By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

A Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
One of the Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best books of 2022
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. 25 black-and-white illustrations
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of October 2022: History is often presented as a series of iconic moments. We know Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat in 1955; the March on Washington took place in 1963; Bloody Sunday took place on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. These are essential events in our history, but just as important—and more difficult to convey—are the seemingly limitless ways that the Jim Crow legal system allowed everyday white people to intimidate and literally murder everyday Black people as a way to maintain the status quo. These methods were more common and effective than the more publicized events recorded by history. They cast racism and racial violence as casual and routine—and they were seldom noticed for very long, if at all. Margaret A. Burnham shines a light on that forgotten history with case after case, telling the stories of everyday people and building an argument for reparations. By Hands Now Known is uniquely illuminating, and it will open people’s minds to the truth. — Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor