Worse Than Slavery

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Simon and Schuster, 22.04.1997 - 320 Seiten
In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.

Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on police records, prison documents, folklore, blues songs, and oral history, from the days of cotton-field chain gangs to the 1960s, when Parchman was used to break the wills of civil rights workers who journeyed south on Freedom Rides.
 

Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

White Men Black Women
157
Going Home
179
Executioners Song
205
A Farm with Slaves
223
Urheberrecht

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Beliebte Passagen

Seite 102 - The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.
Seite 101 - We would be justified in slaughtering every Ethiop on the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home.
Seite 15 - There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes. Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean — expecting to exchange labor, and obedience to the will of another, for idleness and freedom from restraint. Such ignorance and perverted...
Seite 20 - The negro is free, whether we like it or not; we must realize that fact now and forever. To be free, however, does not make him a citizen, or entitle him to social or political equality with the white man.
Seite 52 - AD 1894, save as authorized in the next section, nor shall any previous lease or hiring of convicts extend beyond that date; and the legislature shall abandon the system of such leasing or hiring...
Seite 22 - We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.
Seite 160 - Remember, that for the wisest and most evident reasons, the merciful maxim of the law, which says that it is better that ninety-nine guilty men should escape, than that one innocent man should be punished...
Seite 100 - You don't understand how we feel down here," a Mississippian told a Northern visitor in 1908; "when there is a row, we feel like killing a nigger whether he has done anything or not.
Seite 91 - If I were the sheriff," he said, "and a negro fiend fell into my hands, I would run him out of the county. If I were governor and were asked for troops to protect him I would send them. But if I were a private citizen I would head the mob to string the brute up."27 The Vicksburg Herald, which a few months before had termed Vardaman's position on the Negro question "unsound...

Verweise auf dieses Buch

Torture and Democracy
Darius M. Rejali
Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2007

Autoren-Profil (1997)

David M. Oshinsky, PhD, is a professor in the NYU Department of History and director of the Division of Medical Humanities at the NYU School of Medicine. In 2005, he won the Pulitzer Prize in History for Polio: An American Story. His other books include the D.B. Hardeman Prize–winning A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, and the Robert Kennedy Prize–winning “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. His articles and reviews appear regularly in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

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