Oshinsky - Summary Worse Than Slavery PDF

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David M. Oshinsky – “Worse Than Slavery” Chapter by chapter summary/notes...

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David M. Oshinsky – “Worse Than Slavery”

Chapter 1 – Emancipation -

Oshinsky lays down the historical context between the “end” of slavery and the creation of Parchman farm in the opening chapter “Emancipation”. Notes how “few could escape the consequences of this war”, and how “commerce and transportation had collapsed”; “desperate planters and farmers struggled to survive”. Discusses how Southern whites created the image of the lazy, vagrant freed slaves; “In white eyes, the Negro viewed his freedom in typically primitive terms – as a license to roam the countryside in search of pleasure and trouble” (p.18). This would later become a means of persecution to which poor blacks were rounded up by police and turned into convict labourers.

Chapter 2 – The Mississippi Plan -

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“With freedom, “black crime” moved well beyond the plantation” (p.32), however stealing had “always been common among slaves” (p.32). White reaction to these crimes were intensified and violence ensued; “In Alabama, vigilantes punished hundreds of “thieving niggers” on their own” (p.33). “As convictions mounted, Southern Prison’s turned black” (p.34), and throughout the South the prison system was in disrepair in the aftermath of the Civil War. In response, North Carolina businessman Edmund Richardson devised a plan, striking a contract with a Mississippi penitentiary in which he would “work these felons outside the prison walls. He promised to feed them, clothe them, guard them, and treat them well” (p.35). Richardson laid the foundations for a convict lease system to flourish. The “Penitentiary Report [of 1871] lied shamelessly about conditions on his farms” (p.36), and “The press called him “the greatest of Southern financiers” and the largest cotton planter in the world, not excepting Khedive of Egypt” (p36). Convict leasing did not fully begin en masse until 1875; violence between vigilante white mobs seeking to attack Republican rallies preceded the election and disenfranchised enough voters so that the Democrats won two-thirds of the congressional seats and both houses of the state legislature. “When the Mississippi legislature convened in 1876, crime and punishment were among its primary concerns” …” they believed convicts could provide at least a partial solution to the needs of Mississippi’s labor-starved employers” (p.40). In 1876, the “Pig Law”, legislature aimed at blacks was introduced which raised the severity of punishment for theft of farm animals or property over 10 dollars. This was followed by the Leasing Act, which was designed for black convicts and permitted towns and counties to work their convicts outside local jails. “Hundreds of black children were leased because the state penal code did not distinguish between adult and juvenile offenders. By 1880, at least one convict in four was an adolescent or a child – a percentage that did not diminish over time.” (p.47) The battle against leasing initially was fought on humanitarian grounds, with opponents focusing on the cruel treatment of convicts, not on the profits made by the elite. Among the leaders of this early struggle were editors John Martin of the New

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Mississippian and Roderick Gambrell of The Sword and Shield. Both men were moral reformers who railed against liquor and gambling as well as the convict lease. By September 5th, 1890, convict lease was abolished in Mississippi through new constitution however “the delegates did not vote for immediate abolition because there was no place to put the prisoners, but they fully expecred the state to solve this problem permanently by “establishing a prison farm” in the next several years (p.52) and was certainly followed, a decade later, with Parchman farm.

Chapter 3 – America Siberia -

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Details the expansion over the South and its abhorrent working and living conditions for black convicts. “For years, Southern opinion applauded the “benefits” of convict leasing, while ignoring its brutal underside” (p.56), leasing added millions in revenue, lowered tax and generated money for public services. “By the 1870s there was no more talk about leasing as a temporary response to the forces unleashed by emancipation and war” (p.57). The railroad boom of the 1870s and 80s relied heavily on convict labour in North Carolina, “as the railroads expanded, new industries followed in their path” (p.60). “The South’s economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners” (p.60). “Blacks in Texas made up one-fifth of the general population but almost three-fifths of the convicts. The typical state prisoner was a young, illiterate, male Negro serving a first-time sentence for burglary or theft” (p.60). “By 1915, convict leasing remained alive in only Florida and Alabama, where it served a need that free labor could not entirely meet” (p.70). Alabama was synonymous with coal production, becoming the nation’s sixth biggest producer by 1910. Convict leasing was essential to this growth. Details of prison conditions; “In 1870, Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40 percent of their convicts had died, prompting a doctor to warn that if the trend continued, the entire convict population would be wiped out within three years” (p.79).

Chapter Four – The White Chief -

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James Kimble Vardaman; “The White Chief” “To the poor whites of Mississippi he was part showman and part messiah” (p.85) Son of a Confederate soldier; grew up with wealthy relatives; passed the bar in 1882 “Vardaman married a wealthy widow and bought a failing newspaper, the Greenwood Enterprise, which became a sounding board for his endless grudges and vaguely populist views. Campaigned in 1903 for governor, promising to tax planters, regulate rail roads and provide services to the poor. Used race-based politics; “Vardaman sketched a more ominous portrait in which blacks were demanding social equality, pursuing white women, and committing awful crimes” (p.87). “Vardaman knew that whites fears about social equality grew stronger in rough economic times, and he senses that for poor white men, the ability to protect one’s

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wife and daughter from the “black beast” had become a vital substitute – a compensation of sorts – for the inability to shield them for the ravages of hunger and debt. The White Chief’s campaign banner said: “A vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, the safety of the home, and the protection of our women and children” (p.90). Vardaman was voted into office and immediately urged for police and prosecutors to crack down harder on African-Americans, making the argument that young black males who had been born after the Civil War had “never experienced the “civilizing” effects of slavery” (p.92). “In 1895, a Louisiana newspaper observed that “the [new] generation of negro bucks and wenches have lost that wholesome respect for the white man, without which two races, one inferior, cannot live in peace and harmony together” (p.92). “By 1900, dozens of physicians and psychologists, historians and statisticians were discovering a dangerous “new” Negro, menacing to whites” (p.95). Numbers of lynchings shot up throughout Mississippi, and “not a single white editor in Mississippi found the courage to condemn lynching without qualification in the years between 1900 and World War I. Printed opinion ranged from the Raymond Gazette, which endorsed the lynching of “insane” Negroes who became public nuisances, to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which described lynching as “horrible”, but “excusable” for “certain heinous crimes”” (p.106).

Chapter Five – The Birth and the Birthplace -

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By the time Vardaman was in office, a vast expansion of prison farms had begun, with the state buying up over 20,000 acres of land However, Vardaman was actually opposed to convict leasing “on the grounds that it enriched big planters and railroad barons at the public’s expense” (p.109), however envisioned a system similar to that of the plantation era which would “”socialize” young blacks within the limits of their God-given abilities” (p.110). Plantation labour once again flourished, and “in 1907, an investigator claimed that at least one-third of the large planters in the cotton belt were holding their Negro workers to a “condition of peonage”. Describes the caste system and the racial etiquette which ruled over the segregated world of the South and infiltrated the legal system too, allowing “whites to exploit blacks without legal limit, to withhold the most basic rights and safeguards while claiming to be indulgent, paternalistic, and fair” (p.124). The way in which Southern blacks were kept in poverty led to large amounts of black on black violence and other crimes, which anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker described in After Freedom, as due to “a number of factors, including the arbitrary and complacent workings of the law” (p.131). “The negro, then, lived largely outside the law. He played no role in making it, enforcing it, or judging those who broke it. The law did not protect him from white oppressors or from black criminals. It did not treat him from justly in the courtroom or sentence him consistently for his offsense” (p.131).

Chapter Six – Parchman Farm

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“By the early 1900s, the great bulk of Mississippi’s convicted felons had been delivered to Parchman Farm. According to the state penitentiary report of 1917, blacks comprised about 90 percent of the prison population” (p.137). Conditions almost mirrored that of slavery; “The plantation was divided into fifteen field camps, each surrounded by barbed wire and positied at least half a mile apart. The camps were segregated only be race and sex” (p.138); “Each field camp was directed by a sergeant, or overseer, who lived on the grounds (p.139). “At Parchman, formal punishment meant a whipping in front of the men. It was done by the sergeant, with the victim stripped to the waist and spread-eagled on the floor” (p.149); “Public opinion in Mississippi strongly supported the lash. Prison officials and sheriffs, politicians and judges, church groups and newspapers- most seemed to favour its use. “The whip makes no appeal to hidden virtue,” said the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, “but it is a sure and effective means of planting fear . . . in the hears of [criminals]. It is retribution, and retribution hurts” (p.151). “Unlike prison systems, which drained public coffers at an ever expanding rate, this one poured almost a million dollars into the state treasury through the sale of cotton and cotton seed” (p.155). “In less than a decade, Parchman had become a giant money machine: profitable, selfsufficient, and secure. For Southerners of both races, it represented something familiar as well. Parchman was a powerful link to the past – a place of racial discipline where blacks in striped clothing worked the cotton fields for the enrichment of others. And it would remain this way for another half-century, until the Civil Rights movement methodically swept it away” (p.155).

Chapter Seven – The Other Parchman: White Men, Black Women -

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“By 1915, the great bulk of white convicts had been moved to Parchman, where they lived in separate field camps, segregated by race” (p.162). The number of white convicts continued to rise through the 1930s as the black population in Mississippi was taking a steady decline (Great Migration etc). This decline impacted the racial composition of Parchman, and by mid-30s, nearly 30% of those sent to the state penitentiaries were white (including Elvis’ father, who served three years at Parchman for forgery!). “Women in Mississippi were rarely sent to the state penitentiary” (p.168); “At no time between 1870 and 1970 did females comprise more than 5 percent of the state prison population” (p.169). Women were separated from the men and segregated too, however “sex and rape were all too common in a camp supervised by male sergeants and guarded by male trusties” (p.172).

Chapter Eight – Going Home

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“As a general rule, Parchman’s population rose and fell with the fortunes of the cotton economy” … “But in hard times, Parchman filled up with young men – partly, some suspected, because the big planters had no interest in shielding surplus workers from

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the law. “It is obvious to me,” said Governor Mike Conner in 1936, “that when labor is plentiful in the Delta, the accused is permitted to go to the penitentiary” (p.180). “Every so often, a newspaper story would appear about a local Negro serving an interminable sentence at Parchman because no one cared enough to get him out. As time went by and these stories piled up, the press began to describe a class of “forgotten men.” (p.196).

Chapter Nine – Executioner’s Song -

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“For several hundred convicted felons, capital punishment became the fatal alternative to Parchman farm. As expected, the process was deeply rooted in race. According to a comprehensive report of legal executions in Mississippi, blacks accounted for 87 percent of the 433 people put to death there since the Civil War, a figure slightly above the Southern average of 80 percent” (p.208). There has been great debate by scholars over the relationship between lynchings and executions; “Did these lethal punishments complement eachother or serve as alternatives? Did their numbers rise and fall in tandem (the “reinforcement” effect), or did an increase in one mean a decrease in the other (the “substitution” effect)? Or was there no correlation at all?” (p.209). Execution evolved from the gallows to the electric chair to the gas chamber in 1954 in Mississippi.

Chapter Ten – A Farm with Slaves -

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A greater realisation that Parchman was simply working as a money making machine, rather than rehabilitating convicts began to occur; “Blacks came to Parchman as field workers and left the same way. That was their lot in life. Anything more was anathema in a culture where white supremacy and unskilled Negro labor went hand in hand. In Mississippi, rehabilitation was a dangerous word” (p.224). “Parchman remained a stable and profitable operation, dependent on the rhythms of nature and fortunes of King Cotton” (p.224). World War II brought a boom in industry which Parchman benefitted greatly from too, and “Parchman’s inmate population remained steady in these years, at around fifty women and two thousand men” (p.225). “The flush times of World War II ushered I some minor reforms. In the 1940s, the superintendent began a system of incentives for “well-behaved” convicts that included a ten-day Christmas furlough and weekly visitations with family members at the farm” (p.227). Between 1954 and 1964, Mississippi executed 31 prisoners at Parchman, of which 23 were blacks, sparking a new cycle of racial tensions and violence. When Clyde Kennard, a young African-American, attempted to apply for MSC, state officials framed him for stealing $25 worth of chicken feed and he was sentenced to seven years at Parchman. “Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s leading attorney, took Kennard’s conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to get it overturned. Meanwhile, local activists mobilized a campaign that caught the attention of national figures like comedian Dick Gregory and Martin Luther King Jr.” (p.232).

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Ross Barnett, Mississippi’s new governor, released Kennard from Parchman in the spring of 1963, to “minimize the state’s role in news stories concerning the prionser’s desperate plight” (p.233). “Parchman was already well known to civil rights workers in Mississippi and beyond. “We had all head of [it], of course,” said CORE’s James Farmer, “the most fabled state prison in the South.”” (p.234). In the spring of 1961, 45 male freedom riders were arrested and taken to Parchman. The group included both Black and White men. Two white freedom riders who refused to leave the truck were dragged out and pleaded that they were “unjustly imprisoned”, however they taken inside, undressed and shocked with cattle prods. Other demonstrators ended up in Parchman too, and “it focused attention on Parchman as a civil rights problem and made it part of the larger black struggle” (p.238). “On February 8th, 1971, Haber filed suit in federal court on behalf of inmates Narazeth Gates, Willie Holmes, Matthew Winter, and Hal Zachary. The plaintiffs charged that “deplorable conditions and practices” at Parchman deprived them of rights guaranteed by the First, Eighth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Keady also “added a subclass of black convicts, who faced additional hardships based solely on their race” (p.245). “No longer would Parchman match the apt description that Haber and Nazarath Gates had used when the case began: “a farm with slaves”” (p.248)....