A
Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
One of NPR's Books We Love in 2022 • Named a Best Book of the
Year: 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.