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.

Keywords: civil rights, religion, race, gender