Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

Prisons in the deep South, with chain gangs, shotguns, and bloodhounds, have been immortalized in movies, blues music, and fiction. Mississippi’s Parchman State Penitentiary was the grandfather of them all, a hellhole where conditions were brutal. This epic history fills the gap between slavery and the civil rights era, showing how Parchman and Jim Crow justice proved that there could be something worse than slavery.