Parchman, Mississippi

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Parchman is a small town in Sunflower County, Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta region. Best known as the home of Mississippi State Penitentiary, formerly called Parchman Farm, Parchman is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison in the state. Parchman also houses inmates who have been sentenced to death in Mississippi on death row.

Instead of building a permanent execution chamber there, the state built the first portable electric chair in the United States, carried on a pickup truck and used until 1955, for executions at Parchman.

1 Description
2 Landmark ruling
3 Music
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Description

Located in the fertile Mississippi delta land, Parchman was the location of Mississippi's first prison, then called Parchman Farm because it was a working farm with the labor supplied by the inmates, then called convicts. Using convict labor for everything from raising cotton and other farm food products, to building railroads, to extracting turpentine gum from pine tree was common in the South then to use. Parchman was and still is in prime cotton-growing country. Inmates labored there in the fields raising cotton, soybeans and other cash crops, and the production of livestock, swine, poultry and milk.^[1]

Parchman Farm consisted of 20,000 acres (81 km²), broken down into fifteen work camps, each organized like a pre-Civil War plantation with prison personnel with guns serving as overseers, and so-called inmate trustees driving the convict worker production. The sale of produce and cotton from Parchman Farm was consistently profitable for the state.^[2]

[edit] Landmark ruling

In 1972 four inmates sued the superintendent of Parchman in federal court alleging violation of their civil rights under the United States Constitution. In a landmark case known as Gates v. Collier, federal judge William C. Keady ruled in favor of the inmates. He ordered an immediate end to all unconstitutional conditions and practices. Racial segregation of inmates and the trustee system, which allowed certain inmates to have power and control over others, were abolished.

[edit] Music

Many blues songs originated from the farm or those who spent time there. The song "Midnight Special" refers to a train leaving Jackson on Saturday nights carrying visitors to the prison for the allotted Sunday visits.

The famous John Lomax, accompanied by his wife, Ruby toured through the southern states recording blues work songs and other folk songs for the Library of Congress as part of a WPA project in 1939. They recorded work songs and chants while inmates were performing a group task, such as hoeing the fields at Parchman Farm as well as blues songs sung by inmate musicians.^[3]

Parchman today remains a small sleepy town. The current census shows the population of Sunflower County declining between the years 2000 and 2003.^[4]