Margaret Burnham, the director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, unearths and exposes incidents of everyday murder and violence experienced by Black people in the American South from 1920 - 1960. Unlike modern social media's ability to bring atrocities to light almost instantaneously, during Jim Crow, Black people were routinely killed without any form of justice for their killers--or even mentions in the local newspapers. In several cases discussed in this book, their relatives didn't even know how their ancestors were killed.

These stories are heartbreaking, from an elderly Black woman murdered by a white grocer to Black WW2 soldiers killed by white bus drivers--yet it's fascinating how Burnham brings them to light and gives these victims the justice of recognition. Not only does she bring these stories to life through their retelling (based on extensive research by her team), she also analyzes how these instances were indicative of the social system of the time--a culture where white people were allowed to terrorize and murder Black citizens with no repercussions--and easy acquittals by all-white juries. Particularly infuriating was the story of the Black man who, when getting off of a bus, drunkenly asked a white man to get a drink with him. This infuriated the white man who killed himand left him to die in a ditch. Not shockingly, the white man was acquitted--and was even photographed smiling in his booking photo, seemingly knowing he lived in a world where he would be found innocent. Burnham's team tracked this killer to Florida, where he just passed away in February of this year. Here was a white man who got to live out his whole life, after not being accountable for taking the life of a young Black man.

These "Black lives" mattered and deserve to be recognized, even if justice for their deaths wasn't found. Burnham has done that--and she's done it so well. You'll be infuriated, fascinated, and galvanized by this searing nonfiction tour de force.

Margaret A. Burnham's book is a text that feeds off of her database, Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which speaks to the complex and racist issues surrounding the Jim Crow Laws in the Southern tier of the United States. Ultimately, this is a book about memory and about how it is necessary for those unfamiliar with separate but equal to learn more about the hypocrisy and viciousness that took place from 1920 to 1960. The book is about legal issues surrounding what took place in the early 20th Century to People of Color (lynching, for example), and how these legal issues sadly have not been rectified for decades and generations. By Hand Now Known is a passion project, no doubt...but ultimately it is not as strong as other texts that speak to similar issues.

By Hands Now Known netgalley review

This text examines the parts of Jim Crow laws and racialized crimes, in many cases murders, of Black Americans that were never reported, or would have been lost to history if not for some archival evidence. The brutal murder that starts off the text is heart-breaking, of a sixty-something year-old Black woman in Donaldsonville who was holding a can of oil at a store. The white shopkeeper told her to set it down and get out which she did. He then followed her outside of the store and murdered her with an ax handle. He was never held to account.

Too many people still think of Jim Crow laws an 'ancient history,' the author asserts. "They may recognize the names Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth, and know something about lynching, but they likely have little sense of the quotidian violence that shaped routine experiences like grocery shopping and tied the nation's legal institutions to its racial culture." As I write this, it's weeks after a white supremacist gunman opened fire in a grocery store in Buffalo, in a heinous hate crime that targeted Black shoppers, of whom he murdered several. The fact that what happened to this woman in Donaldsonville still happens to this day, in 2022, is beyond abominable and I don't have words for it.

The other misunderstood/little understood area that the author wants to address is the myth that Jim Crow laws only operated in the South. They very much operated, in many cases just as violently, in the North of the United States, and followed families who were fleeing from the worst of Jim Crow to places like the west coast and California. It followed these Black families and populations wherever they went.

As the author asserts, "It was not so much tied to a geographical place [Jim Crow laws] as it was a national project, supported not just by the violence of 'the locals' but by a national legal system that endorsed and sustained a missionary commitment to a future of perpetual white rule." These powerful, searing words serve as a reminder of the work and reckoning America still needs to do to reconcile with this part not only of its past but also its present.

For readers who are not aware of other little-known atrocities of racialized violence, such as the Colfax massacre in Colfax, Louisiana on Easter Sunday 1873, this text will illuminate and fill out the gaps in knowledge for those wishing to know more. In this case, although 97 members of the white mob were indicted under federal law, only 9 were charged. If this sounds familiar it's because it should...the disproportionate amount of white perpetrators of racialized crimes overwhelmingly get not very much in the way of legal consequences, if at all, or if they do, they get reduced sentences. Compare this to the overly high amounts of incarceration and criminalization of Black populations and the results are staggering.

What happened to George Floyd was an extension of Jim Crow--the police officers who murdered him indeed performed a public execution in 2020, and it is not radical at all to say that it was a lynching. Anyone who knows the deeper history and implications of lynchings also knows this to be true.

The author discusses significant cases such as that of Reverend A.H. Hampton from the 1860s.

Any reader seeking to understand better the links of why transatlantic slavery and Jim Crow laws have continued to reverberate and are still issues that play out against Black Americans to this day needs to read this powerful, well-researched text.

Of particular interest, the author devotes much of the text to exploring several cases that occurred in Louisiana, the primary area of my research.

Readers who also want to know more about the history of the NAACP and how they worked to fight against racialized violence will benefit from this text.

This book is so much more than segregated seating on buses and other forms of public transport, or vicious murders that happened and went unreported in many cases. It also examines the ways the law was built to maximize punitive measures against Black Americans in the Reconstruction Era that are still in many ways in effect today.

As well, the book details forms of protest that Black populations engaged in and are now engaging in, particularly in Birmingham Alabama. While everyone knows the name Emmett Till (or should), few have heard of Robert Sands, fifteen years old, who was shot in 1950 as he passed through a white neighborhood in Birmingham. He died from his wounds.

There's also a section toward the end of the book that goes into the issue of reparations, and key considerations that must be taken into account.