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Community Read & Author Talk: BY HANDS NOW KNOWN at Flyleaf Books
December 2, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
On Saturday, December 2, 2023 at 2:00 pm, Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition (OCCRC), Northern Orange NAACP, Justice United, and Carolina Public Humanities will welcome Margaret A. Burnham as she presents her book By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. Support your local independent bookstore by purchasing your copy from Flyleaf Books!
This will be an in-person event with limited seating for up to 70 guests. Scroll down to order your copy today. Be sure to include in the order comments that you’d like to reserve 1-2 seats!
We are offering a 20% discount on By Hands Now Known for members of the above-mentioned groups. Mention in the order comments online or in person that you’re a member of one of these organizations, and we will adjust the charge before processing your order. Come by the store and pick up your copy today!
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.
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.
