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

Author: Margaret A. Burnham

Narrator: Diana Blue

Unabridged: 10 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/27/2022


Synopsis

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.

About Margaret A. Burnham

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University. 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Colleen on February 18, 2023

If I could award this book a 10, I would do it. Margaret Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and this book represents research and ideas that have advanced the project. I will not attempt to do this book justice because it w......more

Goodreads review by Bruce on October 16, 2022

Want to know why CRT is needed? Want to know why we have to teach our children ALL of our history? read this book.......more

Goodreads review by Mari C.L. on October 10, 2022

This was really well-researched and clearly articulated — a real challenge when working to illuminate lost histories across multiple disciplines. Burnham does well to parse legal language and logics at work (and ignored) while shedding a light on atrocities overlooked in other accounts of Jim Crow a......more

Goodreads review by Shelley on August 05, 2023

This was a heavy book to read. I actually had to read another lighter book with it because it was so intense. Even though it was difficult, I felt like I needed to read instances that people would think could never happen. Like a man, his wife and children walking home from church and a white young......more

Goodreads review by Katie on April 09, 2023

4 stars rtc......more