Summary Of Oshinsky's Worse Than Slavery

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Recommended: The negative impact of slavery

In his book Worse Than Slavery, Oshinsky graphically documents the story of the “farm with slaves” that turned an enormous profit to the state. Throughout the book one is continually confronted with the systematized degradation and humiliation of blacks. Before reading this book I thought I knew the extent of America’s racist past but Oshinsky proved me wrong. There are many dark truths and shameful skeletons I have not encountered before. Parchman Farm with its use of race-baiting techniques and capitalizing on racist fears of black lawlessness as a means to justify political control, violence, and murder is absolutely horrifying. At the heart of Oshinsky’s work, one can see the continual effort of whites to restore their supremacy at all …show more content…

This took form in many ways but three stand out in particular; the state authorized race baiting, the continual demonization and degradation of black lives, and the rise of violence and murder during times of racial progress. In the following I will address each topic and show Oshinsky’s documentations on these themes throughout his work. Race baiting was a racial caste and custom that permeated the legal system. Whereby Mississippi law had informal categories for convicting people depending on the color of skin such that there was a statute law, plantation law, lynch law, and Negro law. Oshinsky documents a prominent Delta attorney, S.F. Davis who describes this system and how certain laws are to be enforced for whites while others are enforced for blacks. Oshinsky writes that although Mississippi did not discriminate by race the “arrest, prosecute, and sentence depended in large part on a person’s skin color, as did the workings of the trail itself” (pg 124). This racial system of conviction allowed whites to exploit blacks and to legally disregard

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