Parchman Farm

The Mississippi State Penitentiary opened in 1901, after the state bought some sixteen thousand acres in Sunflower County, over half of it from the Parchman family, whose name stuck. It was built as a working farm rather than a prison, on a penal plan Governor John M. Stone proposed in 1896 and Governor James K. Vardaman drove to completion after 1904, arguing for it in explicitly racial terms. Prisoners, roughly nine in ten of them Black, rode mules out before dawn and worked cotton in files called long lines until dusk, watched by armed trusties drawn from the inmates rather than by paid guards. Discipline was a leather strap called Black Annie, and a man could be whipped for missing his cotton quota. It made money, and for decades was the state's largest source of income outside taxation. Two other histories run through it. Folklorists recorded here repeatedly, John and Alan Lomax first on 8 August 1933 and Alan again in 1947, 1948 and 1959, capturing work songs adapted from field hollers and sung to the swing of axes and hoes, which survived here because the place was cut off. And in 1961 the Freedom Riders filled it. Arrested in Jackson for desegregating interstate travel, they refused bail and took their thirty nine day sentences to make segregation expensive, and when the city jail and the county farm filled the state moved them here, forty five men on 15 June and some three hundred by the summer's end. Ross Barnett told his guards to break their spirit and not their bones. The desegregation order took effect that November. A federal court found conditions here unconstitutional in Gates v. Collier in 1972, ending the trusty system. The penitentiary is still open.