By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

by Margaret A. Burnham

A Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction



One of NPR's Books We Love in 2022 • Named a Best Book of the 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, American History, Law, Historical

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 27, 2022

Reviews

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 would be far longer than I have ever written on Goodreads but I strongly recommend it to everyone. First, the introduction is one of the strongest and best written I have read. Burnham focuses on the Jim Crow Era and exposes how the rights recognized in the Civil War Amendments were abandoned and the impact this had on African Americans. In the last several years, books have been written about incidents like the Colfax Massacre, among others but we are only now beginning to learn of the violence and terrorism that were part of everyday life for blacks in the South at the time.

The book is exhaustively researched: from judicial research to newspapers, to interviewing survivors. It is brilliantly written and highly appealing to the historian or anyone interested in obtained a more complete picture of the Jim Crow Era.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

(review copy from netgalley)

This text examines the parts of Jim Crow laws and racialized crimes, in many cases murders, of Black Americans that were never reported, or would have been lost to history if not for some archival evidence. The brutal murder that starts off the text is heart-breaking, of a sixty-something year-old Black woman in Donaldsonville who was holding a can of oil at a store. The white shopkeeper told her to set it down and get out which she did. He then followed her outside of the store and murdered her with an ax handle. He was never held to account.

Too many people still think of Jim Crow laws an 'ancient history,' the author asserts. "They may recognize the names Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth, and know something about lynching, but they likely have little sense of the quotidian violence that shaped routine experiences like grocery shopping and tied the nation's legal institutions to its racial culture." As I write this, it's weeks after a white supremacist gunman opened fire in a grocery store in Buffalo, in a heinous hate crime that targeted Black shoppers, of whom he murdered several. The fact that what happened to this woman in Donaldsonville still happens to this day, in 2022, is beyond abominable and I don't have words for it.

The other misunderstood/little understood area that the author wants to address is the myth that Jim Crow laws only operated in the South. They very much operated, in many cases just as violently, in the North of the United States, and followed families who were fleeing from the worst of Jim Crow to places like the west coast and California. It followed these Black families and populations wherever they went.

As the author asserts, "It was not so much tied to a geographical place [Jim Crow laws] as it was a national project, supported not just by the violence of 'the locals' but by a national legal system that endorsed and sustained a missionary commitment to a future of perpetual white rule." These powerful, searing words serve as a reminder of the work and reckoning America still needs to do to reconcile with this part not only of its past but also its present.

For readers who are not aware of other little-known atrocities of racialized violence, such as the Colfax massacre in Colfax, Louisiana on Easter Sunday 1873, this text will illuminate and fill out the gaps in knowledge for those wishing to know more. In this case, although 97 members of the white mob were indicted under federal law, only 9 were charged. If this sounds familiar it's because it should...the disproportionate amount of white perpetrators of racialized crimes overwhelmingly get not very much in the way of legal consequences, if at all, or if they do, they get reduced sentences. Compare this to the overly high amounts of incarceration and criminalization of Black populations and the results are staggering.

What happened to George Floyd was an extension of Jim Crow--the police officers who murdered him indeed performed a public execution in 2020, and it is not radical at all to say that it was a lynching. Anyone who knows the deeper history and implications of lynchings also knows this to be true.

The author discusses significant cases such as that of Reverend A.H. Hampton from the 1860s.

Any reader seeking to understand better the links of why transatlantic slavery and Jim Crow laws have continued to reverberate and are still issues that play out against Black Americans to this day needs to read this powerful, well-researched text.

Of particular interest, the author devotes much of the text to exploring several cases that occurred in Louisiana, the primary area of my research.

Readers who also want to know more about the history of the NAACP and how they worked to fight against racialized violence will benefit from this text.

This book is so much more than segregated seating on buses and other forms of public transport, or vicious murders that happened and went unreported in many cases. It also examines the ways the law was built to maximize punitive measures against Black Americans in the Reconstruction Era that are still in many ways in effect today.

As well, the book details forms of protest that Black populations engaged in and are now engaging in, particularly in Birmingham Alabama. While everyone knows the name Emmett Till (or should), few have heard of Robert Sands, fifteen years old, who was shot in 1950 as he passed through a white neighborhood in Birmingham. He died from his wounds.

There's also a section toward the end of the book that goes into the issue of reparations, and key considerations that must be taken into account.

[Mari C.L. Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 and it’s after-effects.

The sections are broken down in a way that allows the book to slowly build, and the closing chapter on reparations was precise, forceful, and brilliant.

I’m very glad I read this, and it’s going immediately in my essential American History and Culture section; I cannot emphasize enough how well Burnham has presented academic content accessibly and engagingly, despite the challenges presented by working interdiciplinarily and shining a harsh light on terrible histories, largely yet to be acknowledged and reckoned with. Along with a firm case for reparations, she stresses the need for official recognition of harm and apology:

“Apology must be the norm, not the exception. Not least of the reasons to apologize* is to honor those who did not survive the virulence of Jim Crow terror. Their skeletal vestiges, often never properly interred, remain unattended, unmarked, and scattered across history’s terrain. Apologies render them visible, urgent, and—despite the passage of time—still morally deserving.”

*examples in the text: state representatives formally apologizing to descendants of those lost.

A standout from the final full chapter for me:

“The practice of immunizing the perpetrators of racial murder changes the fundamental structure of law. It assigned an explicit racializing function to law and law enforcers. Rather than working as public guardians of community safety, law enforcement officials operate as protectors of privilege.”

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 sailor is with some buddies, sees him and jumps down, strikes him with a harpoon and kills him in front of his family. All because he is black. It ends with the need and way to make reparations that needs to happen for all people to move forward.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

…I found that many subjects were taboo from the white man’s point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negroes were…slavery; social equality…the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or many self-assertion on the Part of the Negro…

- Richard Wright

The problem of time renders reparative justice theory a messy affair. The concept of repair requires a line drawn between the past and the present, but such lines are inherently artificial. For enduring injustices, the past is by definition the embodied present. Those who survived histories of injustice are always in dialogue with those who did not. Some things are not “over,” as proofs on the afterlife of slavery teach. It is only the beneficiaries of past injustices who are served by holding on to the illusion of finite and “done” past.

- Margaret A. Burnham

Jim Crow was the name given to legally sanctioned lawlessness enabling discrimination—and much worse—of Black Americans between the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement, encompassing one of the most horrific and shameful eras in American history. It was made possible by the subversion of section one of the 14th Amendment, one of three post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Ignoring its intent was made possible because of cynical political compromises, perverse court rulings, and state laws intended to reinstate the conditions antebellum enslavement. Margaret Burnham’s clear narrative describes some of the most egregious acts of this age by naming names. It should be, in my opinion, a companion volume to Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name.

Based how they vote and act, the majority of American whites think teaching, or even mentioning, histories like this is detrimental to race relations. They have concocted fictions like “reverse discrimination,” unaccountably terrorized Blacks with injustices ranging from lynching to petty acts of disparagement, perverted access tofair housing laws, and most recently, been successful in proliferating state laws to outlaw teaching of critical race theory, a graduate school level idea that is non-existent in elementary and secondary education. What they really fear is widespread knowledge of the history Burnham describes, of legal and law enforcement-initiated and -sanctioned injustice, violence, and the legacies they create.

To Burnham’s everlasting credit, she is having none of it. Despite the distorted public record, she takes the remaining fragments evidence to make a compelling argument of why history should inform the present and future. Victims often had little more than a name remembered by loved ones who became fewer with the passage of time. Perpetrators were rarely—if ever—held accountable. And lynch mobs didn’t have rosters. In a total darkness of truth, many became community leaders, prominent citizens, or police who thrived on selective enforcement.

Burnham begins her narrative by providing examples of rendition, which has its roots in the practice of returning enslaved persons who escaped to non-slave holding states. Justification to do so could be found in the original draft of the U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Abolitionists in the northern states mostly defied this, leading to passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, a law that historians agree was integral to the beginning of the Civil War a little more than a decade later. It fined people protecting enslaved Blacks who managed to escape. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, arguably the worst in its history (although the current court is giving it a run for its money), further upheld this practice. Not until the passage of the post-Civil War 13th Amendment were these provisions struck from law.

The reactionary backlash to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments led to a political bargain in the wake of the election of 1876 to make Rutherford B. Hayes president and to end Reconstruction. Jim Crow reasserted many of the injustices of slavery upon Black Americans, some were even far worse. Separate and unjust legalisms limited and outright eliminated rights of political representation, employment, education, movement, and of life itself for Black Americans. Law enforcement combined with vigilante justice legitimized unequal enforcement to define and victims as perpetrators. Selective non- and enforcement of laws, not holding people accountable for what they did or even identifying keeping them as anonymous as possible created a publicly rationalized amnesia. Even soldiers who served in the world wars were not immune to racially motivated violence and death when they returned home. The so-called “lost cause” of the South was being redeemed to turns lies of injustice into more oppressive power.

When slightly less than one-half — perhaps even slightly more than one-half — of the current American population would rather have history covered up, ignored, or altered with myths, the stories Burnham recounts cannot be deemed as hyperbolic. Those offended by them believe it is better to stick with narratives that don’t look back at history too closely. That’s why the invention of critical race theory (CRT) and the fear of the lie American elementary and secondary education is vital to the illusion they feel compelled to create. Inventing and elevating lies is central to their deepest hates and goals. It is malignant to the pluralism which is essential to the idea of modern democratic/republican governance.

Its goal is to create a new authoritarianism housed under the appearance of a constitution based on the whims and lies of authoritarian populism. What keeps them up at night are worries about how “others” can be blamed for every evil in the world and make a public policy out of it. Critics for years have pointed out how John Wayne movies have turned fiction into a selective history for large numbers of Americans. Burnham’s evocation of actual history demonstrates “the good old days” of ignorant perception had nothing good about them when it came to justice and fairness. And they still don't.

[Katie ratherbereadinggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars rtc

[Carol Kearns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book NEEDED to be written. The stories of Black Americans that were brutally killed during the Jim Crow era of America—active service members, veterans, working Americans, some women, young and old—needed to be put down on paper so we would know the names of the victims as well as the perpetrators of this horrible, senseless violence. This would be an excellent resource for research into this time period as well as information on redress and/or reparations, which is covered in the final chapter of the book. This was a book that had me shaking my head numerous times at what Black Americans living in Jim Crow states were forced to live under, and the entrenched lack of support from law enforcement (local, state, and Federal) that survivors faced.

[Jarrett Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

“By Hands Now Known” tells the story of Black men and women murdered in the Jim Crow South either by the state or whose murder went overlooked and unpunished by the state. Burnham marshals an extensive list of Jim Crow murders all ignored and effectively sanctioned by the state—whether Black soldiers killed by white bus drivers or Black citizens abducted and killed for trying to register to vote or Black men and women murdered by the police. Burnham shows how the state, by choosing not to prosecute white-on-Black violence, sanctioned that violence and deprived Black families of safety and justice.

[OvercommuniKate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oral history is good to preserve, and I'm glad the author was able to record the oral history, but there's zero organization, no over-arching legal analysis, and no statistical analysis. I thought there'd be actual meat to this book based on the rave reviews.

[Frank Hoppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be part of all American History curricula in both grade and high school. It should also be required reading for all law enforcement training.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am going to struggle writing a review for this book. And I am going to rant a bit, probably. It is related to the book, and bigger things, trust me. Don't like it? Don't read it.

My rating is low, not because I don't think the topic is an important one to write about, but because I think Burnham was operating from a compromised premise. The real cases she details are absolutely fucking awful in their details, but to write from the standpoint that the Federal Government was not involved, or, at the very least, was impotent to change the reality on the ground, is a ridiculous and unsupportable notion.


She states early on that she believed the Federal Government was “oblivious to the long-term stakes” and “that it did not grasp what the problem was” surrounding the obvious violence and oppression of Jim Crow America. I fundamentally disagree, and oddly, many of her references counter her own claim (agree or not, the US Supreme Court and ALL police are part of the federal government, somehow). It was, and is even more so now, quite obvious the Federal Government played a huge, foundational role in promoting, allowing, and then ignoring the racial violence before, during, and after the era of Jim Crow. It legalized slavery, ruled Black People were 3/5 of a person, that "separate but equal" was legal... Ad nauseam.

The US Government, on all levels, was and is a racist system that willfully and purposefully excludes Black People (amongst other marginalized/oppressed groups, but Black people were slaves, and the violence to them has been ultimately terrifying) from participating as citizens, with the same rights and opportunities as White People. This is indisputably factual. White Privilege is real. If you disagree, you are a racist and I have zero interest in anything you have to say about anything. Yep, I said that.

Burnham makes good points about violence, political power, and citizenship as it relates to Jim Crow era realities like rendition, kidnapping, and immunity. But I could never get past her seeming blindness to all of this awfulness being rubber-stamped by the Federal Government and its willful disregard for the codified laws of the nation as it relates to Black People. Everything that has happened to Black People has been witnessed, first hand, by the US Federal Government. Hell, much of it was sanctioned by them. Yes, "them", as in human beings, real, live persons who made actual choices. The Federal Government chose to do - or allow to be done by others - every single thing that has happened to Black People. Every. Single. Thing. And they did NOTHING of substance but prevaricate, obfuscate, and demur. Fuck off with your "State's Rights" arguments. Seriously, using that as a reason to refuse rights to another human being is fucked up beyond belief. Think of all the things the Federal Government could have done, but did not do. Then ask yourself how anyone in government can claim the US is not racist at its very core.

I believe we need reparations for slavery. 100%. No doubt. It can be sorted, figured out, decided, and it should be done. Before we do anything else as a country, this needs to be done. How our Federal Government can look at itself and not be so horribly ashamed of their past actions (and present inactions) is sickening. They made the laws to allow slavery, they need to fix the massive systemic problems that intersect in every aspect of this country because of the aftereffects of slavery. If they do not, the US will always be a failed nation. Always. And don't tell me it is "better than Russia (or some other country)" or "if you don't like it, then leave". Those are facile statements that absolutely ignore the fact the US prides itself on its laws and the rights its citizens supposedly have, but this pride is based on lies, violence, and folly. Ask Black People - or LGBTQ people, or poor people, or disabled people, or... - about rights, and laws, and the like. Yeah, point made.

Burnham succeeds best when she tells the previously untold stories of Jim Crow violence. These and other instances must be brought to the light for those who want to read more about shitty White People who they thought were actually not shitty. The book strays when she tries to make the violence and oppression to be dispersed, localized, and disconnected. The Federal Government has operated with an open-faced White Supremacist agenda since the first wealthy, landed, White, "christian" males floated over to the continent and crafted a government, a government to serve their needs and wants. Until it admits its guilt, and the impacts these choices have had on the nation, nothing really changes. Books like this will tell us more about the past, but how much more do we really need to know to accept it was all planned and orchestrated by people who decided Black People were non-human commodities that they could do with as they pleased, and then just dispose of them? The people that should read this book most assuredly will not, and those that claim "they didn't know" until they read this book are awful liars.

I am unsure whether or not this book does much to instigate the seismic changes the US needs to address its history of slavery, Jim Crow, and now-normalized hate. How many more terrible stories of racial violence do you need to accept the truth and make change?

[NICK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seems like a very important book that needed to be done. Very boring and dry with the outrage listed like a laundry list. A great book written poorly.

[David Crumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading as we think about the terrorism of lynching
As a life-long journalist focused on racial, cultural and religious diversity, I've read countless books about the traumas and triumphs that are part of our American experience with diversity from memoirs and biographies to peer-reviewed histories to novels to poetry. These accounts involve Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, LBGTQ Americans—and so many other minorities among our neighbors who have suffered from bigotry and worse.
This book is different—period.
Prior to this book, I often had thought of America's legacy of White terrorism in the form of lynching as largely a nameless and faceless era of tragedy. We must understand and confront its legacy, I have always known, of course. And, there are many excellent books about this ugly era of American life. Among the essentials I have kept handy on the shelf in my office are theologian James H. Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which is a provocative meditation on the interconnection between lynching and faith in Black American history, and also The Light and the Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader a collection of writings by Ida B. Wells, the crusading Black journalist who led efforts to uncover the truth about lynching at the risk of her own life. Beyond reading these books, as a journalist, I have reported and written dozens of stories over the decades about these issues, including several interviews with Cone before his death in 2018. As journalists who care about America's future, we can do no less.
So, why is this book such a game changer?
What scholar and attorney Margaret Burnam, the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, has done in this volume is to help us tear the veil (or perhaps the hood) off this long campaign of White terrorism by explaining in painstaking detail how we can, indeed, learn about the real criminals who committed these horrific acts.
As I was mentioning this book to friends in a social gathering last night, one person said, "Perhaps we should be careful about blaming descendants today for the sins of the past."
And I understand that reaction, which is so prevalent today when blame seems to come raining down close to people living today. Burnham zeroes in on that desire to leave these deeply troubling cases behind a kind of gauzy grief over the past. She indicts that effort as "manufactured uncertainty."
Instead, she calls on all of us, especially journalists and scholars and other interested people, to help create a massive accounting of what happened in these lynchings. Some of that research already is underway; much needs to be completed in the years ahead.
Why do this?
Because, she writes, there still is need of reparation in many cases. She doesn't let readers off the hook easily. "Apologies and truth-telling are not enough," she writes. She calls for the creation of a larger restorative structure in America that can investigate long-dormant cases and determine what should and can be done for specific descendants in specific cases.
This is essential reading, I think, for all of us who care about justice in America, who believe that such justice is a tap root that extends back to our Declaration of Independence's claims that collectively we are summoning a vision of a new kind of republic in which all of us truly believe in human rights.

[Jessie Bastos · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is necessary to read about events that occured in our past that are beginning to come to light, transforming "individual tragedies into collective experiences." Important takeaways from the book:

- To be captured as an escaped slave was in one way better than being captured as a free Black person wanted for an alleged crime in another state during the Jim Crow era- a slave had monetary value as someone's property and would usually be beaten but not killed. (p.54)

- "Jim Crow's most notorious divide was perhaps the one separating two races on a streetcar." (p.73)

- Although bus drivers "were not trained in law enforcement, in many places they were authorized to carry handguns, blackjacks, and other weapons...for the express purpose of enforcing Jim Crow." "The interior of the bus was like a prison yard: slights could swiftly turn into insults that could morph into violence." (p.76)

- "Federal surveillance reports about Black protests and predictions about likely hot spots were generated on an almost daily basis at the direction of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover." (p.94)

- "Black neighborhoods were cordoned off, their streets unpaved and their shotgun houses firetraps." (p.102)

- Bus drivers "resented the soldiers who refused to defer to them, and the military uniforms signaled a status more elevated than their own." (p.110)

- When it came to Black soldiers stationed in the South during WWII or returning from war, problems stemmed in part because "the Northern negro is unaccustomed to and resents restrictions imposed by custom and law in the South" and "the negro 'white collar' class, teachers, doctors, etc. have not hesitated to agitate for 'racial equility' contrary to the customs of the community." (p.119)

- "The insurgency of individual Black women was extraordinary." "To the present time, stereotypes of Black female personhood are referents to this stance: insolent, defiant in the face of authority, volatile, sullen, mistrusting, not disposed to the easy smile." "Women riders passed these manners on to their children...sharpening their class consciousness" and nourishing a counterculture. (p.120-121)

- "Competition from a Black landowner was more than some whites could tolerate." (p.136)

- Law enforcement "benefited from loaning out its coercive power" to white vigilante groups, and "to gain maximum control over Blacks, it was essential for terror to become law." (p.155)

- "Whereas the tenacious confederate 'states' rights' narrative outlived its usefulness in other arenas of federal law enforcement, it defined, confined, and realigned civil rights initiatives until the late 1960s. Insurance fraud, tax evasion, antitrust, labor law, and kidnapping all became subject to enhanced federal policing and enforcement. But not civil rights crimes." (p.164)

- "In Birmingham in the 1940s, a Black person-any Black person-could have been killed by a white person-any white person. And thus every Black person had to make peace with the burden and duty of resistance, reckon with premature death, determine their personal point of no return...whether or not they wanted to." (p.191)

- "the implication was that every Black man was a potential rapist, and therefore a criminal. This then, was anticipatory racial policing." (p.200)

- "The lacunae, in some ways intentionally created, in our knowledge about Black militancy in the age of Jim Crow." (p.203)

- "Jobs in the coal industry were also drying up for Black workers. Mechanization favored whites, who had a lock on all the skilled jobs. In the 1950s, over 70 percent of Black miners in the Alabama mines lost their jobs. Though they had made up the majority of the workforce in the 1940s, by the close of the twentieth century, Black miners constituted just 13 percent of miners in the country." (p.208)

- Journalist and editor of The Birmingham World newspaper, Emory Jackson, kept those outside the city alerted to Birmingham's violence, speaking "not just to his Black constituents but also to his white readers, aiming at their better angels and always hopeful that the right word at the right time would strike a chord." (p.209)

- "In virtually every case, if there was a coroner's inquest, the ruling was 'justifiable homicide.'" (p.213). Other euphemisms for police killings have included "conduct unbecoming an officer" and allowing that some officers may be "a little too quick on the trigger." (p.138)

- R.L. Meyers "grabbed his gun and, within minutes, shot Robert Sands in the back." "The crime, apparently: walking in a white neighborhood after dark." (p.213)

- "Lynch Law"- the interlocking state, federal, and local practices sustaining lynching. (p.214)

- The "Red Record"- the book written by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The term referred to police murder. (p.214)

- "It is now, even as it was in the days of slavery, an unpardonable sin for a Negro to resist a white man, no matter how unjust or unprovoked the white man's attack may be." (p.215)

- "But we have yet to fully account for police killings, which were, because they bore the endorsement of the state, in a sense more insidious than lynching." (p.215)

- A KKK White Knights internal instructional guide ranked the 'actions' they could take-
1. category one, the least violent- threatening phone calls and visits
2. category two- burning a cross "to instill community fear among Negroes and as an advertisement for recruitment of radical whites"
3. category three- "beating or flogging; burning of property; wild shooting into property; bombings"
4. category four, the most violent- extermination

- The convict-leasing system is "yet another thinly disguised form of kidnapping." (p.237)

- "To build a social order that does not depend on carceral punishment to address social challenges, it is necessary to contront these root causes, revive the tenets of antislavery abolition, probe the myriad facets of slavery's afterlife in law, and embrace the global movement for reparation and redress." (p.237)

- "The trial provided a semblance of transparency while obscuring and compounding the harms." (p.258)

- Reparation "picks up where law has failed." It involves "recognition, truth-telling, apology, and payment- owed to all the victims of Jim Crow injustice." It acknowledges "the hold of the past on the present" and "is meant to be corrective and restorative in nature, not distributive." (p.262-263)

- "At a minimum, an official record must be created." (p.267)

- "An apology amounts to an official determination that the victim died at the hands of the state or that the state was in some way culpable." "It constitutes, or is an invitation to constitute, a fresh justice-respecting relationship." "Apology must be the norm, not the exception." (p.269)

- "Some theorists argue that reparation is justifiable only when legal standards extant at the time of the wrong were violated." "Claims for reparation for enslavement would on this ground fail because slavery did not violate positive law." (p.270)

- "After the overthrow of slavery, Jim Crow reset the terms of racial subordination and reinscribed political domination, economic subordination, and social subservience." (p.271)

[Diana (Reading While Mommying) Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margaret Burnham, the director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, unearths and exposes incidents of everyday murder and violence experienced by Black people in the American South from 1920 - 1960. Unlike modern social media's ability to bring atrocities to light almost instantaneously, during Jim Crow, Black people were routinely killed without any form of justice for their killers--or even mentions in the local newspapers. In several cases discussed in this book, their relatives didn't even know how their ancestors were killed.

These stories are heartbreaking, from an elderly Black woman murdered by a white grocer to Black WW2 soldiers killed by white bus drivers--yet it's fascinating how Burnham brings them to light and gives these victims the justice of recognition. Not only does she bring these stories to life through their retelling (based on extensive research by her team), she also analyzes how these instances were indicative of the social system of the time--a culture where white people were allowed to terrorize and murder Black citizens with no repercussions--and easy acquittals by all-white juries. Particularly infuriating was the story of the Black man who, when getting off of a bus, drunkenly asked a white man to get a drink with him. This infuriated the white man who killed himand left him to die in a ditch. Not shockingly, the white man was acquitted--and was even photographed smiling in his booking photo, seemingly knowing he lived in a world where he would be found innocent. Burnham's team tracked this killer to Florida, where he just passed away in February of this year. Here was a white man who got to live out his whole life, after not being accountable for taking the life of a young Black man.

These "Black lives" mattered and deserve to be recognized, even if justice for their deaths wasn't found. Burnham has done that--and she's done it so well. You'll be infuriated, fascinated, and galvanized by this searing nonfiction tour de force.

[Diogenes Grief · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burnham gives us another important book that highlights the atrocious acts protected under the Jim Crow laws of the south, and casts a harsh light on more individuals who were culprits in these crimes, all god-fearing Christians and bonafide racists, by name and complicity. No small feat in research, knowing that half the population was guilty of reinforcing this heinous period of time, and to which we are obviously still struggling with as certain gullible threads of the societal fabric seek to roll back time to once again dominate the lives of non-Caucasians, women, non-Christians, and the LGBT+ community.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s The Year in Hate and Extremism Report 2022 gives a nice primer on the forces undermining liberal democracy, to include Fox f-ing News and social-media structures with their money-grubbing algorithms. From the White Nationalism movement fueled by the asinine “Great Replacement Theory”, to cowboy libertarianism and fascist-worship, it too is worth the read, because this is the true enemy of the United States right now.

If the Idiocracy reigns, this book will be black-listed and heaped upon the dark Dionysian fires of their pyres, Confederate flags, horned helmets, AR-15s, and all.

In blunt honesty, I’m actually kind-of tired of being so “woke”. I wish I could be blissfully ignorant, easily deceived, blindly selfish, unenlightened by history and psychology, undereducated, emotionally stunted, craven and idolatrous. But as a godless heathen who actually wishes to see peace on Earth and the elimination of suffering for all, I’m forced to endure the madness of our era, and be as proactive as I can in stopping that madness from consuming the country and destroying the planet.

Que será, será.

[Mike Boczenowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you hear “Jim Crow” you probably thin segregated lunch counters and the back of the bus. This was the least of it. Jim Crow was state sanctioned murder of African Americans on a whim. Jim Crow was the US justice department refusing to investigate multiple murders by police on the constitutional notion of “states’ rights”. This is a book that should be read to fully comprehend 20th century American history. Ask your librarian for it and push to make it available. (Thank you, Billerica, MA Publuc Library!)

[Farrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I didn’t quite grasp before I started reading it, that it is basically a recitation of horrible cases of violence and atrocity committed against Black people during Jim Crow. Of course, no justice was ever served. So it’s very depressing and there’s no narrative arc. But still important to document. Certainly black people got ZERO benefit from police (and were in fact harmed without impunity or consequence) and of course this is still ongoing in many ways.

[Jaz Boon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gut wrenching. An in-depth, but accessible, look into the legalized brutality of Jim Crow and the resistance that grew out of American’s racial apartheid scheme. Harrowing stories of death after death committed at the hands of police, deputized bus drivers, and the complicity of the justice system at times. Well worth the read to understand the depth of the terror and the struggle for a brighter future.

[Debra Foster Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

A study of police killings and state support of Jim Crow murder by them.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Michigan history that was unfamiliar to me is an added bonus to this one.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to read. The author's extensive research and powerful narrative voice make the history painfully clear.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Hands Now Known is a compelling record of the harms done to Black citizens in this country between about 1920 and 1950 that, unlike lynchings, were perpetrated by law enforcement or investigated by a federal office of civil rights. Burnham, the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, organizes her investigation into several sections that highlight particular types of injustices, including rendition, where one state requests another state to return a suspect accused of a crime; and racial transportation, where armed bus drivers enforced legal segregation on buses. In the case of rendition, northern states governors had to determine whether returning a suspect to a Jim Crow state would send him to a death sentence at the hands of a lynch mob. There are cases where the northern governor decided against sending a man back to near-certain death; however, the escapees still would never see their homes again. The well-known segregation of buses was put under special duress during and just after World War II, as Black servicemen began to feel they should not be treated so unfairly as they served their country alongside white men. There are many instances where even the smallest infringement of the rigid rules resulted in death—with no charge or punishment of the perpetrator.

Burnham points out the way federal agencies and courts failed to enforce laws despite flagrant cases of injustice, often due to cozy relationships or misplaced concern about the victims' role and background. Time and time again, Thurgood Marshall, as head of the NAACP and the ACLU, attempts to seek justice and is unsuccessful due to the unwillingness of authorities to interfere with states and municipalities. The stories told here—of people speaking their truth, minding their business, attempting to register people to vote—show that, even in the darkest days of the Jim Crow era, there was always resistance to injustice among the Black communities, but little attention was given to cases that were effectively hidden and forgotten. This book is an effort to correct the record.

This book is also an impassioned plea for restitution for the victims, families, and communities most afflected by this horrific violence. While others have made the broader case for reparations, Burnham argues that these groups are especially entitled to both reparations and apologies: "For enduring injustices, the past is by definition the embodied present."

[Natalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Renowned legal scholar 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 in By hands now known : Jim Crow's legal executioners / Margaret A. Burnham. Released in September 2022, Margaret Burnham maps the criminal legal system from Slavery, to Jim Crow, through to the legal structures of today.

Burnham focuses on the Jim Crow era and how the rights recognized in the Civil War Amendments were never fully granted to former slaves. Instead, the North all but abandoned the region, leaving local law enforcement free reign to continue to torment, torture, and otherwise dehumanize Black citizens. For the most part, these "legal executioners" have never had to answer for their crimes against the Black man. Instead, legal systems operated to help bury these injustices, and often, protected the perpetrator of violence while further victimizing the victim, by turning them into the criminal.

Burnham writes to fix this wrong. Like an extensive police blotter, Burnham brings to light cases of murder and other inhumanities suffered by Black people in the Jim Crow South, with names, dates, and other facts that had been, until now, erased from the record. For years, government institutions and public guardians tasked with community safety chose to operate as protectors of privilege over humanity. Burnham is hoping to change that by shining a light on the darkness that we pretend doesn't exist.

You might ask yourself, why is this important? What justice can come from unearthing these skeletons in our closet? For so long we denied the skeletons existed; we claimed they were excised long ago. Recent events have illustrated how the skeletons are there, and always have been. Ignoring them doesn't seem to work; it has only caused more damage. It's time we as a nation acknowledge and reckon with these tragedies from our past. By apologizing for past wrongs, we can acknowledge the harm done and finally start to heal.

[Sandie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Margaret A. Burnham is a legal scholar book and founder of the The Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law (CRRJ), which is an academic program that documents historical anti-Black racial violence in relationship to failures of the criminal justice system. Begun in 2007, CRRJ also works for redress and reconciliation and has established a database, The Burnham Nobles Digital Archives, which documents over a 1,000 cases of anti-Black killings between 1930 and 1954 in the Jim Crow South. By Hands Unknown is a formidable and persuasive outcome of CRRJ's research and mission.

The book addresses both the legal and extra-legal reign of violence and terror conducted by lawmen and laymen to keep Southern Black people in their place after the Civil War and the refusal of the many same Black citizens to stand their ground collectively and individually. After a cogent introduction, Burnham uses the stories of over thirty families that fell victim to unhinged sheriffs, angry bus drivers,  company goons, and ordinary white civilians who murdered, tortured, and brutalized with impunity. These men and women and their families found almost no recourse; federal, state, and local courts rarely gave them justice. Southern communities even turned a deaf ear to prominent Southern white families who demanded justice for victims. The murders Burnham covers and the failure of the Federal judiciary are profoundly shocking. 

She begins her stories with Southern Blacks who fled certain lynching and were welcomed by Detroit Michigan's strong Black community and aided by the local chapter of the NAACP and Michigan's white governors who refused to honor extradition back south. 

After Detroit she returns to the South during WW2 where Jim Crow's Southern custom and white supremacy clashed with Black soldiers from both the North and South who were empowered by the equality they knew from the North and experienced in combat along white solders.  Burnham writes that "between 1941 and 1946, at least 28 active-duty servicemen lost their lives in the US for refusing to accept the humiliations of Jim Crow. Hundreds more suffered non-fatal gunshot wounds, incarceration in civilian jails, chain-gang sentences, and military sanctions. The legal response from the military was tepid at best. And state and local civil authorities were outright hostile." Army Lieutenant Jackie Robinson was court-martialed for refusing to move to the rear of an army bus in Fort Hood, Texas. Sometimes, both Black and white soldiers sought to protect their fellow Black soldiers and passengers. It is hard to comprehend the deaths of ordinary people and US servicemen, so casually shot dead by bus drivers. 

Burnham tackles the routine and often deadly violence committed by notorious local sheriff's and their deputies. She names the lawmen as she continues to tell us the tragic stories of individuals and their families and casts her eyes again on the complicity of the state, local, and federal governments. Although a Civil Rights Unit was established in 1939 by FDR and lead by the future Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy any action by the Unit and the Federal Government on behalf of Black Southern victims of murderous white supremacist sheriffs or civilian vigilantes were continually thwarted by Hoover's FBI, state and local law enforcement, Southern Federal authorities, and a devastating series of US Supreme Court rulings that insisted civil rights violations of Black Americans, no matter how heinous, fell outside of the jurisdiction of the Federal government and were responsibility of the very state and local authorities who were perpetrating or turning a blind eye to the murders of their Black citizens. These Supreme Court rulings remained the law of the land until the late 1960s. When LBJ sought to bring the murderers of civil rights workers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, to justice, he was stymied by Hoover and Southern FBI agents, as well as state and local Mississippians. Local prosecutors and judges, owing the careers to the white southern electorate, were also reluctant to take on even the most vicious and egregious cases of legal and extra-legal violence visited upon their Black neighbors. These all-white juriesregularly acquitted the few perpetrators and re-elected the notorious lawmen even after they were brought to trial. When Southern white people were the victims of kidnapping, it was a serious crime, punishable by death in Mississippi, but kidnapping of Black citizens was almost never charged even though thousands of African Americans were taken by the Klan to be killed or savagely beaten. 

Burnham spends a good part of the book in Birmingham Alabama where the murder rates were high, the sheriffs notorious, and the law, legal extra-legal, and corporate, were used to fight unions, sometimes with deadly force.  Birmingham was also a city where its Black citizens resisted Jim Crow, protested the deaths of African Americans at the hands of the law, and organized boycotts and strikes long before the 1960s.  

As is all Black History, By Hands Known is the story of resistance, struggle, and heroes, heroes like the Black Citizens of Detroit and Birmingham;  Irish and devout Catholic Frank Murphy who refused to send Black fugitives back south to likely death and, as FDR's Supreme Court Justice, sided with the Civil Rights of Black and interned Japanese Americans; Captain CJ Butler UMW leader, pastor, father of 18, Black community stalwart whose murder united Black and White miners; or Army Corporal Willie Lee Davis who died on leave in his native Georgia simply for telling the sheriff, he "was Uncle Sam's man now."

Using family photos and histories, Burnham makes the lives of innocent Black people caught in the deadly snare of Jim Crow painfully real. She never lets us forget people resisted and insisted on justice for their murdered loved ones, and finally she argues that the families of these once unknown African American citizens, victims of racialized murder, be honored with recognition, apologies, and reparations.

My only quibble is that she gives the Brits a pass on reparations because the Irish got to be white after some time in America.

By Hands Now Known is a powerful history that deserves our attention in order to count every life.

[Neil Doherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously researched, so I must believe it, though tough to swallow, but I cann’t, yet, accept the blame, since my forbears weren’t here in USA during most of the Jim Crow era, i.e., 1950. But it does move me toward opening my mind to consider reparations from the USA, or its Southern states, for lynchings, kidnappings, and other White racial violence by police, KKK, mobs, and drunken miscreants.

On p. 265, the author argues that Bostonians of Irish descent once faced ‘need not apply’ signs, a discrimination now entirely superseded , as evidenced by their political and economic standing in the city today. Access to ‘whiteness’ largely erased the history of exclusion. Perhaps so, at Harvard and in Boston. But I grew up in Philadelphia, which has had black mayors since I left. And was I not offered a scholarship as a minority “poor White” from a Yale braman admissions interviewer who came to our house. I conclude that reaparations are a hard sell. But time does offer a chance for the end of injustices that are socumented in this book. So th boo, at least, opens consideration of injustices and ideas to move forward, even if I’m not ready to embrace reparations.

Ubuntu, (p. 271) past wrongs must be purged. Bantu term for “ I am because we are.” (P. 272).
Eloquently written.

Precisely narrated but replete with mispronunciatons by narrator Diana Blue.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a chronicle of individual anecdotes of racist violence it was well done, a (necessarily) difficult read about a number of unheralded cases against the backdrop of SCOTUS decisions (Cruikshank, Screws) that bore upon them. But the introduction seemed to suggest it would be more comprehensive and quantitative, and if that was the intent it fell short of the aim. The anecdotes stood for wider phenomena, but there was no statistical analysis to connect them. And the restorative justice piece, while a major theme of Burnham, was much more speculative and suffused with lofty sentiment rather than something concrete, with a handful of exceptions. The constant attempt to draw a straight and unbending line from the racist violence of the 1930s and 1940s (and the better known cases of the subsequent decades) to contemporary police shootings - and contemporary criminal justice writ large - was strained and politicized and added nothing to the strengths of the book.

[Such a Good Listener · Rating 1 out of 5]

Audiobook - I'm interested in this subject, just as I'm interested in every atrocity in human history, but I absolutely cannot listen to the soothing voice of Diana Blue reading Margaret Burnham's words for over 600 minutes to learn more about this. In the opening alone, which is agonizingly long, it's like Burnham is standing in a court room trying to convince the judge/jury (instead of me) of why someone should read her book over another instead of just starting the book because someone interested in this subject is going to listen to all of the books, not just one over another. She uses every "big word" in the dictionary just in the first 15 minutes and it's really off-putting. If the goal of her book was to not only educate, but also say "hey white people, you did this and you were wrong!" then I'm one of the listeners she's actually trying to reach and she has lost me right out of the gate.

[Annette Tamminga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Understanding the legal background and history of Jim Crow is important for every American. Especially those who think there was never or there is not white privilege.
I was torn how to rate this book. The accounts are without doubt disturbing and the law enforcements involvement infuriating. This was a tough book to read not because of the subject matter, but because it was written like a legal text book. It is wordy and much like a dissertation. I am not a lawyer or scholar and had to actually read a sentence twice to understand. It was written as research for the Restorative Justice Project so maybe I should have expected that. It was missing a summary and finality for the average reader.
As I read it I saw parallels to today. The law enforcement violence, white supremacy, state rights vs. federal, and yet it was never approached in the book.
If you expect to get some type of summary or conclusion from this book, you won’t.