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Friend,
The manila folder was almost empty when it landed on the desk of law school student Tara Dunn. Her assignment? To find the truth hidden in what was missing.
Inside was a newspaper article and the name of a man whose life had been cut short, a Black husband and father named Henry “Peg” Gilbert. The article, from a Black-oriented newspaper, reported that the prominent Troup County, Georgia, farmer and community leader had died in jail in 1947, less than a week after he was arrested on charges of aiding and abetting a fugitive.
The article reported little more. Except for this conclusion: that Gilbert had died when he attacked the chief of police. The police chief, it was reported, killed Gilbert in self-defense.
It took Dunn, then a student at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, more than two years to unravel the truth: Gilbert had been taken from his farmhouse in the middle of the night, as Klansmen and local authorities terrorized the Black community looking for a fugitive being sought for the murder of a white man. In jail, where he was thrown despite no evidence he had committed any crime, Gilbert’s skull had been crushed, his bones broken in half, his body pocked by five shots from a gun. Those were the conclusions of an FBI investigation conducted not long after Gilbert’s death.
But like most investigations of Black deaths in that era, this one went nowhere. Gilbert’s children were left without a father and his family was too terrified to look for answers. No one was held to account for his death.
Gilbert’s story is just one of the more than 925 unresolved violent crimes against Black people investigated by the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern.
Now, some of those stories are compiled in a new book – By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners – that relies on more than 25,000 documents collected by students and the founders of the project, Northeastern Law Professor Margaret Burnham and Melissa Nobles, then a political science professor and now chancellor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This month, Burnham is in Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, to sign copies of her book, published in September.
“The narrative of violence in the Jim Crow era is not new to the American public,” Burnham said. “But what is unsettling in what we have found is the ways in which violence contorted and misshaped the law itself. We’ve been able to unearth all this evidence that violence and disenfranchisement were mutually reinforcing phenomena in [the] Jim Crow South. The disenfranchisement meant that local and federal authorities had no responsibility to Black citizens. They were responsible only to their electorate. And on the other side of the coin, the violence was a way of enforcing the disenfranchisement.”
Restorative justice
Founded in 2007, the Northeastern project has created a vast database of unsolved violence, torture, lynching and murder of Black citizens across 11 states throughout the Deep South between 1932 and 1954.
Fueled by the work of students and professors from Northeastern and beyond, the project centers on preserving the history of these cases (Burnham estimates the number still to be investigated exceeds 1,000) and to provide scholars with a critical resource of information on the racial violence that pervaded the Jim Crow South.
Burnham, a renowned civil rights advocate, first fought for voting rights in Mississippi during the violence-plagued summer of 1964. She became the first Black female judge in Massachusetts and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to help investigate human rights abuses in South Africa.
Restorative justice has been Burnham’s life’s work.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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