By hands now known, p.1
By Hands Now Known, page 1
BY HANDS
NOW KNOWN
JIM CROW’S LEGAL EXECUTIONERS
MARGARET A. BURNHAM
In honor of my parents, Louis Everett Burnham and Dorothy Challenor Burnham, whose gift to me was this cause
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I RENDITION
1“A New Version of the Old, Old Story”
2“Mr. Ford’s Place”
3“That Dusky Hospital on DeVilliers Street”
PENSACOLA TO BLACK BOTTOM
4Bentonia Blues
YAZOO COUNTY TO BLACK BOTTOM
5The One-Way Ride on Airline Highway
CRESCENT CITY TO BLACK BOTTOM
6Resisting Rendition
LEGAL STRATEGIES AND POLITICAL ADVOCACY
7Who Stays Up North, Who Goes Back Down South
PART II RACED TRANSPORTATION
8The Color Board
9POB Noxubee, POD Back of the Bus
10A Bus in Hayti
11“Us Colored … Sat Where We Wanted To”
12Double V on the Bus
13The Departments: War and Justice
14The “Negro Transportation” File
PART III PATEROLLERS AND PROSECUTORS
15Reconstruction Statutes, Jim Crow Rules
16“Her Hips Looked Like Battered Liver”
TUSKEGEE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
17“A Little Quick on the Trigger”
UNION SPRINGS IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
18“The Testimony … of the Negroes Seems More Probable”
TUSKEGEE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
19“Head … Soft as a Piece of Cotton”
LAFAYETTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
20“None of Washington’s Business”
PART IV THE SCREWS EFFECT
RACIAL VIOLENCE IN THE SUPREME COURT
21“Look to the States”
22A “Patently Local Crime”
23“Victim … of a Quarrelsome Nature”
PART V BLACK PROTEST MATTERS
24“Bad Birmingham”
25Negroes Are Restless
26“Mr. Van”
27“Negro Youth, Shot Near White Residence, Dies”
PART VI “HE THAT STEALETH A MAN”
28Abduction
SOUTHWEST MISSISSIPPI
29“Negro Leaders Cry for Justice in Kidnap Outrage”
30Black Captive, White Capture
PART VII “A MINT OF BLOOD AND SORROW”
31Redress
THE PROBLEM OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
32“Found Floating in River … Cause of Death Unknown”
33“A Fight with Some Sailors”
34Owed? What? And By Whom?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
“The Black Man Is a Person Who Must Ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia”
—W. E. B. DuBois
In June 1944, a person named Sam Rayburn sent a letter to the New York office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People about a death in Donalsonville, Georgia. An “elderly Negro woman” had been examining a can of oil at a general store. The white man in charge told her to put the can down. She did so, then turned, perhaps on her heels, and left. The man, whose age Rayburn put at about twenty, followed her from the store onto the street and beat her with an ax handle, causing her death. Rayburn, the letter writer, did not name the victim or the perpetrator, but did say it was rumored that the white man had been arrested and promptly released. “Donalsonville,” the letter continued, “is a small town completely icolated … Please interceed if there is any possible chance.” A lawyer for the NAACP, likely overworked, advised Rayburn to look to local authorities or Georgia’s governor, Eugene Talmadge, for an investigation.
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. We know nothing—not the race nor the gender—of Sam Rayburn. 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. The case never reached federal authorities.
Scanty though the facts are, they suggest how lethal, for women and for men, the most commonplace encounters under Jim Crow could be. And they tell us something about the role of law, for they suggest that the dispute mechanisms that are at the heart of the country’s sense of exceptionalism—reliance on neutral laws and evidence-based determinations—yielded to a strikingly different system under Jim Crow. What cultural norm did Ollie Hunter violate? Did she curse the store manager? Throw the can onto the counter? Exit the store too quickly? Was there bad blood between the two? Who was the killer? Did he raise his family in Donalsonville after the murder? Did his descendants remain there? Who were the local journalists who deemed the case too trivial to report? The prosecutor who, so far as we can tell, let the case die? We are left to speculate on details and motives, but what we do know about the slaying tells us a great deal about the role of direct, physical violence in sustaining Jim Crow. Based on these facts, at that time and place, the transgressor was the Black “elderly” woman, not the young white grocer, and her sentence was death.
Although much has been written about the South in general and southern Jim Crow in particular, the system of white supremacy that prevailed between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century is ancient history for the current generation. They may recognize the names Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth, and know something about lynching, but they likely have little sense of the quotidian violence that shaped routine experiences like grocery shopping and tied the nation’s legal institutions to its racial culture. Much of that history was never preserved. The chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life, dictating the movements and postures of white storeowners and Black customers, is what sustained Jim Crow for over half a century. Conflating private and public authority, and immunizing whites who served as its unofficial policemen—like the grocer—Jim Crow blurred the lines between formal law and informal enforcement. C. Vann Woodward captured this in his 1955 classic, The Strange Career of Jim Crow: “the Jim Crow laws put the authority of the state or city in the voice of the street car conductor, the railway brakeman, the bus driver … the hoodlum of the public parks and playgrounds.”
Although closely correlated with life in the postbellum South, Jim Crow took different forms across the country, embedded in culture, articulated in law, and entrenched in politics. Often portrayed as defining a strictly dualistic system with segregation on the one hand and integration on the other, Jim Crow was as pervasive in northern spaces where no signs demarcated racial positioning as it was in southern spaces where the races rubbed elbows but occupied different worlds. It was not so much tied to a geographical place as it was a national project, supported not just by the violence of “the locals” but by a national legal system that endorsed and sustained a missionary commitment to a future of perpetual white rule.
While researchers have examined the history of the Jim Crow regime and its contemporary footprint, particularly in the realm of criminal justice, the erasure of important parts of this narrative—Ollie Hunter’s case and those like it—leaves us with crucial gaps in our understanding of the period. Using newspaper accounts, courtroom testimony, legislation, and judicial rulings, By Hands Now Known addresses those gaps. It seeks to illuminate how direct physical violence, a defining feature of Jim Crow, shaped the legal terrain in the South during the first half of the twentieth century—transforming, in fundamental ways, concepts of federalism, citizenship, and democratic rights and privileges. Neither sporadic nor irrational, but rather inescapable and uncontrolled, the violence was a marker of legal personhood and freedom. Its ideologies and constructions—of racialized masculinity, of Black pain, suffering, and silence, of color-coded public spaces, of southern redemption—have endured into the present. As a uniquely American phenomenon, the mob violence that riddled the southern landscape from Appomattox until World War II indubitably epitomized racial vulnerability. But the national obsession with lynching has also obscured the mundane, largely hidden violence that, while it lay at a different point on the spectrum, was equally essential to Jim Crow. Twice erased is the murder of Ollie Hunter: submerged, seamlessly, into the landscape of southern life at the moment of her death, and then omitted, brutally, from historical accounts of the period.
THE EARLY TO MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY was a critical period in solidifying white supremacy and incorporating its premises into legal codes and practices. This study of the Jim Crow legal system examines the experiences ordinary citizens had with police, prosecutors, and courts. It draws on cases, some well known and many, like that of Ollie Hunter, newly discovered, that have been collected by researchers at Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under my direction and that of MIT political scientist Melissa Nobles, my research partner. In 2007, Nobles and I set out on a journey to unearth this forgotten history of racially motivated homicides, for the families, of course, but we also wore our scholars’ hats as we did the work. Without these accounts, we thought, we could not fully map the Jim Crow system in the United States, or gras
We knew that these histories had been largely ignored in official accounts of the period. But as we traveled across the country and visited with families, we met with hundreds of people who insisted on keeping these memories alive for their own posterity. Preserving photographs and old newspaper clippings, they cultivated a kind of vernacular history that they were eager to share with us. Despite these individual efforts, however, a careful account of lethal state violence remained unavailable to a wider public. It was our sense that as long as these events translated as idiosyncratic, one-off, private experiences of grief, multifaceted systems of racial injustice would remain hidden, and, concomitantly, the need for structural remedies would seem unwarranted. We brought together our professional expertise and the critical work that community historians were doing to compose a more comprehensive and accurate picture.
To track these cases we created a database of racial violence incidents—namely, homicides—in the US South during the Jim Crow era. We narrowed our scope to the South—fully mindful of the myth of southern exceptionalism—simply because so much of the violence occurred there. We chose the mid-twentieth century because we wanted to capture the memories of elderly family members, and because we had access to federal records from that period. A good deal had already been written about the racial violence of the traditional civil rights era. Jim Crow–era violence, on the other hand, had not been fully treated when we began our research. When we called survivors from the period, often they responded, “I thought I’d never get this call.” The fruit of this project is the CRRJ Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, a collection of public documents and interviews that capture, through over a thousand homicides, the grim history of anti-Black violence in the Jim Crow South.
Drawing, in part, on these archival materials, By Hands Now Known tackles the three interrelated themes of federalism, racial violence, and resistance.
The federal government, including the Justice Department, had the legal tools to protect citizens from the most egregious forms of Jim Crow violence and a political duty to do so, but distance and denial severely undermined its response. In the mid-twentieth century, federal courts, oblivious to the long-term stakes, rendered nearly toothless the Reconstruction-era statutes that specifically targeted racist terror. The government failed to grasp that what they were dealing with was not just a criminal law problem but a civil and human rights problem. Its failure to take the necessary steps to punish the violence constituted a breach of law and duty, even where the crimes were committed by private individuals. What tools were available to Washington and why were they ineffective? What permanent scars to the legal system are attributable to these failures? And how did the Black freedom movement challenge this federal abandonment?
Second, By Hands Now Known probes the dynamic relationship between violence (physical violence in contrast to symbolic or structural violence), political power, and citizenship during the Jim Crow era. These assaults both signified and solidified white male domination, repressed Black political participation and economic competition, and unified whites across class lines. Violence mediated the transformation from slave property to citizenship in a free labor regime. White control, including violent suppression, was inherent in slavery, but after the Civil War, the country’s ruling elites, in both the North and the South, were operating under a purportedly liberal democratic regime, and therefore had to adopt different methods to control and exploit free labor. Violence that was previously lawful became putatively illegal. Nevertheless, from Reconstruction until the end of Jim Crow, Black citizenship was profoundly shaped by the white terror that served to control Black labor and mollify the white working class. The right to live free of violence—to have the legal wherewithal to protect one’s property and person—was at the heart of the liberal, law-bound, democratic project. Stripping Black people of that right knocked them back to noncitizens. By Hands Now Known investigates these Jim Crow years of dashed hopes to illuminate how, after slavery was over, a self-described democratic republic used terror to revive a form of sub-citizenship that would prevail for just short of a century. It illustrates how authoritarian southern political systems thrived within an ostensibly democratic national polity.
Third, By Hands Now Known excavates the history of collective resistance to racial terror in the Jim Crow era. Historians have written much about the civil rights movement of the thirties and forties, and the continuities in antiracist social movements across the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the popular view persists that Black protest, particularly in the South, was not especially robust or consequential until the late 1950s. The case studies here suggest otherwise. In September 1933, four thousand people, aroused to a “fever pitch,” attended a “protest funeral” in Atlanta in the wake of the police shooting of forty-year-old Glover Davis, a blind man. With ninety police officers, some mounted, armed with machine guns and tear gas, encircling the church, the pastor forbade protest eulogies. In defiance, one minister intoned, “Lord, give us men who are not afraid to … denounce police brutality, and their slaying of Negroes, shooting them in the back while they flee arrest … give us an aroused church, both white and black … who despite mob violence … and even though the police force surround our churches … will stand upon the house tops and cry aloud.” In 1942, thirteen years before the Montgomery boycott, Black bus passengers in Mobile, Alabama, threatened a “Walk to Work, Walk to Church, Walk to Shop” campaign, forcing the town’s bus company to disarm their drivers after an operator shot and killed a soldier on his bus. And in 1948, 4,500 mine workers, Black and white, staged a wildcat strike in Edgewater, Alabama, to protest the police killing of a popular fifty-four-year-old Black union man.
Demonstrations such as these were but one form of Black protest. Civil lawsuits filed by survivors of racial homicides offer detailed accounts of the events, as do petitions to public officials and letter-writing campaigns. These materials, the source of many of the cases examined in this book, evince sophisticated conceptions of the relationship between structural harms and police brutality, while also revealing significant divisions over politics and strategies. Though some civic and church leaders looked for consensus and favored top-down, deliberative approaches, militants—including many in the faith community—pushed back. Rejecting the prevailing script of respectability and polite subordination, they worked from the ground up, centered the perspectives of those at the bottom, perceived it as absurd to lobby for legal change in lawless spaces, and argued that only bold contestation—which could include counterviolence and sabotage—would bring about change. Also key was the Black press, without which many of these stories would have remained hidden. These big city newspapers—including the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American—transformed individual tragedies into collective experiences, nationalized Black politics, and ignited the Black imagination. In sum, these practices of protest altered legal meanings, challenged the state’s pretensions to equal justice, fostered collective agency and solidarity, and dislodged official truths in favor of indigenous knowledge. These anti–Jim Crow activists lost as often as they won, but their travails, which tell us much about life under Jim Crow, comprise an essential umbilical link to the movements of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
A NINETEENTH-CENTURY federal case, United States v. Cruikshank, forshadowed what was at stake in the twentieth-century struggle over federalism and citizenship. The case concerned a massacre that took place in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday 1873. When the guns fell silent in a confrontation over the results of an election pitting Republicans, Black and white, against white Democrats, many of whom were former Confederate soldiers and members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, 3 white men and somewhere between 60 to 150 Black men were left dead, and the parish courthouse, the site of the siege, was virtually in ashes. Historian Eric Foner described this event in majority-Black Grant Parish as the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.” It “taught many lessons,” he wrote, “including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to retain their accustomed authority.” Although 97 members of the white mob were indicted under federal law, only 9 were charged. Congress investigated the massacre and released a report describing it as a “deliberate, barbarous, cold-blooded murder” that was a “foul blot on the page of history,” but the appellate courts overturned all the ensuing convictions.
