“By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) by Margaret A. Burnham

In the spring of 1941, outside a movie theater in Fairfield, John Jackson waited with his girlfriend to see a show. A white police officer ordered Jackson and the other people in line, all African Americans, to clear the sidewalk. But Jackson, laughing and joking with his girlfriend, did not hear the order.

When challenged by one officer, Jackson asked, “Can’t I laugh?” The police officers forced Jackson into the back of their squad car, beat him severely and shot him four times. He died before reaching the police station.

Three years later, in Donalsonville, Georgia, an “elderly Negro woman” did or said something (or perhaps, nothing at all) that displeased the white clerk in a general store. The 20-year-old clerk followed the woman outside and beat her to death with an ax handle.

Neither the Fairfield cop nor the store clerk, or countless other white killers like them, went to jail for their crimes.

White-on-black violence was both a result and a pillar of Jim Crow. For African American men and women, even “the most commonplace encounters” with whites could turn lethal. And it is this aspect of the Jim Crow system, in which whites could do violence to black people with impunity, all the while being empowered and protected by the legal system, that is the focus of Margaret A. Burnham’s new book “By Hands Now Known.”

A professor of law at Northeastern University in Boston, Burnham co-founded the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. Working with fellow scholars and students, Burnham has documented hundreds of police killings of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. “By Hands Now Known” is a product of that effort.

In prose that is both graceful and urgent, Burnham describes how Jim Crow violence was enabled and tolerated by the white power structure, from local sheriffs and police chiefs in the South to the Justice Department in Washington. Local police were unlikely to seriously investigate black-on-white murder when it was often the police themselves who did the killing. And for much of the early 20^th century, the federal government lacked the will to prosecute theses crimes.

Burnham shows that African American citizens were not passive victims of white violence. Years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, often viewed as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, black people responded to white attacks through protests, boycotts, lawsuits and demands that authorities grant them equal justice. But the white legal system was not designed to protect black rights. It was designed to deny them.

In addition to reclaiming the stories of black victims, Burnham also reclaims the stories of forgotten black activists such as Alabama’s Captain “C.T. Butler. An African American coal miner, pastor and gifted orator, Butler was a tireless union organizer and advocate for African American educational opportunities. Because of his union activities, Butler was the target of company harassment and, in 1948, while walking to work, Butler was shot to death by two U.S. Steel company police. Thousands of miners, black and white, staged a wildcat strike to protest the killing. And more astonishingly, Butler’s widow sued the company and won a $10,000 judgment from an all-white jury.

The Butler case was an encouraging but rare win. In reading “By Hands Now Known,” it is difficult for the reader not to feel a sense of hopelessness as black Americans stood up to the forces of oppression and often lost. But the story Burnham tells also shows the resilience, the refusals to stop fighting, of a people who only wanted (and still want) what their country promises to all its citizens.

Beyond documenting these past injustices and recognizing that we still live in a nation where the legal system can work very differently depending on a person’s skin color, what is there to do? Burnham highlights the importance of reparations for the surviving families of murder victims. But she also reminds readers of the importance of simple apologies. In some places where these 20^th century killings occurred, 21^st century officials have delivered apologies to the families of the victims. “For the families,” Burnham writes, “apologies are an opening gesture on the path to reparative justice, and they offer a teaching moment for the institutions that extend them.” Such an apology, she wrote, “amounts to an official determination that the victim died at the hands of the state or that the state was in some way culpable.” It acknowledges that these people, often innocent of any crime, were killed by a legal system that was designed to kill them. That is not full justice, but it is also not nothing.

On Sunday, Oct. 16, at 2 p.m., the Birmingham Public Library will host Margaret Burnham at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where she will discuss “By Hands Now Known.” The event is free and open to the public. The book will be available for purchase and signing courtesy of Thank You Books.

James L. Baggett is an archivist and historian in Birmingham. He can be reached at birminghambaggett@gmail.com.