By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham

Overview

A Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction

One of NPR's Books We Love in 2022 • Named a Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, and Publishers Weekly

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar.

If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn’t lynching the law?

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324066057
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	145,207
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A professor of law, she was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the US Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part I Rendition

1 "A New Version of the Old, Old Story" 3

2 "Mr. Ford's Place" 10

3 "That Dusky Hospital on DeVilliers Street" Pensacola to Black Bottom 15

4 Bentonia Blues Yazoo County to Black Bottom 30

5 The One-Way Ride on Airline Highway Crescent City to Black Bottom 45

6 Resisting Rendition Legal Strategies and Political Advocacy 55

7 Who Stays Up North, Who Goes Back Down South 62

Part II Raced Transpotation

8 The Color Board 73

9 POB Noxubee, POD Back of the Bus 78

10 A Bus in Hayti 85

11 "Us Colored … Sat Where "We Wanted To" 99

12 Double V on the Bus 108

13 The Departments: War and Justice 114

14 The "Negro Transportation" File 118

Part III Paterollers and Prosecutors

15 Reconstruction Statutes, Jim Crow Rules 125

16 "Her Hips Looked Like Battered Liver" Tuskegee in the Middle District 130

17 "A Little Quick on the Trigger" Union Springs in the Middle District 136

18 "The Testimony … of the Negroes Seems More Probable" Tuskegee in the Middle District 140

19 "Head … Soft as a Piece of Cotton" Lafayette in the Middle District 147

20 "None of Washington's Business" 153

Part IV The Screws Effect

Racial Violence in the Supreme Court

21 "Look to the States" 167

22 A "Patently Local Crime" 173

23 "Victim … of a Quarrelsome Nature" 179

Part V Black Protest Matters

24 "Bad Birmingham" 189

25 Negroes are Restless 194

26 "Mr. Van" 199

27 "Negro Youth, Shot Near White Residence, Dies" 209

Part VI "He That Stealeth a Man"

28 Abduction Southwest Mississippi 221

29 "Negro Leaders Cry for Justice in Kidnap Outrage" 230

30 Black Captive, White Capture 235

Part VII "A Mint of Blood and Sorrow"

31 Redress The Problem of the Twenty-First Century 241

32 "Found Floating in River … Cause Of Death Unknown" 245

33 "A Fight With Some Sailors" 255

34 Owed? What? and by Whom? 262

Epilogue 273

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 283

Illustration Credits 319

Index 321

Editorial Reviews

"A vitally important history.… Burnham’s meticulous unpacking—of newspaper accounts, coroners’ reports, and interviews with surviving witnesses, family members, and clergy—is searing, unforgettable, and profoundly moving."

Patricia J. Williams

"The corrective we all need.... This book is a rich, evocative testament to [Burnham’s] life’s work, as she illuminates a series of harrowing, untold cases of racial violence from 1920 to 1960, tapping a database she built over the course of a decade. Her insights and interpretations bring a vital, necessary perspective to the segregationist era."

Oprah Daily

"In this necessary and important book, Margaret A. Burnham addresses the enormous violence necessary to sustain Jim Crow through a series of compelling case studies about the lives destroyed by the brutal regime of separate but equal.… In reckoning with the impact of this history on the present, Burnham asks how we might undo or redress this legacy of violence. It is timely and essential reading."

Saidiya Hartman

"Meticulously researched and carefully documented.... The dozens of fully fleshed out stories in this book—which are examples, of course, of countless stories left untold—add a personal element to this achingly real history. By Hands Now Known is impossible to read without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of racial violence in the U.S. in the past and persisting into the present."

starred review Booklist

"Needs to be read by everyone who recognizes the historic mandate of our time: to interrupt cycles of racist violence.… Rigorously delineated, passionately argued, Margaret A. Burnham’s book offers us heart-wrenching cases.… But Burnham goes further, asking us to finally acknowledge the history of ever-present resistance, even under the most insurmountable conditions, and to consider what justice might mean today."

Angela Y. Davis

"The detailed accounts of racial terror in this book are hard to stomach, but necessary to understand the national legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow system that emerged after emancipation.... Margaret Burnham’s rich historical analysis documents the longstanding failure of federal laws and institutions to prevent racial violence and police brutality. The book also shines a light on the resourcefulness of African Americans who organized to help one another and fight for justice."

NPR - Debbie Elliott

"Burnham illuminates a continuum of white supremacy.... She also examines Black Americans’ long-standing ‘practices of dissent and resistance’ and describes reparations as an ethical imperative."

The New Yorker

"Masterfully explores how everyday acts of violence fundamentally shaped Jim Crow during the twentieth century. With meticulous and compelling new research, Margaret A. Burnham offers a powerful, moving, and groundbreaking account of the interconnections between race, law, and citizenship in US history."

Keisha N. Blain

★ 06/06/2022

Burnham, founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, debuts with a searing study of the “chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life” in the Jim Crow South. The threat, Burnham contends, was not limited to the mob lynchings of African American boys and men accused of raping or sexually harassing white women, but also included such “quotidian violence” as the beating death of an “elderly Negro woman”—as a contemporaneous letter sent to the NAACP described her—by a white storekeeper in a small Georgia town in 1944. That murder, like many others recounted in the book, was not prosecuted and not reported on by local journalists. According to Burnham, these and other acts of racialized terror lie at the heart of the Jim Crow regime, which was a system of racial segregation as well as a statement about who could, and who could not, claim the privileges of American citizenship. Drawing upon a database created by Northeastern and MIT researchers that catalogues “racially motivated homicides” in the South between 1920 and 1960, Burnham illuminates the role that white terror played in controlling Black life, resistance efforts mounted by Black communities in the face of indifference and hostility from federal and local governments, and the legacy of Jim Crow in the modern-day judicial system. The result is an essential reckoning with America’s history of racial violence. Photos. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Devastating.... [A] remarkable book."

Fresh Air, NPR - Dave Davies

"Defying national suppression and indifference, By Hands Now Known vividly conveys the stories of those whose lives were destroyed by previously undocumented racial violence between 1920 and 1960.… Margaret A. Burnham, drawing on a painstakingly constructed database, launches a vital and restorative reckoning with the reprehensible devastation of lives, communities, justice, and memory."

Martha Minow

"[Shows] the ‘chronic, unpredictable violence’ that shaped daily life in the South.... Recounting such stories is part of the important work that this book does.... But historical retrieval is only part of Burnham’s goal with this book, which also makes a case for reparations, to pick up ‘where law has failed.’... With justice so elusive, even a simple acknowledgment of the facts is a necessary step. As some of the survivors put it when they first heard from Burnham and her team: ‘I thought I’d never get this call.’"

New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

"If you truly want to understand why police and vigilantes who kill Black people are rarely held to account, you must read this extraordinary book.… By far the most sobering and most illuminating work I have ever read on the long history of state-sanctioned racial violence in the US."

Robin D. G. Kelley

"[This] narratively lively yet stunningly exhaustive interrogation of Jim Crow laws retained from slavery, misconstrued after Reconstruction, and nationalized during Plessy v. Ferguson, ought to become indispensable to all legal and civil rights considerations, and the cause célèbre of our time—reparations."

David Levering Lewis

"A work by turns shocking, moving, and though-provoking. It merits the attention of anyone interested in the historical roots of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and, more recently, Black Lives Matter.... By Hands Now Known is one of those rare books that forces us to consider in new ways the nature of our politics and society and the enduring legacy of our troubled past."

New York Review of Books - Eric Foner

★ 07/08/2022

Racial violence in the Jim Crow South shaped many Black people's relationships with the law and the courts in the first half of the 20th century. This violence was essential to establishing Jim Crow legal systems and enforcement. In her first book, Burnham (law, Northeastern Univ.; director, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project) uncovers the hidden and unknown victims of Jim Crow violence through detailed research into newspapers, trial testimony, transcripts, and legislation. Based on a database created by Northeastern's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, this series of case studies focuses on Alabama's Middle District. In six sections, Burnham demonstrates how Black Americans challenged racial violence and the legal system that supported it, including efforts in Northern states to thwart rendition of fugitives back to the South, where their safety could not be guaranteed. Other sections examine the role of small-town sheriffs in perpetrating violence and the ebb and flow of Department of Justice efforts to prosecute and win convictions in civil rights cases. A final eloquent chapter makes clear the need for reparations to Black communities. VERDICT Readers interested in the long history of the civil rights struggle should definitely read this.—Chad E. Statler

Library Journal

★ 2022-08-26
Searing indictment of the all-encompassing violence of Jim Crow and a persuasive case for long-overdue reparations.

The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, writes Burnham, “blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement.” Every White citizen of a Jim Crow state was effectively deputized to enforce racially discriminatory laws and customs, even to the point of murdering a supposed offender, a common practice of the police as well. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, offers a vast roster of cases that highlight this formal/informal system of oppression. For example, bus drivers throughout the South had carte blanche to commit violence on any Black rider who dared insist on his or her dignity, while Black men were routinely lynched for responding the wrong way to a police officer—to say nothing of being in a White neighborhood without apparent reason. Most of the author’s illuminating and disturbing examples come from the mid-20th-century because abundant federal records exist (even if state and community records have been suppressed) and because living descendants of Jim Crow victims can often be found to corroborate official and civilian crimes against them. These include a Black man hanged for alleged sexual assault; a Black woman driven from her city to the friendlier climes of Detroit after a botched abortion procedure; a Black soldier killed for demanding equal treatment, one of countless Black service members who agitated for voting rights and equal employment even as they “continued to protest Jim Crow transportation and police brutality.” Burnham closes with a closely argued case for paying reparations to the descendants of victims. “Such a program is both practicable and politically feasible because the beneficiaries constitute a finite group,” she writes, adding, “Material reparation should be a part of a larger program of redress, including public educational initiatives and memory projects like memorial markers.”

An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.

Kirkus Reviews