Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

When we think of American civil rights, we tend to focus on the mid-20th century, and the likes of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,

who fought for the rights of black people in an era of segregation.

But in his revelatory new book, Before the Movement, Professor Dylan Penningroff tells a much

longer and broader story, beginning in the era of slavery and focusing on everyday legal matters

that historians have traditionally overlooked. The book has been shortlisted for the Kundle

History Prize of which were a media partner, and Rob Atar caught up with Dylan recently to find

out more. Rob began by asking Dylan to lay out the chief

arguments of his book. So the book is really about two main ideas. One is what would black

history look like if we put black people at the center of the story. I ask it that way because when you think

about African American history, the way that it's typically written in the United States,

it's usually a history of race relations. It's about black people overcoming adversity,

striving to become full citizens up from slavery. And that story, of course, is absolutely

true and vital and necessary, but there's something peculiar about it, which is that it makes

it seem as though you can't talk about black history without putting white people somewhere

in the story. And I wanted to tell a story that had black people and their lives

at the center of the story. So that's the first theme. The second theme is about civil rights. How did we

get to the concept of civil rights that we have today? Today we think of civil rights as being

essentially about protection from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, and we think of it as being enforced by the federal government.

But in 1866, if you had asked somebody just after the Civil War had ended, what are civil rights?

They would have answered you that civil rights are the rights of free men. That means property, contract, the right

to go to court, sue and be sued. These were the rights that carried Abraham Lincoln to the White

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