got lynched around the turn of the century. And white people took his land. About ten years go by and somebody discovers oil on the land. So the Gulf Oil Corporation comes in and they're very interested. They want to purchase the land. What they discover is there's a break in the chain of title. There's no conveyance at the courthouse from Isom McGee to the next person who says that they owned it. And so Gulf Oil goes on this ten year odyssey trying to track down Isom McGee's relatives. And they finally find this woman named Lillie Mae Gussie. They find her in Louisiana and they get her to sign a lease and she makes money right from Gulf Oil. And it creates all these court cases because people are coming in and disputing the claim and so forth. Okay. Not every time. It's not every time that that happens. Right. That's kind of an unusual case. But what I think it does is sort it sort of shows you that there was a cost to forcing Black people out of their civil rights. In a sense, white people's rights depended on Black people having civil rights. And that is one of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this book.
ALDON MORRIS (00:31):
And that is all the time we have for questions. Everybody, I know we could sit here and talk all day about this, but that is all the time we have. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Thank you, Dylan.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:34):
For more information on Dylan C. Penningroth and Aldon Morris, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with assistance from the team at Chicago Humanities who produce the live events and make sure they sound great.
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DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:01):
There was a cost to forcing Black people out of their civil rights. In a sense, white people's rights depended on Black people having civil rights. And that is one of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this book.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all what’s going on, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m Alisa Rosenthal, and today, we’re bringing you a wonderful conversation from our Fall 2024 Festival
I’ll link to all the works referenced throughout in the show notes, so you can check those out below or at chicagohumanities.org.
This is Dylan C. Penningroth and Aldon Morris at the University of Illinois at the Chicago Humanities Fall Festival in 2024.
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ALDON MORRIS (00:08):
Well, let me start out by saying that it is a pleasure to be here. And it is a pleasure to see all of you on a beautiful Saturday. Now. It is a really, really great pleasure for me to reunite with my friend and colleague, Dylan Penningroth. We were both on the faculty at Northwestern for probably about ten years together and got to know each other. And now, of course, he left us, I think, in '15 and went out to the University of California, Berkeley, where he's a distinguished professor of law and history. And so, Dylan, welcome back to Chicago. And also, I want to start by saying congratulations, Dylan, for researching and writing this book, "Before the Movement
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:09):
Leads with the tough questions. First, I just want to say thank you so much for the Chicago Humanities Festival, Michael Green, Dean Road and also Bella Garcia for making all of this cohere so well. And it is an especial pleasure to be here with Professor ALDON MORRIS:. If it's not clear already, he's a legend, you know, in the field of social movements, sociological theory, and race, among other things. And so I'm just delighted to be here together with you. Thanks. It's a real honor. So my book "Before the Movement," it's it's a legal history of Black lives that tries to use law to open a window onto Black life itself. Right. So we're thinking about Black legal life to look at Black life more broadly. When we think about civil rights today, or at least when I think about civil rights today, I tend to think about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, people who were engaged in a freedom struggle, which was focused on forcing the federal government to force state and local officials to recognize Black people's rights, their civil rights. The civil rights that are typically referred to when we think about King and Parks and so forth, those are the rights to things like nondiscrimination on the basis of race. So the right to sit on a bus in dignity, the right not to be discriminated against. So if you think about what's in your pocket, if you bought a ticket today, you have a ticket and that ticket entitles you to be in this room. That ticket is guarded partly by federal anti-discrimination law, which says that you can't be barred by the University of Chicago, UIC, from coming into this room on the basis of sex or race or disability or veteran status. Okay. But there's another kind of civil rights that's lurking underneath that. When you think about what your ticket is, it's many things, but above all, it's a contract. You have a right to be here because you have formed a contract in purchasing this ticket. That kind of civil right is something that was the one that was widely understood for most of this country's history. It wasn't until the 1950s or 60s that civil rights came to be understood as the right to be protected against discrimination on the basis of race or other protected categories. So in a way, my book is about how we got from civil rights with a small c small r to Civil Rights, capital letter, Civil Rights. Okay. But the second thing that my book is about, is about trying to tell the story of Black life with Black people at the center of it. So when I was going through grad school, I read a lot of African-American history. It's what I trained in. And I came to realize that so much of the history I was reading was written in the framework of race relations. It was about Black people's struggle against white oppression from slavery to freedom. And you're going to sort of see this long arc, and it's kind of an arc of progress. From second class citizenship to first class citizenship from partial freedom to full freedom. But there's something I thought that there's a cost to that. That story is incredibly important even today. But there are other things that are lurking beneath it that are not just about race relations. In other words, I wanted to write a book where race relations were not at the center of it, but were very influential. Right. They're not determining the story, but they're heavily influencing the story. So what did I do in order to make that happen? So Professor Morris asked me to reflect on civil, social, and political rights. So in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is writing for the White House. And at that time Black rights were kind of a wedge issue. The Democrats were using it to split apart Lincoln from his supporters. And what Lincoln and the Republicans did in 1860 was quite brilliant. What they did is they appealed to white Americans' least common denominator sense of what the fundamental rights of a free person were. At that time, most Americans, or at least what most white Americans thought of rights in three parts
ALDON MORRIS (00:10):
Yeah. Okay. So as I read this book, as I read this book, Professor Penningroth talks a lot about his own relatives, great, great, great uncles and aunts and others and explained their encounters and entanglements with the law. So what I want, what I'm curious about is why did you decide to use your own relatives in this book? And were you not afraid that there would be some who was who would say that you were engaging in "me- search" rather than research, that you were not being an objective scholar?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:11):
It's a great question. I think I knew that my relatives were going to be in the book. For me, the question was more, how explicit would I be about acknowledging that fact. When I say that they're in the book, what I mean is my experiences with my family members, the stories I heard at cookouts. There's a cassette tape that I actually talk about at the beginning of the book. Stories that I heard helped me think about the kinds of questions I wanted to ask, the kinds of research directions I wanted to go in. They didn't give me the answers. But they helped me decide where I wanted to go when I walked into that archive or that courthouse and started looking at the shelves, those thousands of pages. So they helped me ask the right questions. But what you're asking is a really good question. I decided late in the writing process that I really kind of wanted to tell stories that were not only based on things I found in the archives, but that I would make explicit what I had learned from my family members. Some of those stories that I tell in the book come from the courthouse. They come from the archive. Some of them come from interviews that I did with my mother, with my great uncle. Of course, they didn't like to call them interviews. My mom when I was driving around and we talk in the car and I'd say, Can I interview you? And she would say, We're not interviewing, just we're just talking. And so but I would, you know, remember and I sometimes recorded it surreptitiously, and I have these notes and it helped me formulate the questions that I wanted to ask. So late in the process, I decide that, really, if I really want to be honest with myself, I think I can make some of that explicit on the pages. Just tell a couple of those stories. And so the first page of the book, I talk about my great, great great uncle, a man named Jackson Holcomb, who on a recording that his son, Thomas Holcomb, makes, Thomas Holcomb says on the recording that Jackson Holcomb owned a boat while he was a slave. And that Confederate soldiers toward the end of the Civil War came up to him, asked him for a ride across the Appomattox River. They were running away from Grant's army. They were desperate, fearful. And my great great great uncle, Jackson Holcomb, took them across the Appomattox River in his boat. When they got to the other side. They paid him. They paid him in real money. And according to my Uncle Tom, they didn't make any bones about it. It was just kind of casual. And I started thinking, like, what's that about? Now, I didn't get the answers from that story. But the question the question set me on the path to this book. I think the way that I want to answer the question about "me-story" – "me-search" is as follows. There's a really wonderful historian named Kendra Field who has recently recently written something called "The Privilege of Family History." And in it she points out that white historians had for a hundred years been basically doing "me-search." And sometimes doing it quite openly. So one of the most racist and also most brilliantly researched in books in my field Ulrich Bonnell Phillips.
ALDON MORRIS (00:12):
Yes.
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:13):
"Life and Labor in the Old South," 1918. I mean, you just it's painful to read this book because he uses language, but he's writing about slavery. And in the preface to the book, he says, basically, you can trust me for two reasons. One, I've been to the archives and two, I grew up in Georgia, and I know these people. I know something about how the Negro works. And I thought, you know, if U.B. Phillips can do "me-search," then why can't I? So I just put it in there and made it more explicit.
ALDON MORRIS (00:14):
Yeah, it is really a lovely addition to the stories that you tell. You know, reflecting back, remember that most slaves could not read nor write. They were prohibited from reading and writing. So then there's a common image that before the 1950s, 60s freedom movement, that is the Civil Rights Movement, that southern Black people were unschooled and alienated from the law. Yet Dylan, you found that Black people knew a lot about the law even during slavery, and that activists and lawyers actually counted on the fact that ordinary Black people knew something about law. Now, my question to you is that why did you challenge this narrative that Black people were largely ignorant of law before the Civil Rights Movement?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:15):
I think the reason I wanted to challenge it is that the sources were screaming it. So I mentioned a bit ago that I went to the courthouses and we can talk later about the research process. But, you know, the baseline finding and this is one reason why it took me 20 years to write this book. The baseline finding is that me and my research assistants found 14,000 civil cases in the archive. We looked at them, and of those 1500 of them involved Black people. And these cases came from Mississippi, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., New Jersey. They came from all over the country, really. And so when I looked at these cases, these are largely civil cases. It seems to me that at a minimum, what we have here is Black people exercising their civil right to go to court, their right to sue and be sued. We're seeing Black people exercising their right to own property. They're on the deed books. We're seeing they're seeing them exercise their right to make contracts. And you can see this in all these these court records. The reason I wanted to make it, the reason I wanted to challenge this legal ignorance narrative is because it said so in the records. But also because there's a story in the fact that we now think of Black people as legally ignorant and scared to go to court before the Civil Rights Movement. There's a story behind that. So one way to tell the story is to look at what white lawyers said about their clients when they went to court. And to make no mistake, white lawyers really wanted Black clients. It was business for them. And in fact, the profession whitened in the 1890s, in part because white lawyers wanted to kick out Black lawyers from the competition for Black clients business. So white lawyers, they they have Black clients. Including some of the most white supremacist people you can imagine, like James Eastland, who blocked the Civil Rights Act of 64 for something like 60 votes. He had Black clients. When you look at what men like him did, they wanted to win. And sometimes in order to win, they would deploy what I call "the trope of the ignorant Negro." This idea, this kind of stereotype of a Black client who has been taken in, who has been defrauded against his will without really knowing what he was getting into by a powerful white man. And you can see in the transcripts lawyers and Black clients positioning the Black clients as ignorant of law. And I thought that, you know, I'm sure that in some sense it's true. But in another sense, it's not true because they're not any more ignorant in terms of everyday knowledge of law than most white people. More white people can read and write. But in terms of just sort of everyday legal knowledge, like what it takes to sell a mule, what you have to do in order to convey a piece of land, how you inherit. Black people know about as much as white people. They know basically when you can do it on your own and when you need to go get a lawyer. And so these white lawyers, they're creating this trope of legal ignorance, which is not necessarily incorrect, but it's incomplete. And then in the 1960s, you see white liberal lawyers echoing that same trope of legal ignorance to protect Black people from exploitation and consumer contracts. So there's this whole area of law called uncouscionability law, which is about protecting people who cannot protect themselves in contract from being exploited. Right. And to this day in law schools, contracts professors teach a case called Williams versus Walker Thomas Furniture. And it's basically about that. And it relies on this trope of Black ignorance. The last thing I'll say about it, though, is that when activists go to the south in the 1960s, they also, for their own purposes, somewhat rely on this trope of Black legal ignorance. It's not so much that they that they actually necessarily believe that Black people are legally ignorant, but as political rhetoric, as a mobilizing strategy, as something to encourage donations, it actually works for civil rights activists in some circumstances to portray Black Mississippians, rural Black Mississippians, as people who need to be taught about their rights. So I'm kind of interested in the rhetoric, in the kind of intellectual tradition that has led people at different times in different places to portray people as, Black people as either legally savvy or legally ignorant. And they do it for pursuing their own interests.
ALDON MORRIS (00:16):
Okay. Well, given the long history of Black people employing their civil rights, as you point out in the book, one must ask
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:17):
It's a great question and it has troubled me for a long time. But the answer is no. But but the why of the no is the tough part because it gets into some fundamental ideas about freedom in a free market economy. Let me explain what I mean. I'm going to start by just drawing on a really wonderful concept put forward by Derrick Bell, a Harvard law professor who is one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. You've probably heard a lot about CRT, right? A lot of anti CRT laws. But Fox News never really stops to explain what CRT actually is. One of the things that it is, is it's a set of propositions about the way that legal change happens. Theory. And Derrick Bell in the 1970s comes out with this idea called interest convergence. What he says is that Black people's interest in civil rights, there would be advancements in the area of civil rights if and only if it coincides with if it converges with the interests of white people. Right. This is what he calls the interest convergence dilemma. In my sources. I see this again and again. And I'll just give you an example. In 1866, there was a woman named Rosa Baskerville. I'm pretty sure that she's related to me, although I can't be sure because it's hard to trace to this. I found a contract with her name on it in the records at the Richmond Historical Society. It was a contract between a man named William R. Baskerville and I think the Negroes formerly his slaves. Now, this contract, William R. Baskerville, lived in a town that I remember hearing when I was growing up. So my mother would often talk about, Someday we're going to go to Baskerville Junction, right? That was her name. Baskerville. And I would ask her like like, Is it named after us? She'd be like, No. Is named after the people who owned us. But William R. Baskerville in 1866, writes a contract, and I think something like 53 Negroes, formerly his slaves, sign their names with X marks to this contract. The contract provides that for the year 1866 they are going to work as they have heretofore as slaves. Right. Just let that sink in for a minute. They will work as they have heretofore as slaves. And in return, they get a quarter share of the corn crop. They get certain kinds of foodstuffs. Not a lot. So they're going to work 12 months like slaves, literally like slaves because they were his slaves before. And they're now promising to work as they have heretofore as slaves. And they do it through contract. It's an exchange of promises. They are exercising their civil rights. Their libertarian right of contract. Having contract rights isn't enough unless you know something about the pile of chips that each party brings to the table. Why did Rosa Baskerville sign that contract to work like a slave for 12 months in return for a quarter share of the crop? Because she had no better alternative. And that same dynamic I think, you know, you can see it all around us. If there's one sort of take away from my book, it should be something like, law is all around us. And this is one way in which law is all around us. When you sign a contract with Apple, all those, you know, those click thrus and so forth. You know, like, do you agree? Well, what choice do I have? I need to finish this word document so I can send it to my boss. Right. And, you know, that's sort of a small example. But of course, there are much worse examples, like Latino people working in packing houses in Iowa. Right. Exposed to horrific dangers, getting their hands cut off and with no compensation. Why do they do it? Because they have no better alternative. So my answer, if John Roberts were here in the room, I would say something like, well you need, Black people need those libertarian rights, but they're not enough.
ALDON MORRIS (00:18):
Got you. As I was reading through your book, there was an argument that just jumped up at me and said, Whoa. And that is that you argue that Black people desperately needed to know the law to protect themselves from each other. You argue this was true because class exploitation, agenda, exploitation as well as dictatorial leadership exist in the Black community. And you make clear that these negative forces operated largely independent of white supremacy. Thus, Black people, you argue, had to employ law to protect themselves from each other. So why was it important for you to make such an argument?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:19):
That's a great question. And I'll say at the at at the front of this answer that at times I have struggled with what to put in and what to leave out. And so when I went to the courthouses, I was looking at civil cases. And some of those cases involve Black people's intimate lives. So divorce. Right. What comes out in a divorce case? Things that are messy, things that are private, and the court forces people to air it out. Especially before the era of an era of no fault divorce. People actually have to be at somebody has to be at fault. So people say horrible things about one another in court. I found disputes within Black churches. So in 1867, one of the biggest Black churches in Washington, D.C., just tore itself to pieces. It was a dispute where the minister, Albert Bolden, was basically acting like a dictator. He seized control of the the books where all the money was accounted for and wouldn't let the trustees look at it, wouldn't let especially the members of the church examine the books to see what was going in and what was coming out. Just a side note
ALDON MORRIS (00:20):
Now, in the book, there's a theme that runs through it, and that is that Black people have been involved for a long time in owning corporations. And for example, the Black church is a prime example of such a corporation. So even if we think about the Black church, you argue that Black parishioners often needed to use incorporation laws against church leaders to protect themselves from dictatorial pastors, even including Martin Luther King Jr. So the question is, is that what was so important about the power of incorporation? And what tensions and risk did incorporation create for Black folk?
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:21):
Let me start by pointing out the names of a couple of corporations you might recognize. The Black Panthers. Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The Montgomery Improvement Association. These were all corporations formed by African-Americans, and they had been forming corporations at least since 1796, when Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia was incorporated as a separate entity. Why did they form corporations? Because a corporation is a powerful legal tool for organizing resources, whether it's money, people's energies or anything else. It's a way of channeling resources in one direction that you want to get something done. And Black people took advantage of it constantly. It shields members and investors from risk. Right. So if you're in if you're an investor in a corporation and the corporation does something wrong, you're not liable for the damage that it causes. Limited liability. It also centralizes management, right? So one person can speak for the corporation. And then the third thing it does is it has a legal personality, which is a fancy way of saying that a corporation can own property, make contracts, like hire people. How does that play out in practice? Six months into the Montgomery bus boycott. So you all know you're familiar. Rosa Parks sits on the bus and they're fighting for six months. And then in June 1956, Martin Luther King and nine other people go to the Montgomery courthouse and they file papers to incorporate the MIA, King as the president. There are officers. And, you know, you might ask yourself, why did they do that? Well, one big reason is it legally empowers King to make decisions for MIA. So you might disagree as a member with what King is saying, but he speaks for the organization. It empowers the MIA. to accept donations. And to spend money on this enormous car pool that powers the boycott for like more than 15 months. The fact that MIA incorporated, I think is one reason that they were able to last so long and achieve the success that they did. So I think that's my short answer as to why they were so frequently forming corporations and the presence that Black corporations had in Black life and continue to have today.
ALDON MORRIS (00:22):
Good. Did I see a sign saying it's time for question and answer? Okay, that went really quick. Hopefully, Dylan, you'll get a chance to talk about the process of writing this book. Why did you go to so many courthouses? What did you find? Etc.. But perhaps that could come out in the question and answer period. All right.
Audience Member 1 Thank you. Hi. So speaking of corporations still, and at one point in your book, you talked about that, indeed corporation, a corporation is a person in a certain sense. Could you expand on that? That kind of caught me, and I would love to hear you talk about that a little bit please.
DYLAN C. PENNINGROTH (00:24):
I love that question. It gives me a chance to make fun of Mitt Romney again. But but the thing is, he was right. It's not good politics to say that corporations are people, my friend. Right. But but, you know, if you told a lawyer that, they'd say, well, of course it is. So what does that mean? It's just sort of a technical, legal meaning that a corporation has legal personality, that for legal purposes, it is a person. It's an artificial person. John Marshall says this in one of the early constitutional cases that sets the rules for corporations in the United States. It's a it's a person in contemplation of law. So it's not a physical person. You know, it doesn't have sort of physical presence. It's a legal construct. But that doesn't mean it's not powerful, of course, as we know. That's really all I meant by these corporations are people.
Audience Member 2 My question, so I've seen in my "me-story" a little bit as well, coming out of slavery I have, for example, a contract in a will that when my great great great grandmother is created on property transfer and one of the things that I noticed in looking at this is around Paducah, Kentucky is under the slave rules for slave workers that they had classified mulattoes and Negroes separately. And most of the mulattoes would understand that their fathers were the actual slave owners. And there was a big shift in the prison population under reconstruction, where Blacks were more in prison in the the during that period under slavery. But during reconstruction, more mulattoes were locked up. And there were you could see shifts in certain industries. I was wondering if you could see sort of those kind of shifts as well in the research. Maybe it's an entree to what you said, the process of going to the court records, did you see dynamics in communities like that that you could trace this way?
Thank you for that question. You're putting your finger on one of the most fascinating mysteries I discovered early in my research, which is that the records I looked at civil court records at the county courthouse level, they're not marked by race. So, you know, I would go to the courthouse. I would pull these big heavy ledgers down from the shelves. You know, they're like, this big, leather bound and I, you know, go through the page after page after page and it doesn't say whether they're Black or white or anything else. Right. The question is why not? Because these records are being produced at the very moment when the water fountains and everything else in southern life is being segregated by law. And it's also a big contrast to other sorts of records that exist at the time. So like voter rolls. Those are segregated by race. Like my great great uncle, Jackson Holcomb, Holcomb. In 1903, he appears on one of the colored voting rolls. But deeds, wills, contracts, court disputes. None of these are segregated by race. And it's because in the world of civil rights, legally speaking, race doesn't have a legal meaning anymore. Right. Like, there's no such thing as Negro property. Like, you know, people buy and sell farms. They don't buy and sell Black farms. They they make contracts. They don't make Black contracts. And that's true partly because it's efficient. You would have you would have had to make an incredibly cumbersome legal system if you were going to segregate those things. And and Black people enter into those contracts and they enter into those property relations not on the same terms as white people. Right. Because, again, substantively, they start off with a smaller pile of chips. They come to the bargaining table, usually unequal with the people on the other side. But yet and still, they are in the legal system. So again and again, what I see is Black people are being exploited through law, not outside of law, not in spite of law. They're being exploited through law. And because they are part of the legal system, they are able to pursue their interests through law. Does that make sense? I should say too that it turned out to be a real hassle to try and figure out who was Black from a bunch of records that don't say. And it has to do with ancestry.com. Not not this one, but looking up your ancestors on the electronic census. That's part of what took so long. Me and my research assistants, we looked up all 14,000 of those cases, 28,000 litigants. And that's how I know that there were 1500 cases out of our sample. I didn't look at every case but our sample, 1500 that involved Black people.
Audience Member 3 Hi. So you had mentioned that you had looked at cases across different states, and I was wondering if you found that in so, for example, like the Black community in Chicago has different cultures, different traditions than maybe the Black community in Mississippi. Do you find that Black people were arguing for and going to court for different things based on like region and geography, or did you find that across the board Black people were kind of, I guess, going to court for for similar cases and for similar reasons?
That's a great question. I I did not find big variations in the ways that Black people talked about and used property. Now the kinds of property they owned started to diverge after, say, about the 1940s. You get different kinds of property. People own less farmland and they are more like tenants holding leases to landlords. They also are, some of their wealth, all Americans wealth is, it consists not of tangible things, but of benefits. Right. Like all of us, you know, a lot of the wealth that we might call our own is from, you know, a pension or a 401k. So more and more Black people, as they enter into, to the extent that they're able to enter into that part of the marketplace, they start to own those kinds of property. But what's fascinating to me is not so much the differences between Mississippians' and Chicagoans' ideas about property, is the connections that property creates between people in Mississippi and Chicago. And maybe I'll just give an example from my own family. So Jackson Holcomb's son, Thomas Holcomb, he moves north in 1927. He moves to Redbank, New Jersey, and then eventually he moves to South Orange, which is where my mom grew up. And for many years, he maintained his membership in Midway Baptist Church, in Southside Virginia. He had land down there. He owns that land in common with some of his siblings. And so, you know, for 50 years he's living in the north, but he has property interests in the south. He has civil rights to land in the south. And that creates both opportunities and tensions among him and his relatives. Right. You know, he's far away. You know, we used to go south. We'd go back to the family land from time to time. But he's far away and he's sending money down south to pay the taxes. And so, you know, there are there are moments when family members disagree about what should be done with the land. And it's those disagreements as well as the loves and the the cooperation that I find so fascinating because it reveals something about the texture of Black people's lives.
Audience Member 4 All right. Thank you. I have another "me-story." My great grandfather owned land, at least according to census records, in Amite County, Mississippi. He and his brothers. And then over time, from family stories, they were forced off of that land and moved to Pike County. And in in answering the gentleman's question in front of me, I'm wondering is, when I view that land ownership in Ancestry.com, does that necessarily correlate or in your research correlate to the law reflecting that my you're the people that you research own the land? And was there anything you saw in your research showing their transition when whites pushed or forced African-Americans off their land, how it was portrayed in the law?
It's a great question. And so the deed books are where the official record of who owns what is recorded. And Black people are on those deed books, for sure. You referenced your family members being forced off the land. And that, I think, is one of the moments that is a real kind of analytical pivot point for me. Right? White people did that. It absolutely happened. There are some pretty important cases that have to do with white people forcing Black people off their land. But it created legal problems. Right. When you buy a house, you know, what's one of the things that you have to do? You have to get title insurance. And title insurance is it is something that the mortgage company requires to make sure that the title that you are going to receive is sound and will not be questioned down the line. And if it is, if somebody comes out of the woodwork and says like, this isn't really your house. My family owned it. The title Insurance is there to make you secure. White people did force Black people off their land. But I'll just give you one story about a man named Isom McGee, who was in Louisiana, and he got lynched around the turn of the century. And white people took his land. About ten years go by and somebody discovers oil on the land. So the Gulf Oil Corporation comes in and they're very interested. They want to purchase the land. What they discover is there's a break in the chain of title. There's no conveyance at the courthouse from Isom McGee to the next person who says that they owned it. And so Gulf Oil goes on this ten year odyssey trying to track down Isom McGee's relatives. And they finally find this woman named Lillie Mae Gussie. They find her in Louisiana and they get her to sign a lease and she makes money right from Gulf Oil. And it creates all these court cases because people are coming in and disputing the claim and so forth. Okay. Not every time. It's not every time that that happens. Right. That's kind of an unusual case. But what I think it does is sort it sort of shows you that there was a cost to forcing Black people out of their civil rights. In a sense, white people's rights depended on Black people having civil rights. And that is one of the things that kind of blew my mind when I was researching this book.
ALDON MORRIS (00:31):
And that is all the time we have for questions. Everybody, I know we could sit here and talk all day about this, but that is all the time we have. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Thank you, Dylan.
[Audience applause]
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:34):
For more information on Dylan C. Penningroth and Aldon Morris, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with assistance from the team at Chicago Humanities who produce the live events and make sure they sound great.
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