Ep 81: Dylan Penningroth on the Hidden History of Black Civil Rights

Ep 81: Dylan Penningroth on the Hidden History of Black Civil Rights

“If we want to understand Black people’s demands for the rights that America denied them, we must pay more attention to how they talked about and used the rights that were not denied them—the associational privileges and common-law civil rights they had been exercising for generations in county clerks’ offices and church basements—rights of everyday use.” Dylan Penningroth joins the podcast to talk about his recent book, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of the Black Civil Rights [https://www.dylanpenningroth.com/before-the-movement]. We explore the many ways Black people understood and navigated the law across different periods of U.S. history, including slavery, Reconstruction, and the civil rights era. We also discuss the rights exercised—and the abuses endured—by free Black people before the Civil War; why some organizations, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made strategic use of incorporation laws while others, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), did not; and what the struggle for rights can teach us today, including about contemporary Black conservatism and opportunistic uses of race. The photo above shows Freedom Summer volunteers and locals canvassing in Mississippi in 1964.

Ep. 80: Guy Aitchison on Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights

“There’s a tradition of these rights being claimed by groups who were excluded and who they weren’t originally intended for, because they have that possibility inherent to them, which is the idea of universal equality and universal freedom.” Dr. Guy Aitchison joins the Democratic Constitution Podcast to talk about his 2020 article, “Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights [https://academic.oup.com/book/33781/chapter-abstract/288538840?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false],” in which he argues for the role of rights as a vocabulary of political critique and struggle. Our conversation touches the neo-republican conception of rights, rights claims as speech acts and forms of communication, the importance of “moral rights,” and the Declaration of Independence. Listeners may find some of the themes familiar, including C.B. Macpherson’s concept of possessive individualism—discussed both in our reader [https://docs.google.com/document/d/19ejLXScq4hIEt0B8cNQKBDxHvxGu92iIquHWsf_8B4A/edit?tab=t.0] on universal and equal human rights and in my interview with Matt McManus [https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-democratic-constitution-podcast-45b?utm_source=publication-search]—as well as the history of the Levellers, which I explored in a recent article [https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-leveling-spirit-a9b?utm_source=publication-search]. Gil Schaeffer’s recent article [https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-declaration-of-independence-and] argues for the radicality of the Declaration of Independence’s invocation of universal and equal rights. I make the same argument here [https://jacobin.com/2025/07/independence-day-constitution-democracy-bicentennial]. The photo for this week’s episode is from a 1964 demonstration in Atlantic City in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Ep. 79: Clyde Barrow on the Life and Times of Charles A. Beard

“Beard resigned and wrote a very scathing letter of resignation, which is still read today. But he was such a beloved figure at Columbia, he actually provoked several days of protests and riots on the campus, of students demanding that he return and not be subject to this inquisition, and several other prominent faculty resigned right in his wake as well because of it.” Clyde Barrow returns to the podcast to talk about Charles Beard, the subject of his 2000 book, More Than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard. Beard was one of the foremost American intellectuals of the 20th century, and the author of several important books, including An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Clyde discusses the state of constitutional critique during the early 20th century and Beard’s place within it; Beard’s analysis of judicial review and checks and balances; his relationship with the English Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party, FDR, and the New Deal Democrats; and why Beard should be understood as a socialist but not a Marxist. I last spoke with Clyde about the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills [https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/clyde-barrow-on-c-wright-mills-nicos].

Ep. 78: Richard Wolff on Marxism, Trump, and Political and Economic Democracy

“The argument about the absence of democracy is powerful in one way at the workplace. But it is also powerful in another way, in the general community, where it ought to be pushed much, much harder.” This is my conversation with Richard D. Wolff, a longtime economics professor and host of Economic Update, one of the many programs affiliated with Democracy at Work [https://www.democracyatwork.info/]. Richard and I discuss the lack of democracy in the United States, the need for a new constitution, and why the left should be talking more about both. We also discuss Wolff’s political development, Marxist economics, tariff policy, and the Trump administration’s continued killings [https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/terror-tuesday-redux?utm_source=publication-search] in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

DSA Presentation: Reconstruction and Radical Republicanism

This is the recording of my presentation to East Bay DSA about Reconstruction and Radical Republicanism. Apologies for the rough audio quality.