Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A law professor, she was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. In By Hands Now Known (W. W. Norton & Company), Burnham challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. She maps the criminal legal system in the mid-20th-century South, from rendition – the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens – to the outsized role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy. In doing so, she traces a vivid line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, Burnham reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been told.