Everyday Use: A History of Civil Rights in Black Churches

Abstract

After the Civil War, African Americans began to exercise civil rights of contract, property, and standing, a set of rights with significance that scholars of the Black freedom struggle have not fully appreciated. By the Jim Crow era, African Americans were putting these civil rights of the nineteenth century to everyday use. Dylan C. Penningroth seeks to revise the history of “civil rights” by examining one strand of Black people’s long engagement with legal rules, legal ideas, and legal institutions: the private law of religion. Throughout the twentieth century, Black male church leaders fought over the role churches should play in the Black freedom struggle, while ordinary church members, both women and men, seized the new meaning of civil rights as racial justice and redirected it to their concerns about church injustice.