By Hands Now Known

April 1, 2022

Director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, Burnham draws on more than 1,000 cases of racial violence in the United States from 1920 to 1960 to reveal the legal structures that allowed them, focusing on the South as she shows the quick step from slavery to Jim Crow injustice and the continuing legacy today. In her new view, issues of state vs. federal jurisdiction and the undue power of local sheriffs emerge as key legal underpinnings to such violence.

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Starred review from June 6, 2022
Burnham, founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, debuts with a searing study of the “chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life” in the Jim Crow South. The threat, Burnham contends, was not limited to the mob lynchings of African American boys and men accused of raping or sexually harassing white women, but also included such “quotidian violence” as the beating death of an “elderly Negro woman”—as a contemporaneous letter sent to the NAACP described her—by a white storekeeper in a small Georgia town in 1944. That murder, like many others recounted in the book, was not prosecuted and not reported on by local journalists. According to Burnham, these and other acts of racialized terror lie at the heart of the Jim Crow regime, which was a system of racial segregation as well as a statement about who could, and who could not, claim the privileges of American citizenship. Drawing upon a database created by Northeastern and MIT researchers that catalogues “racially motivated homicides” in the South between 1920 and 1960, Burnham illuminates the role that white terror played in controlling Black life, resistance efforts mounted by Black communities in the face of indifference and hostility from federal and local governments, and the legacy of Jim Crow in the modern-day judicial system. The result is an essential reckoning with America’s history of racial violence. Photos.

October 10, 2022
This meticulously researched and carefully documented book records dozens of the devastating stories of Black Americans who suffered racial violence, particularly in the American South, in the mid-twentieth century. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, makes a convincing argument for reparation for the descendants of those who were the victims of lynchings, mob violence, and police killings in the Jim Crow South. With its title referencing the frequent reports of people being killed "by hands unknown," Burnham's study makes it clear that many of those hands are now actually known, whether they belonged to individuals or larger groups. The book breaks the instances of racial violence into several categories, including struggles on public transportation, the killings of Black members of the military who had grown accustomed to living without the forms of discrimination usual in the South, murders committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, and police violence. It also includes the more hopeful stories of those who managed to escape from Southern violence with the help of Black activists in the North. The dozens of fully fleshed out stories in this book--which are examples, of course, of countless stories left untold--add a personal element to this achingly real history. By Hands Now Known is impossible to read without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of racial violence in the U.S. in the past and persisting into the present.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
Searing indictment of the all-encompassing violence of Jim Crow and a persuasive case for long-overdue reparations. The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, writes Burnham, "blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement." Every White citizen of a Jim Crow state was effectively deputized to enforce racially discriminatory laws and customs, even to the point of murdering a supposed offender, a common practice of the police as well. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, offers a vast roster of cases that highlight this formal/informal system of oppression. For example, bus drivers throughout the South had carte blanche to commit violence on any Black rider who dared insist on his or her dignity, while Black men were routinely lynched for responding the wrong way to a police officer--to say nothing of being in a White neighborhood without apparent reason. Most of the author's illuminating and disturbing examples come from the mid-20th-century because abundant federal records exist (even if state and community records have been suppressed) and because living descendants of Jim Crow victims can often be found to corroborate official and civilian crimes against them. These include a Black man hanged for alleged sexual assault; a Black woman driven from her city to the friendlier climes of Detroit after a botched abortion procedure; a Black soldier killed for demanding equal treatment, one of countless Black service members who agitated for voting rights and equal employment even as they "continued to protest Jim Crow transportation and police brutality." Burnham closes with a closely argued case for paying reparations to the descendants of victims. "Such a program is both practicable and politically feasible because the beneficiaries constitute a finite group," she writes, adding, "Material reparation should be a part of a larger program of redress, including public educational initiatives and memory projects like memorial markers." An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights.

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Starred review from July 8, 2022

Racial violence in the Jim Crow South shaped many Black people's relationships with the law and the courts in the first half of the 20th century. This violence was essential to establishing Jim Crow legal systems and enforcement. In her first book, Burnham (law, Northeastern Univ.; director, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project) uncovers the hidden and unknown victims of Jim Crow violence through detailed research into newspapers, trial testimony, transcripts, and legislation. Based on a database created by Northeastern's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, this series of case studies focuses on Alabama's Middle District. In six sections, Burnham demonstrates how Black Americans challenged racial violence and the legal system that supported it, including efforts in Northern states to thwart rendition of fugitives back to the South, where their safety could not be guaranteed. Other sections examine the role of small-town sheriffs in perpetrating violence and the ebb and flow of Department of Justice efforts to prosecute and win convictions in civil rights cases. A final eloquent chapter makes clear the need for reparations to Black communities. VERDICT Readers interested in the long history of the civil rights struggle should definitely read this.--Chad E. Statler

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