Margaret A. Burnham — By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners

A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence from a renowned legal scholar, this "meticulously researched and carefully documented" historical work presents "dozens of fully fleshed out stories…examples, of course, of countless stories left untold" (Booklist).

Many may recognize the names of civil rights activists—from Rosa Parks to Medgar Evers to Martin Luther King, Jr.—but they likely have little sense of the quotidian violence of Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy that prevailed between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Now, the gap has been filled by author Margaret Burnham, Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and its archive of nearly one thousand cases of previously undocumented racial homicides between 1930 and 1955. Drawn from these archives and augmented by newspaper accounts, court testimony and rulings, coroner’s reports, and interviews with surviving witnesses, family, and clergy, By Hands Now Known is essential reading. Those interested in race, history, and law will find it groundbreaking, illuminating, and moving.

This program will happen over Zoom webinar. Please visit this link to register.

About the author

Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A professor of law, she was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the US Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.

About the moderator

L’Merchie Frazier visual activist, public historian and artist, innovator, poet and holographer, is Executive Director of Creative / Strategic PLANNING for SPOKE Arts / /Medicine Wheel and was formerly Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket. Frazier has served the artistic community for over twenty years as an award winning national and international visual and performance artist and poet, in one life work “Save Me From My Amnesia”, with residencies in Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Africa, France, and Cuba. Her collected works are in the Smithsonian, the White House, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work supports the dialogues that concern social justice, and restoration, civil and human rights.

This program is part of the American Inspiration Series from American Ancestors/NEHGS and presented in partnership with the Boston Public Library, the Museum of African American History, and the GBH Forum Network. Copies of the book will be made available for ordering by Porter Square Books.

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