This Month’s Book Reveals the True Legal System of Jim Crow

Learning and education are integral parts of the Alluvial Collective’s mission. What better way to educate ourselves than via a good read? With that in mind, we launched a monthly book giveaway recommending books that inspire us to discuss and reflect.

This month’s book is “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners” by Margaret A. Burnham.

Click here to enter by February 20.

From the Publisher:

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.