By Hands Now Known

Searing.... An essential reckoning with America's history of racial violence. -- Publishers Weekly, starred review Uncovers the hidden and unknown victims of Jim Crow violence.... Readers interested in the long history of the civil rights struggle should definitely read this. -- Library Journal, starred review Defying national suppression and indifference, By Hands Now Known vividly conveys the stories of those whose lives were destroyed by previously undocumented racial violence between 1920 and 1960.... Margaret A. Burnham, drawing on a painstakingly constructed database, launches a vital and restorative reckoning with the reprehensible devastation of lives, communities, justice, and memory. -- Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University, and author of When Should Law Forgive? A vitally important history.... Burnham's meticulous unpacking-of newspaper accounts, coroners' reports, and interviews with surviving witnesses, family members, and clergy-is searing, unforgettable, and profoundly moving. -- Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights and Giving a Damn If you truly want to understand why police and vigilantes who kill Black people are rarely held to account, you must read this extraordinary book.... By far the most sobering and most illuminating work I have ever read on the long history of state-sanctioned racial violence in the US. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels Needs to be read by everyone who recognizes the historic mandate of our time: to interrupt cycles of racist violence.... Rigorously delineated, passionately argued, Margaret A. Burnham's book offers us heart-wrenching cases.... But Burnham goes further, asking us to finally acknowledge the history of ever-present resistance, even under the most insurmountable conditions, and to consider what justice might mean today. -- Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz In this necessary and important book, Margaret A. Burnham addresses the enormous violence necessary to sustain Jim Crow through a series of compelling case studies about the lives destroyed by the brutal regime of separate but equal.... In reckoning with the impact of this history on the present, Burnham asks how we might undo or redress this legacy of violence. It is timely and essential reading. -- Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Masterfully explores how everyday acts of violence fundamentally shaped Jim Crow during the twentieth century. With meticulous and compelling new research, Margaret A. Burnham offers a powerful, moving, and groundbreaking account of the interconnections between race, law, and citizenship in US history. -- Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of the number-one New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls and award-winning author of Until I Am Free [This] narratively lively yet stunningly exhaustive interrogation of Jim Crow laws retained from slavery, misconstrued after Reconstruction, and nationalized during Plessy v. Ferguson, ought to become indispensable to all legal and civil rights considerations, and the cause celebre of our time-reparations. -- David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois