Analysis Of Worse Than Slavery By Oskinsky

In Oskinsky’s book, Worse Than Slavery, he constructs a view of life of the post antebellum period after Reconstruction has ended and how in the deep south of Mississippi and the rest of the former Confederacy, local and state governments institute laws and acts that are made to punish the black man and oppress him back to when he or she would have been a slave. During the Civil War, Mississippi lost a quarter of its white male population, leaving most of the work to the women and elderly and the people became desperate, as an old man explains, “I must live. My sons fell in the war. All my servants have left me. I sell firewood to the steamboats passing by” (Oskinsky, 13). With people becoming desperate, they are more than likely to find a scapegoat. That scapegoat was the blacks. “Mississippi was moving to a formal-and violent-separation of the races. Deeply rooted customs were now being written into law” (Oskinsky, 13). Mississippians were determined to uproot the plans that the Freedmen's Bureau and the Republicans have put in place. The people of Mississippi came up with a plan to bring a Democratic “redemption”, this would be called the “Mississippi Plan”. The …show more content…
During the civil rights era, Parchman was used to hold movement workers and several leaders including some the Freedom Riders, James Farmer and Stokley Carmichael. Parchman Farm only fell when four inmates brought lawsuits to the federal courts to end the abuse and conditions of the camps at Parchman. In 1972, the case, Gates vs. Collier, Judge William C. Keady ordered the immediate end to Parchman Farm practices. The officials at Parchman tried to abuse the ruling by putting a single black man into the “white area” and vice-versa. With the change of Parchman Farm, the society around it also changed, segregation of inmates was terminated and would eventually be replaced with organized gangs and racial