num_pages: 352
description: A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crowera 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 isnt lynching the law?In By Hands Now Known Margaret A. Burnham director of Northeastern Universitys 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 1000 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.
language: English
title: By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company