Review of Worse than Slavery

Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice chronicles Black/African American history, particularly in the state of Mississippi, from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era.  The notorious Parchman Farm also figured in the Freedom Riders films.  

Mississippi had been known for violence between and among white men. However, after the Civil War, white people’s resentment of Black people, i.e. the formerly enslaved, grew and intensified.

Black people were characterised as immoral, licentious and savage. In particular, the myth of the need to protect white Southern women spread more widely and grew more deeply entrenched. So did another myth, that of the need to confine and control Black people for their own safety, i.e. to protect them from their lack of moral fibre once slavery had ended. Mississippi was the first state to bring in Black Codes which restricted the movements of Black people. These were then adopted by other Southern states and would later become the basis for the Jim Crow laws, but they were abolished during Reconstruction.

Worse than Slavery describes all this as the backdrop to the use of prison labour which came later.

During Reconstruction, the formerly enslaved in Mississippi and throughout the South found themselves able to vote for the first time in their lives. White teachers from the North went down South to teach Black people to read and write. These activities were protected by the U.S. government.

However, post-Reconstruction, the government lost interest in protecting the rights of Black people. Then someone lit upon the idea of “convict leasing”, i.e. the use of prison labour. The jails, which had predominantly been occupied by white prisoners, now were filled with Black people, many of whom had been jailed for minor offences. They could then be hired at a low price by white plantation owners and other business owners.

It’s important to note that this practice still continues to this day, albeit under better conditions.

The conditions in which these prisoners were kept were beyond appalling. Worse than Slavery depicts workers who were starved, emaciated, crawling with vermin which naturally led to disease, and whose bodies were torn up by savage whippings. Those who were deemed unfit to work were sent to hospital to die. Children were also used as prison labour. No prisoner involved in the convict leasing system survived for ten years.

Once the conditions of the prisoners and their living quarters became known, a moral panic ensued, inflamed by the press. Something had to be done. These immoral Black men could not be allowed to roam freely, putting white women at risk. But that system, in that form, could not be allowed to continue. And there was a constant need for cheap labour to carry out the most dangerous jobs.

For a clear, comprehensive description of the advent of post-Civil War racism and the beginnings of Jim Crow, Worse than Slavery is an excellent source.