Burnham Honors Cohort

Burnham Honors Cohort

The Louis A. Berry Institute for Civil Rights & Justice at Southern University Law Center presents the 2023 Burnham Honors Cohort. The Burnham Honors Cohort is a project of the Louis A. Berry Institute for Civil Rights & Justice at Southern University Law Center in partnership with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern School of Law, Philander Smith College, and Tougaloo College.

The project namesake is named in honor of Margaret Burnham, Distinguished Professor of Law and African Studies at Northeastern University and founder/director of the highly regarded Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ). CRRJ investigates cold cases involving anti-civil rights violence in the United States – particularly the South – and other miscarriages of justice between 1930 - 1970. Their work will join that of previous scholars and CRRJ students in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, which currently houses documents and information on more than 1,000 cases of anti-Black violence. 

The five-year project will start in February 2023. 

Burnham Honors Cohort

Grand Rounds, Boston, Massachusetts
May 8 - May 10, 2023

2023 Burnham Honors Cohort Participants

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

By Hands Now Known was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction and has been longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Book Synopsis: In 1945, a Black man named George Floyd was accused of being drunk on a Saturday evening and jailed. After he protested against a second invasive search, the arresting officer beat him to death as he lay on the cell floor. To Professor Margaret Burnham, the discovery of this precursor to the 2020 George Floyd murder was striking, but not shocking. “Lawless police acting on behalf of the state has defined how Black people experienced American law for two centuries,” says Burnham. Though the white officer who killed Floyd in 2020 was tried and convicted, many such killings have been carried out with impunity. In By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), Burnham examines the true scope and nature of Jim Crow-era violence, the laws that condoned it, and their legacy today.

Burnham Honors Cohort Staff