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By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners with Margaret A. Burnham (Zoom Program)
Wednesday, January 18, 2023 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST
CO-SPONSORED WITH THE JUSTICE HARRY J. ELAM JUDICIAL CONFERENCE
Moderated by Judge Angel Kelley, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts
*This is a Zoom program*
From the Publisher: 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.
For more information, please visit: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393867855
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. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
For more information: https://law.northeastern.edu/faculty/burnham/
Advance registration is required for this educational program. Register today to guarantee your spot!
Complimentary copies of By Hands Now Known are no longer available.
