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The brutal conditions and inhuman treatment of African-Americans in Southern prisons has been immortalized in blues songs and in such movies as Cool Hand Luke. Now, drawing on police and prison records and oral histories, David M. Oshinsky presents an account of Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm; what it tells us about our past is well worth remembering in a nation deeply divided by race. Two 8-page photo inserts. 320 pp.
Historian Oshinsky (A Conspiracy So Immense, 1983) draws on materials ranging from court records and blues lyrics of black women prisoners to the novels of William Faulkner for this thoroughgoing history of Parchman Farm, Miss., a 20,000-acre plantation notorious even among the most hardened criminals for its inhumane conditions. Oshinsky traces Parchman Farm's evolution during Mississippi's frontier days, when lawlessness and violence made the later Wild West seem tame by comparison, and after the Civil War, when civic society broke down and a fifth of the state budget went to the purchase of artificial limbs for broken—and desperate—veterans who too often wound up behind bars. A disproportionate number of Parchman's residents, however, were black, and Oshinsky is particularly good at tracing the decline of African-American fortunes in the late 19th century, when, as a contemporary observer noted, "however these [white Mississippians] may have regarded the negro slave, they hated the negro freeman." White Mississippians reasserted their power through the courts, fostering a system of work farming whereby Parchman inmates (often mere children who had committed such crimes as stealing change from the counter of a dry-goods store) were rented out as near-slave labor for neighboring cotton plantations—a system that ended only in the mid-20th century. Oshinsky examines the culture of what he calls this "American Siberia," drawing heavily on oral histories collected by federal workers in the New Deal era, to show how thoroughly that culture influenced the larger society of the Deep South. In a charged epilogue, Oshinsky notes that Parchman, now a "scientifically run" prison, is resisting pressures to institute chain-gang labor, setting something of a standard of humane treatment for the region.
A well-paced, revealing history of hard times.
Dreamer300
Posted March 29, 2012
This book details why the judicial system is so unjust against African American. I begin to read this book due to the Trayvon Martin case and I see why the African American life is not cherished. This book explains why African Americans are sterotyped by our skin color and not our character. This book explains why America fight senseless wars in the name of Justice but fail to provide Justice in the states. However, the bible is clear on reaping and sowing so until this nation begin to treat every one Just then it will remain in the state its in, Must Read!!!!
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Posted April 2, 2004
Evil is all that comes to mind while reading this book.Pure evil.Why did whites feel they had to invoke this cruelty to blacks.Evil.Pure Evil
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Posted September 11, 2011
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Posted April 25, 2010
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Posted June 25, 2010
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Overview
"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. ...