Margaret Burnham: By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

Renowned legal scholar, civil rights advocate, and former judge Margaret A. Burnham is the founder of Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) and author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. Through CRRJ, Burnham has led teams of law students in investigating acts of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including hundreds of unsolved murders of Black people among other historical failures of the criminal justice system. The project serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers and organizers involved in initiatives seeking justice for these crimes.

Burnham began her career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In the 1970s, she represented civil rights and political activists, including Angela Davis. In 1977, she became the first African American woman to serve in the Massachusetts judiciary, when she joined the Boston Municipal Court bench as an associate justice. In 1993, South African president Nelson Mandela appointed Burnham to serve on an international human rights commission to investigate alleged human rights violations within the African National Congress, a precursor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 

She was a former fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Studies and in 2016 was selected for the prestigious Carnegie Fellows Program. She was among four scholars from across the country appointed by President Biden to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, a national initiative charged with reviewing the records of murders and other acts of racially motivated violence that occurred between 1940 and 1979. Burnham is a University Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University, where she has been on faculty since 2002.

Cosponsored by the Boston College PULSE Program for Service Learning and Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics.

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