Parchman, officially the Mississippi State Penitentiary, is a working prison on roughly eighteen thousand acres of Sunflower County bottomland, the oldest and largest in the state. It is not a museum and it offers no tours. It belongs in a guide to the Delta because of what it was built to be. After the Civil War Mississippi had leased its convicts, most of them Black, to private businesses. From 1900 the state bought land for a penal farm instead, and in 1904 Governor James K. Vardaman made it his project.
The farm ran like a plantation. Men in striped uniforms picked cotton in long lines under the guns of armed trusties, slept in barracks called cages, and could be whipped with a strap. Historians describe it as an African American institution by design, and Vardaman said as much himself. A federal court found its conditions unconstitutional in 1972. In June 1961 the state sent Freedom Riders, arrested in Jackson after their buses arrived, to Parchman, where as many as three hundred were held at one time.
The prison also shaped the blues. Bukka White sang "Parchman Farm Blues," and John and Alan Lomax recorded prisoners here in 1933. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands at the main entrance on US 49W, where passersby are not allowed to stop and photograph. Read about it, listen to the recordings, and keep driving.
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