Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

David M. Oshinsky's "Worse than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal
of Jim Crow Justice, tells yet another piece of recent, uncomfortable
American history which must not be forgotten. Mississippi, like other
southern states after the Civil War, did not deal well with freed
blacks, and developed the system of "Jim Crow justice" which, in many
respects, replicated slavery. Initially, the state leased prisoners --
usually blacks -- to private individuals, usually to pick cotton and
do other heavy labor. As Oshinsky presciently concludes, this resulted
in a more onerous existence for the black contract workers than when
they were slaves. Owners, at least, had a vested interest in keeping
their slaves fed and clothed, as they represented a substantial
investment of capital. Persons leasing convict labor had no such
capital investment, and, as a result, had no incentive (other than
humanitarian, which, Oshhinsky notes, usually begged the question in
white southern minds as to whether blacks were "human" at all) to keep
workers from starving or working to death. The system of convict labor,
considered "enlightened" by many at the time - and a great source of
profit for the State - was an exercise in barbarism.

Parchman Farm, a
huge cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta, represented an
improvement, in that Mississippi itself owned and operated the farm and
tended to feed and house the convicts. The system, however, was far
from just, in that prisoners were armed and chosen to guard their
fellow inmates, profit was a main goal and justification of the system,
and no effort was made to rehabilitate the inmates. Only in the last
quarter of this century was Parchman reformed through a series of
federal court orders defining the situation as "cruel and unusual
punishment."

Oshinsky's beautifully constructed narrative brings to vivid life one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

Historian Oshinsky uses Mississippi as a paradigm for the shameful history of black injustice in the South between the post-Civil War demise of slavery and the post-World War II rise of the civil rights movement. Since its admission to the Union, Mississippi had been a violent place, as the author relates; and brutality to blacks was simply a part of Mississippian culture. After the abolition of slavery, in most white Mississippians' minds, something else had to be arrived at for "keeping the ex-slaves in line." Thus laws were passed designed to maintain white supremacy, particularly when it came to controlling black labor. After a discussion of the deplorable practice of convict leasing, a system whereby people could "hire" prisoners for physical labor outside the walls of prison, the author turns his attention to Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary, "a sprawling 20,000-acre plantation in the rich cotton land of the Yazoo Delta." What transpired behind the fences of Parchman Farm since its founding in the early part of this century is a horror story told here through a rigorous study that should be accorded an important place on the U.S. history shelf. Brad Hooper