By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham (review)

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• By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham
• Michael W. Flamm

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. By Margaret A. Burnham. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2022. Pp. xxiv, 328. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-324-06605-7; cloth, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-393-86785-5.)

After two years as an army corporal, Willie Lee Davis returned to Summit, Georgia, in 1943 to see friends and visit his mother. On the eve of the Fourth of July, he was in a juke joint with a young woman when the town’s white police chief confronted and slapped him. “I’m not your man,” protested Davis, who was in uniform; “I’m Uncle Sam’s man” (p. 179). Then Davis made a tragic mistake—he tried to flee through a dark alley with a dead end. The officer shot him in the chest, and Davis died on the nation’s birthday.

In By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, Margaret A. Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern University, provides painful example after example of how white supremacy and racial violence were interwoven during the Jim Crow era. Drawing on a digitized archive of more than a thousand homicides that she compiled with political scientist Melissa Nobles, Burnham ably chronicles how the legal system and federal government failed to protect the rights and lives of African Americans during the decades between Reconstruction and the modern freedom struggle.

Burnham is careful to note that “Jim Crow took different forms across the country, embedded in culture, articulated in law, and entrenched in politics” (p. xiii). She spotlights the South because racial violence was so prevalent there, but then she contends that she is “fully mindful of the myth of southern exceptionalism” (p. xv). However, her powerful study should have explored, or at least cited, some of the historical literature on this important topic, such as The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York, 2010), edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino.

Burnham organizes her book into seven sections. Part 1 deals with rendition, noting how resistance in the North to the return of Black prisoners to the South, where lynching remained pervasive, continued a century after the Fugitive [End Page 450] Slave Law of 1850. Part 2 examines the visible and invisible conflicts over segregation on streetcars and city buses. Here and elsewhere, the author uncovers fascinating bits of lost history, such as the 1943 “Walk to Work, Walk to Church, and Walk to Shop” campaign in Mobile, Alabama, which foreshadowed the more famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 (p. 83).

In Parts 3 and 4, Burnham describes how the federal government, the legal system, and the Justice Department left African Americans at the mercy of white southerners after Reconstruction. She details how, in Screws v. United States (1945), the Supreme Court eviscerated Section 52 of the 1870 Enforcement Act, making it almost impossible to convict the perpetrators of racial violence in federal courts. Parts 5 and 6 concentrate on Black resistance, at both the local and the national levels, to crimes such as kidnapping or abduction, which the police typically ignored and historians have tended to overlook. At times, the sheer number of racial injustices provided by the author may overwhelm or confuse the reader. The book as a whole might have benefited from more selectivity and editing.

But in Part 7, Burnham makes a clear and compelling case for reparations, particularly for the victims of murder and lynching by white officers or supremacists. In a nod to W. E. B. Du Bois, she calls redress “The Problem of the Twenty-First Century” and asserts that recognition, apologies, commemoration, and reconciliation are not sufficient (chap. 31). Restitution is critical, she contends, because of the immense personal and institutional harm inflicted on African Americans. The author concedes that “reparative justice [is] a messy affair” for many reasons, but stresses that historical mistreatment, international precedent, and democratic practice make it essential so long as the past influences the present (p. 264). Given the overwhelming and horrifying evidence presented here, it is difficult to disagree.

Michael W. Flamm...