This week you will begin reading the assigned monograph for this class, David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. 

For the discussion this week, I want you to give your opinion about the book’s title.  Although the book is about a period of American history after the emancipation of millions of slaves, it describes the establishment of a penal system in the South which, in effect, engaged in the wholesale re-enslavement of thousands of mostly innocent southern blacks. Certainly, no one would argue that slavery was preferable to even the worst nightmares southern white supremacists could inflict on a now technically “free” black populace.  Yet the title comes from a quote from an inmate who endured the horrors of the prison.

From your reading of the first two chapters, what do you believe lies at the root of the establishment of this prison system in Mississippi?  What lies at the root of the brutality inflicted upon the emancipated black populace of the state?