Review by Booklist Review
This meticulously researched and carefully documented book records dozens of the devastating stories of Black Americans who suffered racial violence, particularly in the American South, in the mid-twentieth century. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, makes a convincing argument for reparation for the descendants of those who were the victims of lynchings, mob violence, and police killings in the Jim Crow South. With its title referencing the frequent reports of people being killed "by hands unknown," Burnham's study makes it clear that many of those hands are now actually known, whether they belonged to individuals or larger groups. The book breaks the instances of racial violence into several categories, including struggles on public transportation, the killings of Black members of the military who had grown accustomed to living without the forms of discrimination usual in the South, murders committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, and police violence. It also includes the more hopeful stories of those who managed to escape from Southern violence with the help of Black activists in the North. The dozens of fully fleshed out stories in this book--which are examples, of course, of countless stories left untold--add a personal element to this achingly real history. By Hands Now Known is impossible to read without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of racial violence in the U.S. in the past and persisting into the present.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Burnham, founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, debuts with a searing study of the "chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life" in the Jim Crow South. The threat, Burnham contends, was not limited to the mob lynchings of African American boys and men accused of raping or sexually harassing white women, but also included such "quotidian violence" as the beating death of an "elderly Negro woman"--as a contemporaneous letter sent to the NAACP described her--by a white storekeeper in a small Georgia town in 1944. That murder, like many others recounted in the book, was not prosecuted and not reported on by local journalists. According to Burnham, these and other acts of racialized terror lie at the heart of the Jim Crow regime, which was a system of racial segregation as well as a statement about who could, and who could not, claim the privileges of American citizenship. Drawing upon a database created by Northeastern and MIT researchers that catalogues "racially motivated homicides" in the South between 1920 and 1960, Burnham illuminates the role that white terror played in controlling Black life, resistance efforts mounted by Black communities in the face of indifference and hostility from federal and local governments, and the legacy of Jim Crow in the modern-day judicial system. The result is an essential reckoning with America's history of racial violence. Photos. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Burnham's (law, Northeastern Univ.; director, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project) debut transports listeners to the hate-filled and ugly world of the Jim Crow South. Burnham presents listeners with historical details based on legal records, firsthand accounts, and family lore of systemic, widely condoned, and egregious acts of violence. Burnham addresses the period when enslaved people were considered property, to be bought and sold, and continues through various Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction practices that deprived the formerly enslaved population of fundamental constitutional rights. Case by case, she presents listeners with horrific acts of injustice--many of which were condoned by organizations that should have protected the vulnerable--utterly overlooked by the judicial system. Narrator Diana Blue's composed but impassioned voice recounts atrocity after atrocity as though pleading a case to a jury. Her clear and even delivery assists listeners' understanding of each citizen's betrayal, although some listeners may be distracted by scattered mispronunciations throughout. Burnham leaves the case for reparations for the end of the book, providing listeners with food for thought. VERDICT An essential listen that should be a part of every collection. Burnham's message that a true reckoning with the past can only happen with the help of informed, justice-minded citizens resonates.--Laura Trombley
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Searing indictment of the all-encompassing violence of Jim Crow and a persuasive case for long-overdue reparations. The post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, writes Burnham, "blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement." Every White citizen of a Jim Crow state was effectively deputized to enforce racially discriminatory laws and customs, even to the point of murdering a supposed offender, a common practice of the police as well. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, offers a vast roster of cases that highlight this formal/informal system of oppression. For example, bus drivers throughout the South had carte blanche to commit violence on any Black rider who dared insist on his or her dignity, while Black men were routinely lynched for responding the wrong way to a police officer--to say nothing of being in a White neighborhood without apparent reason. Most of the author's illuminating and disturbing examples come from the mid-20th-century because abundant federal records exist (even if state and community records have been suppressed) and because living descendants of Jim Crow victims can often be found to corroborate official and civilian crimes against them. These include a Black man hanged for alleged sexual assault; a Black woman driven from her city to the friendlier climes of Detroit after a botched abortion procedure; a Black soldier killed for demanding equal treatment, one of countless Black service members who agitated for voting rights and equal employment even as they "continued to protest Jim Crow transportation and police brutality." Burnham closes with a closely argued case for paying reparations to the descendants of victims. "Such a program is both practicable and politically feasible because the beneficiaries constitute a finite group," she writes, adding, "Material reparation should be a part of a larger program of redress, including public educational initiatives and memory projects like memorial markers." An indispensable addition to the literature of social justice and civil rights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
