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Essay on Worse Than Slavery Analysis Paper
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.
During the Cold War years an article of faith that distinguished the West from the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism was the latter's Siberian gulag, a vast network of prison camps where inmates faced unspeakable brutality and horrors from both nature and man. Of course, nothing of that kind could flourish here. According to David Oshinsky, the U.S. did indeed have its own gulag, and it went by the name of Mississippi. Parchman Farm was its "first circle."
The Parchman Farm story begins with the Reconstruction era. Determined to overthrow Republican regimes, Mississipians devised what would become the model for Democratic redemption elsewhere, the so-called "Mississippi Plan.".....
