By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
by Margaret A. Burnham
Buy on AmazonA Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction 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.…
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"The detailed accounts of racial terror in this book are hard to stomach, but necessary to understand the national legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow system that emerged after emancipation. Story after story reveals how white authorities used violence, fear, kidnapping and murder to perpetuate white supremacy and deny the basic human dignity of Black people. Margaret Burnham’s rich historical analysis documents the longstanding failure of federal laws and institutions to prevent racial violence and police brutality. The book also shines a light on the resourcefulness of African Americans who organized to help one another and fight for justice."
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