“By Hands Now Know – Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners” is a book by Margret A Burnham. The book captures and brings forth the history of racial violence against black people and a legal system that supported and even encouraged it. To understand the book, we need to know a little history of America. A fair idea about the American Civil War, the end of slavery, the protection of civil rights for former slaves and black people, and some knowledge about “Jim Crow” Laws.
The southern states of America were not comfortable granting equal rights to black people and hence started the segregation process. The process was marketed as “separate but equal” but was never equal. The courts and legal system not only looked away from racial violence but legitimized and supported Jim Crow laws of racial segregation.
The book captures and explores the everyday violence that black people faced in buses, trains, grocery stores, on roads, and virtually everywhere. The author studies the experience of ordinary citizens with police, prosecutors, and courts in the Jim Crow legal system.
“Between 1941 and 1946 at least twenty-eight active-duty soldiers lost their lives in the US for refusing to submit silently to the humiliations of Jim Crow.”
The author documents most cases from 1920 onwards, for which the official records exist and because family members of the victims have also corroborated the crimes against them. The horrific stories not only remind us how society was divided on racial lines and atrocities done to black people but also how the courts and legal system legitimized it. The perpetrators of the crimes were never charged or prosecuted and let go even in cases where they have killed someone.
There are many reasons to document history, the primary among them is that we don’t forget and learn from it. The other reason is that we learn from it and take corrective actions. The author also argues for paying reparations to the descendants of the victims and she thinks it is both practical and feasible.
“Reparation is an interdependent bundle of gestures and practices that involve recognition, truth-telling, apology, and payment – owed to all victims of Jim Crow injustice.”
This book is a doorway to the history of unjust that happened in the Jim Crow era and provides us an insight into the kind of injustices and atrocities that people faced. A well-written, well-researched book about the dark era of Jim Crow laws, social justice, and civil rights.
About the Author