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.