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By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners cover

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

Margaret Burnham

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By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

By Hands Now Known was a finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, Chicago Public Library, and Publishers Weekly. 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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Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Year
2022
ISBN-13
9780393867862
Genre
History
Topics
Jim Crow era racial violenceLegal system and civil rightsLynching and law enforcement

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