Burnham, Margaret A.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Margaret A. Burnham illuminates how violence, the law, and white supremacy interrelated in histories of Jim Crow segregation in the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century. She also extends this timeline back into the nineteenth century to demonstrate how “Jim Crow’s statutes and legal practices transformed the norms of slavery into the American criminal justice system.” (3) While acknowledging the sociocultural force and tragedy involved in high-profile lynching cases, she opts to highlight lower profile cases to demonstrate the everyday interactions and lived realities of Jim Crow. Overall, the book “tackles the three interrelated themes of federalism, racial violence, and resistance.” (xv) She shows that the lack of sufficient legal action and punishment for violence supporting segregation restricted Black citizenship. Meanwhile, law enforcement officers discriminately pursued and abused Black Americans to push into regulative legal frameworks. Building and restoring an archive of civil lawsuits, petitions, and letter-writing campaigns, she foregrounds resistance to the undermining of Black lives. Indeed, “Even if the law ‘on the books’ seemed cut-and-dried, historical experience had created a crawl space through which [Viola] Edwards, and many hundreds of other Black Americans, could and did slip.” (17) Burnham moves through and between individual legal cases to advance human-centered legal histories, traversing the U.S. from Detroit to New Orleans. Rendition cases, segregated public transportation disputes, and law enforcement interactions show how race and gender shaped American social hierarchies. Being active-duty military or veterans often did not help Black Americans in these cases. Legal power mostly operated locally at least until the late 1960s, fueling persistence of localized prejudice despite the emergent and shifting national civil rights movement.