The Importance of Educating Yourself

Maybe it’s just me, but I realized at some point that I was missing something about Black history after my many years of formal education.  I knew a little about slavery and the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, but I didn’t know what else was happening besides that.  Black history was very 2-dimensional.  A few short biographical summaries of great people.  Pithy quotes.  Slavery/discrimination = bad.  Freedom/non-discrimination = good.  It was presented in those terms.

Yet, there were obviously more aspects of Black culture, Black-run businesses and churches, land ownership in the South, famous Black icons, and everyday people, all of them with histories.  I grew up in the North, in the mostly white suburb that had formed near our formerly rural home when they built an enormous state university campus nearby.  I had this suspicion (duh) that maybe Black communities had more going on than what I picked up in school.  As an adult, I began checking out the occasional book from the non-fiction section.  Sometimes there were stories that either hadn’t made it into the textbooks or hadn’t been fleshed out in classroom discussion.

This year I happened to check out “Before the Movement,” by Dylan C. Penningroth.  The author, a Black professor of law and history at UC Berkeley, pulls from family history, court records, and behind the scenes insights into the events surrounding the stories that reached the public.  He traces the ebb and flow not only of what we now call Civil Rights, but other legal privileges, associations, and “rights of everyday use,” ideas which affected ownership of property, legal identity outside of race, and contract law, all of which the Black community actually participated heavily in even before the 1960s.

I’m not a lawyer, and most of this terminology is a stretch for me to follow.  So why did I take 19 pages of notes on this book?  Because starting a few pages into the introduction, my concept of Black history changed.  It was like staring at the visual chaos of a Magic Eye® picture and suddenly seeing a 3-dimensional image pop out.  Penningroth takes Black history from 2D to 3D.   Without devaluing the Civil Rights narrative, he shows the need to include all of Black history to get a better understanding, stating:

“Movement-centered scholarship is as urgent and necessary today as it was in the 1960s.  But the notion of Black history as a freedom struggle has also cost us something… it has shrunk our vision of Black life down to the few areas of Black life where federal law and social movements made a difference… Overshadowed are many other parts of life that Black people might have cared about just as much but that do not fit into a story of freedom—things like marriage and divorce, old-age care, property-owning, running churches and businesses.” (xviii)

You might have planned some activities for Black History Month.  So, have you got anything besides what I called …

“A few short biographical summaries of great people.  Pithy quotes.  Slavery/discrimination = bad.  Freedom/non-discrimination = good.”

These are all valuable.  But there’s more.  And we can’t count on “the powers that be” to educate us.  They probably didn’t learn much more in school, either.  We need to educate ourselves.

Donna Stuart, ADC, CMT © February 1, 2026

Penningroth, D. C. (2023). Before the Movement. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.