Mississippi

Parchman, Mississippi

Name: Mississippi State Penitentiary 

Population: 4,840 inmates (houses only men now but was mixed gender)

Founded: 1901

Who Owns It and General Facts: 

• It is owned by Mississippi state

• Parchman is referred to as “destination doom” in William Faulkner’s novel “The Mansion.”

• Parchman began as three separate farms: a small farm, which was maintained by white convicts, a smaller one farmed by women (mostly Black), and a colossal sprawling plantation for the prison’s Black male convicts. The land took up a massive span of 46 miles and 20,000 acres meant to bring profit to Mississippi. (Oshinsky, David)

• In some years between 1947- 1959, celebrated folklorist Alan Lomax went to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Using a reel-to-reel tape deck and a camera--Lomax documented as best as he could the painful and hopeless conditions of the prison farm, where mostly Black inmates labored.

  The incarcerated men sang as they worked, keeping time with tools and the dirt, facing their condition, and creating a new body of Southeast American song. A disturbing account of how slavery persisted well into the 20th century in the standardized form of prison and the chain gang, Parchman Farm includes 44 of Lomax’s remastered audio recordings and a book of more than 70 of Lomax’s photographs. (Parchman Farm ARTBOOK)  

• Conditions at Parchman have been ruled as violating the Constitution, according to the U.S. Justice Department said April 20, 2022. “Our investigation uncovered evidence of systemic violations that have generated a violent and unsafe environment for people incarcerated at Parchman,” Kristen Clarke, the U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at a press conference. “We are committed to taking action that will ensure the safety of all people held at Parchman and other state prison facilities.” (Mitchell)

  Between 2014 and 2021, the number of correctional officers plummeted from 1,591 to 667. The inmate population shrank during that time from 21,919 to 16,945. (Mitchell)

  Twelve individuals incarcerated at Parchman died by suicide in the last three years, all in single cells.

  The DOJ report said that Parchman inmates had been subjected to “an unreasonable risk of violence due to inadequate staffing, cursory investigative practices, and deficient contraband controls,” adding that “these systemic failures result in an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion and violence, including ten homicides in 2019.” (Mitchell)
  

Land History: 

• The Meridian Race Riot occurred over three days in March 1871 in Meridian, Mississippi. It resulted in the murders of a white Republican judge and nearly thirty blacks by a mob of vigilante whites led by the Ku Klux Klan. The riot is the bloodiest day in the city’s history since the Civil War. (Sanders, S.)

• Parchman is 30 miles from where Emmett Till was lynched. On August 28, 1955, while visiting family in Money, MS, 14-year-old Emmett Till, was brutally murdered and assaulted for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.

• Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She became a journalist and used writing to discuss the sociology of white supremacy in the United States during segregation. She advocated creating laws to punish those who partook in the act of lynching. She spoke to 7 presidents about instilling anti-lynching laws. She was one of the NAACP’s founders and a founder of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club, where she continued to deal with the most pressing issues she saw within the Black community. (Martin) In March 2022, 124 years after Wells visited the White House and after nearly 200 attempts by Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching law over the 20th century, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making the act a federal hate crime. The new law carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for anyone who conspires to commit an act of lynching — defined as the public killing of an individual without due process, according to the NAACP — that results in severe injury or death. Ida B. Wells deserves credit for its passage. (McShane)
  

• Some of the Freedom Riders, a group of interracial civil rights activists who boycotted Jim Crow laws in the 1960s, were incarcerated at Parchman. Claude Liggins, 77, said the racism by the guards at Parchman was mostly focused on the white Freedom Riders. “They couldn’t understand why they would want to go against their own race and support us,” Liggins, who is black, said. “They had several white men who were beaten almost to death.” (Grabenstein)

Unusual Facts:

• Elvis Presley’s father Vernon was imprisoned at Parchman in 1938 for “check forgery”(Nix), and blues singers Bukka White and Son House were arrested for supposed acts of violence. (Grabenstein) Bukka White wrote “Parchman Farm Blues” after his release.

• A book called Ghost of an Innocent Man was written about Willie J. Grimes, a man with no record of violence, who was falsely convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment in Parchman. He spent 24 years behind bars before being exonerated. (book here)

• Jesmyn Ward Wins National Book Award for ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ : (NYT ) Part of the book’s synopsis is around the lead character moving to Parchman and awaiting the father of her children’s release from prison.

• Oshinsky said, “Parchman, I believe, is the closest thing to slavery to survive the Civil War. Its story covers the bleak panorama of race and punishment, brutality and paternalism, in the darkest corner of the American South.”

• Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is an hour and a half drive from Memphis, Tennessee, is known as the original home of the blues.

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