Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
Worse than Slavery: Parchman
Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David M.
Oshinsky
18.95
"Worse Than Slavery" is an epic
history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the
civil rights era - and beyond. Southern prisons have been immortalized in
convict work songs, in the blues, and in movies such as Cool Hand Luke and The
Defiant Ones. Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary was the grandfather of them
all, an immense, isolated plantation with shotguns, whips, and bloodhounds,
where inmates worked the cotton fields in striped clothing from dawn to dusk.
William Faulkner described Parchman as "destination doom." Its
convicts included bluesmen like "Son" House and "Bukka"
White, who featured the prison in the legendary "Midnight Special"
and "Parchman Farm Blues." Noted historian David M. Oshinsky draws on
prison records, pardon files, folklore, oral history, and the blues to offer an
unforgettable portrait of Parchman and Jim Crow justice - from the horrors of
convict leasing in the late nineteenth century to the struggle for black
equality in the 1960s, when Parchman was used to break the spirit of civil
rights workers who journeyed south on the Freedom Rides. In Mississippi, the
criminal justice system often proved that there could be something worse than
slavery. The "old" Parchman is gone, a casualty of federal court
orders in the 1970s. What it tells us about our past is well worth remembering
in a nation deeply divided by race.
