Margaret A. Burnham’s poignant, innovative, and meticulously researched book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, brings to the fore an open American secret, and by “American” I don’t only mean the United States. There is very little civil about white civil society. Under the veneer of polite smiles, public calls for nonviolence, and appeals to patriotism is the brutal reality of white license. This thread that sutures the pieces of white supremacism extends beyond the spectacular public lynchings whose perpetrators brazenly posed for photographs and sent pieces of their victims to relatives and friends as “souvenirs” from their celebrated deeds. Nearly countless are the almost daily offenses whose documentations were rarely made and whose register in the annals of homicidal history appear on no legal dockets. Such is the horror of whiteness that, as now bears witness to suppression born of narcissistic rage in acts of continued suppression, masks itself as national salvation.
I state “open secret” because most Black people knew this, but as in effect illegitimate witnesses, their mouths muzzled, their efforts squelched, and their testimony blocked. Surrounded by monstrous whiteness, in which even eye contact portended death, a theodicy of systemic white supremacy and legitimated antiblack racism left a continued portrait of Black people as a “problem” of illicit appearance. The boundaries involved were more than just signs along drinking fountains, public transportation, places of residence, hospitals, schools, churches and synagogues, graveyards, and a long litany of marked spaces. There were also the boundaries imposed on documentation, knowledge, and truth. What, after all, happens to the social scientific study of homicide when white people murdering Black people was not, in practice, acknowledged as murder or even homicide?
Those of us who study antiblack racism are aware of this problem—that of articulating social scientific support for what is well known. If suppressed enough, many events will be forgotten, and forgotten across many generations. There are, however, moments of realizing the double standards of American criminal justice systems. These days it is mostly through the usual failure to prosecute police officers caught on audiovisual recordings of their homicidal activity. As even conviction is rare in those cases, one could imagine what really is going on beyond the lens of well-located cameras. Yes, there is the conviction of Derek Michael Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. And yes, there is the surprise murder conviction of Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Their accomplice, William “Roddie” Bryan, recorded their pursuit and murder of Arbery who was, truth be told, jogging while Black. No arrests were initially made. But for that recording, who knows? And, yes, there is progress; for, in the past, those agents of white civil society would have probably not been arrested, despite the audio-visual evidence.
Yet, the Chauvin case and McMichael and McMichael’s are intimately linked historical phenomena. The father and son who killed Arbery were acting under the presumption of their licensed whiteness, which in effect deputized them to sterilize white spaces of Black appearance. The police officers who didn’t arrest them on the scene of the homicide shared with them a misunderstanding of a schism in white civil society. The conflicting desires of a preferred non-racist self-image was accompanied by a continued commitment to separate or segregated spaces. The decline of white civil enforcement led to the growth in state enforcement. The result is a military-style, racially-sanctioned police state wedded to an economy of racially-dominated imprisonment. The reassertion of the “old days,” the nostalgic “great” to which to return in “Make America Great Again,” in an age of cybertechnological spectacle, overdetermined Floyd’s and Arbery’s last breath.
How does one unveil an open secret? Burnham, a University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, knows what many of her fellow Blacks already know. Many whites also know, but bad faith is, after all, a lie to the self, and that knowledge falls sway to investments in pleasing falsehoods. Evidence has no force without commitment to the evidentiality of what it offers. It is that which enables truth to appear. Burnham already knew there was a conflict between dominant social scientific data and reality in the study of everyday violence meted out by white civil society against dark peoples, especially those of African descent. She did not, however, expect the scale of everyday depravity her students and she brought out of history’s vaults.
A human being is not a thing. A human being is a set of relationships that extend beyond the self into a world of meaning and power in which even death leaves traces. Burnham and her students pursued those traces. Not calling a homicide “homicide” does not mean a human being didn’t die at the hands of another. Tracking down ignored pleas, reexamining disturbing historical events under a legal system governed by proverbial cats watching the milk, revealed a litany of not previously documented murders and, had unprejudiced trials been conducted, murderers. Frantz Fanon, in his classic Black Skin, White Masks (1952), declared that Euromodern racist society is the attempted murder of humanity. Burnham’s poignant, heartbreaking book offers much evidence for Fanon’s claim.
There were Black veterans who liberated whites in Europe and, after suffering indignities that included riding in the “colored” sections of trains in which Nazi prisoners of war rode first class, were murdered by white mobs when returning “home”; some were murdered by bus and trolley drivers who enforced Jim Crow with guns at their disposal; corpses, so many, of Blacks murdered for even hints of crossing the color line fertilized swamps, forests, and farms; strange fruit, as Abel Meeropol wrote in lyrics immortalized by Billie Holiday’s voice, left to rot. Their odor was carried over the winds of time. Jim Crow’s “legal executioners,” weren’t brought to justice because of a system of unjust justice. The word “legal” in the book’s subtitle is, after all, ambiguous, since de jure illegality was unmoved by de facto irrelevance.
Juries, however, don’t only reside in courthouses. There is the judgment of history, and making those hands now known offers what those who long to return to the past fear most: truth. For people living under the terror of an unjust justice, there is just justice in the revelation of truth, and this redemptive element extends, too, to the production of knowledge needed to make truth appear.
The horror—yes, the horror—is there and, consequently, here. So many accounts now told. Among them is Sam Rayburn’s, in a letter he or she sent to the NAACP to investigate an incident in Donalsonville, Georgia. A young white man had beat a sixty-year-old Black woman to death in front of a general store. He had ordered her to put a can of oil down. She obeyed, but that was insufficient. Burnham writes:
Rayburn’s letter was all that kept this incident from disappearing into thin air. It never made it into any newspaper or historical account. Remaining a mystery is the name of the killer, although the extant legal records allow us to say with some confidence that he was never prosecuted…. In 2020, researchers learned that the victim was one Ollie Hunter, that she was in her midsixties, and that she was likely single when she was killed. If there was any legal process in Donalsonville, it appears not to have been preserved. (Xi–xii)
Ollie Hunter is, in many ways, metonymic of those who fell to a system bolstered by systemic evasion of reality and truth. There were, and, in some places, continue to be, so many Ollie Hunters. Reading the pages of By Hands Now Known raises an important psychoanalytical question, in addition to its historical, legal, and political significance: What is white hysteria of being overtaken by Black violence but projection? What is it but the haunting of unaccounted for deeds?
Although By Hands Now Known unveils ignored and suppressed homicides, it is an exemplar of what excellent research is supposed to do: reveal reality and truth. In addition to its implications for decolonizing criminology and the study of the history of racialized violence, I was struck by the methodological reflections this extraordinary book adds, which, if extended, come to philosophy with a critique of the epistemic complicity of hegemonic practitioners wedded to normative practices, in which avowed civility and conviviality demand the absence of peripheral vision.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
