Black History Month Event: Webinar with author Margaret Burnham

Margaret Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University.  She will discuss her recent book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (Norton, 2022).  The book explores a series of legal cases involving African Americans from 1920 to 1960.  It shows the connections between the laws of slavery and the legal system under Jim Crow in the late nineteenth and twentieth century South.  Many of the cases involved rendition, the legal process by which southern states sought to return accused African Americans to southern “justice.”  This prompted battles over questions of jurisdiction, many right here in Detroit.

 

This Black History Month event is co-sponsored by the Law School, the Association of Black Law Alumni, African American Studies, the Black Abolitionist Archive, the History Department, the Political Science Department, the Pre-Law Program, and Student Affairs.