Margaret Burnham, the director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, unearths and exposes incidents of everyday murder and violence experienced by Black people in the American South from 1920 - 1960. Unlike modern social media's ability to bring atrocities to light almost instantaneously, during Jim Crow, Black people were routinely killed without any form of justice for their killers--or even mentions in the local newspapers. In several cases discussed in this book, their relatives didn't even know how their ancestors were killed.

These stories are heartbreaking, from an elderly Black woman murdered by a white grocer to Black WW2 soldiers killed by white bus drivers--yet it's fascinating how Burnham brings them to light and gives these victims the justice of recognition. Not only does she bring these stories to life through their retelling (based on extensive research by her team), she also analyzes how these instances were indicative of the social system of the time--a culture where white people were allowed to terrorize and murder Black citizens with no repercussions--and easy acquittals by all-white juries. Particularly infuriating was the story of the Black man who, when getting off of a bus, drunkenly asked a white man to get a drink with him. This infuriated the white man who killed himand left him to die in a ditch. Not shockingly, the white man was acquitted--and was even photographed smiling in his booking photo, seemingly knowing he lived in a world where he would be found innocent. Burnham's team tracked this killer to Florida, where he just passed away in February of this year. Here was a white man who got to live out his whole life, after not being accountable for taking the life of a young Black man.

These "Black lives" mattered and deserve to be recognized, even if justice for their deaths wasn't found. Burnham has done that--and she's done it so well. You'll be infuriated, fascinated, and galvanized by this searing nonfiction tour de force.