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Lädt ... Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1997. Auflage)von David M. Oshinsky (Autor)
Werk-InformationenWorse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice von David M. Oshinsky
Books Read in 2014 (583) Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. A simply told and simply devastating account of life for African Americans in Reconstruction and Jim Crow-era Mississippi, and of the state's penal labor practices in particular. The depth of hatred and violence of Southern racism never ceases to stun me. When it comes to things like black people being rounded up as vagrants to be sent off to malarial swamps to labor and die in their hundreds, you have to accept that in some ways the racial oppression in the South, even after slavery was abolished(!), approached the Holocaust for horror. ( ) A simply told and simply devastating account of life for African Americans in Reconstruction and Jim Crow-era Mississippi, and of the state's penal labor practices in particular. The depth of hatred and violence of Southern racism never ceases to stun me. When it comes to things like black people being rounded up as vagrants to be sent off to malarial swamps to labor and die in their hundreds, you have to accept that in some ways the racial oppression in the South, even after slavery was abolished(!), approached the Holocaust for horror. The subtitle of this book mentions Parchman Farm, which the book definitely covers, but only for the last half and only as the extreme example of the Jim Crow "justice". And while the main title refers to the treatment that blacks have suffered in the South since the Civil War, one can still imagine someone debating the title on being accurate or not. After all, is anything worse than slavery? I would hold that the author does a very credible job of proving that yes, there definitely is something worse. In fact, I would contend that a more dramatic but reasonable alternative title of this book could have been "1001 Reasons Why the State of Mississippi Should Have Been Burned to the Ground a Long Time Ago". I've read a lot about the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and the Rwandan genocide, and I've asked myself why this book disturbed me even more than the others. I suspect that it's for two reasons. First, that South's mistreatment of the blacks has lasted for many, many more years. And secondly, as this book so aptly shows, the mistreatment has been so purely mean-spirited. The white South's behavior in this book is equivalent to that of the emotionally disturbed youngster caught torturing cats and dogs for sport. That this is the same area that is at the very heart of the current Republican Party's base should cause us all to pause and reflect. From Booklist 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 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Auszeichnungen
"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. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)365.9762Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Penal & related institutions History, geographic treatment, biography North America South Central U.S. MississippiKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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