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"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.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Administration of Criminal justice, History, Mississippi State Penitentiary, Prisoners, Prisonniers, Justice pénale, Histoire, Administration, State Penitentiary, Parchman, Mississippi, Geschichte, Fallstudiensammlung, Gefängnis, New York Times reviewed, Prisons, united states, Justice, administration of, Mississippi, social conditions, Mississippi, history, African americans, mississippiPlaces
MississippiShowing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
April 22, 1997, Free Press, Free Press Paperbacks published by Simon & Schuster
Paperback
in English
0684830957 9780684830957
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2
Worse than slavery: Parchman Farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow justice
1996, Free Press
in English
0684822989 9780684822983
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Book Details
First Sentence
"In the tumultuous summer of 1861, a Mississippi planter named William Nugent rode off to war with a regiment from Vicksburg."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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December 19, 2023 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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December 8, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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