By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, by Margaret A. Burnham

When I started reading this book, I had some rather harsh feelings about the shrill tone of the book and by the author’s somewhat tedious repetitiousness about certain matters. By the end of the book, I saw that the author had acknowledged most of her faults–except for the characteristic fault of a Marxist worldview, which undercuts her anti-Capitalist mindset, it must be readily admitted. Another characteristic flaw of the book is the author’s strident hostility to constitutional government, namely the federalism upon which our Republic was created and has endured, which suggests her support of the takeover of the federal government by like-minded fellow travelers who can then enforce her worldview on a hostile majority population through the power of the federal bureaucracy. This book is not properly speaking a scholarly work of history, and it is certainly an activist work that seeks to bring to the attention of readers various related cases that demonstrate the way in which local actors like police officers and bus drivers in the Jim Crow South were either legally or extralegally given the license to kill uppity blacks in order to preserve what the author views to be an unjust and racist social order.

This particular book is between 250 and 300 pages in length and is divided into seen parts and 34 chapters that are focused on providing documentation to cases that have largely escaped public notice about racial violence during the 20th century, mostly in the South. After a short introduction, the first seven chapters deal with the subject of rendition, by which Southern justice systems sought the return of black fugitives from Michigan in particular, where such people would be highly likely to suffer lynchings or patently unjust legal proceedings, and deal with the complicated case-by-case determination by which local groups sought to fight such efforts at extradition. This is followed by seven chapters that discuss the violence that frequently occurred, especially once black soldiers were emboldened by the increase in their status due to participating in the armed forces in World War II, between whites and blacks in crowded Southern buses, where tempers and impatience on all sides flared. Six chapters follow that discuss police violence and the injustices that occurred in the Middle District of Alabama, where jury nullification made prosecuting dirty cops difficult. Three chapters look at the repercussions of a federal decision that affirmed federalism as it relates to criminal law. This is followed by four chapters that discuss the role of black protest even as far back as the 1940s when it came to racially sensitive cases in various locations like Birmingham and Durham. Three chapters discuss the problem of abduction and the harm that was done to black kidnapping victims that the law in numerous states appears not to have protected. The last four chapters discuss the thorny issue of reparations and what is owed by whom to whom on what grounds.

This last issue appears to be the real reason for the book’s existence. The author acknowledges a standard of justice that I personally affirm, that no damages are reasonable to require in an ex post facto fashion for those actions that were legal and accepted at the time they were done, however poorly we may think of such things after the fact. That said, this book demonstrates that there were numerous cases where people did not in fact serve as legal executioners, regardless of their office and position, and for a violation of law and for a refusal to protect certain classes of people–like African-Americans–by a selective enforcement of the law is itself something that merits damages to be given to those who suffered wrongs or their heirs and estates. In that sense, while the people the author labels as Jim Crow’s legal executioners of blacks over the course of decades of history did often escape justice during the course of their lives, such people were not in fact legal executioners but acted illegally in many cases, denying that the law provided protections to black citizens of their communities and acting as if they had a license to kill and kidnap when they in fact did not. To the extent that justice can belatedly be provided to the families of some of the people, we may hope that an environment where the life and property of all people is respected and protected by the law and by institutions of law and order can be cultivated within our whole republic–and indeed throughout the world.