American
Dylan C. Penningroth is an American historian of African American history and law. He is a professor of law and history at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003), showed how enslaved people and their families understood and defended property and kinship, and it won several prizes. His second book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (2023), traces how ordinary claims to land, church membership, contracts and family ties shaped the civil rights movement. It won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award in 2024. Penningroth's work matters because it moves the start of civil rights history back into the daily lives of Black Americans, using court records, church minutes and probate files to do so.