in this sensitively told tale of suffering brutality and inhumanity worse than slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest south from emancipation to the civil rights eraand beyondimmortalized in blues songs and movies like cool hand luke and the defiant ones mississippis infamous parchman state penitentiary was in the precivil rights south synonymous with cruelty now noted historian david oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison drawing on police records prison documents folklore blues songs and oral history from the days of cottonfield chain gangs to the 1960s when parchman was used to break the wills of civil rights workers who journeyed south on freedom rides