By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
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.

1140914140
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
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.

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By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham

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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: 401,893
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

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