Professor Dylan Penningroth’s book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights has won the 2024 Scribes Book Award and made the shortlist for the 2024 Cundill History Prize. They’re the latest in a long string of accolades and honors.
The book explores the larger picture of how Black people worked within the laws of property, contracts, marriage and divorce, business and religious associations, and more to assert their rights — even while other parts of the legal system offered discrimination, hostility, and violence.
The Scribes award is given by the American Society of Legal Writers. The Cundill honor, administered by McGill University, is considered the world’s leading prize for history writing and comes with a $75,000 award. The winner will be named as part of the Cundill History Prize Festival on Oct. 30.
Since its publication last fall, Before the Movement has racked up a number of awards, including Law & Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History or Biography and two — the Merle Curti Social History Award and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize — from the Organization of American Historians. The book was also shortlisted for the Lynton Prize and the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History.
“Before the Movement masterfully achieves an impossible feat: it uses a wide and unwieldy archive alongside personal reflective narrative to offer a clear and compelling argument about law’s experience in the lived world,” the Hurst Prize citation says. “This book is at the core of what groundbreaking law and society historical scholarship is — it is engaging and accessible while expanding our understandings about an important topic, and it reflects deep and pain-staking research to bring alive archives that would otherwise go unnoticed. In bringing alive the ‘legal consciousness’ of people in their everyday interactions of the law (i.e., mundane disputes and cases), Professor Penningroth offers a more nuanced and fuller dimension to the history of Black civil rights in the United States before it was categorized as one.”