Research Catalog

By hands now known : Jim Crow's legal executioners

Title

By hands now known : Jim Crow's legal executioners / Margaret A. Burnham.

Author

Burnham, Margaret A., 1944-

Publication

New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2022]
©2022

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	Sc E 23-119	Schomburg Center - Research & Reference

Details

Description

xxiv, 328 pages : illustrations, portraits; 24 cm

Summary

"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"--

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-317) and index.

Contents

"A new version of the old, old story" -- "Mr. Ford's place" -- "That dusky hospital on DeVilliers Street" -- Bentonia blues -- The one-way ride on Airline Highway -- Resisting rendition -- Who stays up north, who goes back down south -- The Color Board -- POB Noxubee, POD back of the bus -- A Bus in Hayti -- "Us colored . . . sat where we wanted to" -- Double V on the bus -- The Departments : War and Justice -- The "Negro Transportation" File -- Reconstruction statutes, Jim Crow Rules -- "Her hips looked like battered liver" -- "A little quick on the trigger" -- "The testimony . . . of the Negroes seems more probable" -- "Head . . . soft as a piece of cotton" -- "None of Washington's business" -- "Look to the states" -- A "patently local crime" -- "Victim . . . of a quarrelsome nature" -- "Bad Birmingham" -- Negroes are restless -- "Mr. Van" -- "Negro youth, shot near white residence, dies" -- Abduction -- "Negro leaders cry for justice in kidnap outrage" -- Black captive, white capture -- Redress -- "Found floating in river . . . cause of death unknown" -- "A fight with some sailors" -- Owed? What? And by whom?

Call Number

Sc E 23-119

ISBN

9780393867855
0393867854

LCCN

2022036502

OCLC

1294287400

Author

Burnham, Margaret A., 1944- author.

Title

By hands now known : Jim Crow's legal executioners / Margaret A. Burnham.

Publisher

New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., [2022]

Copyright Date

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-317) and index.

Local Note

Schomburg copy with dust jacket.

Chronological Term

To 1999

Research Call Number

Sc E 23-119

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