Skip to content
Connect
Stories

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners | Margaret Burnham 

People in this story

Margaret Burnham, University Distinguished Professor of Law; Affiliate Professor of Africana Studies

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.

More Stories

Is the US now a four-party system? Progressives split Democrats, and far-right divides Republicans

06.05.2023

The real reason Ukraine is only taking responsibility for some attacks on Russia

06.02.2023

International committee moves closer to treaty on plastic pollution—and this Northeastern policy expert is helping to lead the way

06.06.23
News@Northeastern