By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
(I’m going to start recording more of the stuff I’m reading and writing here–because I don’t want the site to be fallow, and that seems like as good a prompt as any.)
By Hands Now Known was a haunting book to read–and honestly, it makes me feel like kind of a clod. I spent years learning about the American Civil Rights movement in the ’60s, and I had what in retrospect is a very superficial understanding of the subject. Black people were deprived of their rights by white people, but by themselves and with occasional help from others, they were able to regain them to some extent, and now things are more or less OK, or at least “better” according to some definition of the word.
This understanding of the situation did not withstand the first anecdote from the book, which involved an older Black woman being murdered in front of the store at which she had been shopping by one of its employees. She had supposedly offended him by acting impertinently, for which the sentence was death. This type of action must have happened tens of thousands of times across the country during the Jim Crow era. And this group of dead, its vastness unknown, is only the tip of the iceberg of victims of racist crimes and actions in our country’s history.
I must have known about this in some way, but for whatever reason–maybe because of [REDACTED PERSONAL NEWS], or maybe just I’m getting older–it didn’t really permeate me.
Reading about this topic brings to mind the old Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” How many people, if they found themselves living in a Jim Crow reality, one where a group of people is officially or otherwise held back from success and happiness under color of law and public prejudice, would do anything about it… or even notice or care about what was happening around them?
Reading By Hands Now Known catalogues crimes of the past, but it left me shaken and disturbed about where America stands now and where it promises to go. The lesson for me was not just that all this bad shit happened back then. It’s that we can see the same genocidal impulse unleashed against minority groups today, and that those who benefit or have been cast as bystanders by fate will maintain willful blindness.