# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For weeks, Mississippi's prisons have been gripped by crisis, including at least a dozen inmate deaths. On Wednesday, the Justice Department responded to the turmoil.

A watchtower at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl, Miss. The Justice Department announced a civil rights investigation into the state's prison system. Credit... Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press

For weeks, Mississippi's prisons have been gripped by crisis. At least a dozen inmates have been slain or killed themselves, and feuding gangs have forced lockdowns. Images and videos taken on smuggled cellphones have highlighted deteriorating conditions, and legislators and activists have asked for federal intervention.

The Justice Department responded to the turmoil on Wednesday by announcing a civil rights investigation to explore whether prison officials have done enough to protect inmates from one another and the quality of mental health care and suicide prevention efforts.

In a statement, officials said the inquiry would focus on four prisons, including its facility in Parchman, a Mississippi Delta prison notorious for its history of harsh conditions.

The federal investigation follows a burst of violence that began in late December and prompted the lockdown of prisons across the state. Officials attributed the disorder to warring gangs, but the turmoil has underscored the broader troubles plaguing an understaffed prison system as it has descended into chaos.

The situation has become one of the most pressing issues facing Gov. Tate Reeves, the newly elected Republican who took office last month. In the first days of his term, he announced a state investigation into the prisons and plans to find a new corrections commissioner.

His administration said on Wednesday that it welcomed the federal inquiry.

"We are grateful that President Trump's administration has taken a focused interest in criminal justice reform and that they care enough about Mississippi to engage on this critical issue," said Renae Eze, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reeves.

"As we continue our own investigations," she continued, "we look forward to cooperating with them and working together to right this ship."

The inquiry into Mississippi's Department of Corrections comes after a Justice Department investigation into Alabama's prisons. Federal investigators last year found evidence that Alabama's prisons had violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment, as officials had failed to provide safe conditions for inmates and protect them from violence and sexual abuse.

Critics in Mississippi pressed federal officials to initiate an investigation there after the recent spate of violence, decrying conditions that they described as inhumane and unconstitutional. In a 23-page request, a roster of civil rights groups and elected officials, including Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, described "extreme" staff vacancies, as well as a long record of violence, escapes, uprisings, inadequate health care and institutions where criminal gangs are tolerated.

"The Mississippi prison system is in a state of acute and undeniable crisis," the letter said, adding that at one prison, gang members who dominate the kitchen withhold food to punish other prisoners and control who gets a mattress or blanket.

Inmates using illegal cellphones have also sought to bring attention to the conditions in which they are held, sending out photographs of inmates fighting, broken toilets, holes in prison walls, dangling wires and dead rodents caught in sticky traps.

Last month, 29 inmates filed a lawsuit against state officials, describing the recent killings as the "culmination of years of severe understaffing and neglect."

"Plaintiffs' lives are in peril," the lawsuit said, adding that inmates have died as a "direct result of Mississippi's utter disregard for the people it has incarcerated and their constitutional rights."

Last year's annual report from the Mississippi State Department of Health detailed infrastructure problems in the state's prisons. Credit... Mississippi State Department of Health

The report included images of clogged drains, exposed wires, holes in ceilings and broken toilets at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. Credit... Mississippi State Department of Health

Even as most of the violence has tamped down, leading officials to lift the lockdowns at most of the state's prisons, several other inmates have died at Parchman.

Last month, two prisoners were apparently killed from blunt force trauma in an episode that officials described as an isolated incident. On Saturday, an inmate at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, another prison included in the federal investigation, was found dead in his cell. Officials said that his death was under investigation but that there were no signs of assault.

Last month, Mr. Reeves, who called the situation in the prisons a "catastrophe," said he had asked the Mississippi Department of Investigations to assign an officer to Parchman to "bring order and root out the underlying issues."

Still, despite his calls for overhauling the prisons, Mr. Reeves did not ask lawmakers to budget more money for the Department of Corrections in the coming fiscal year, saying he wanted to make a "targeted investment" rather than "blindly request an increase to achieve a vague ambition."

Mr. Reeves has also recruited a group of prosecutors and law enforcement officials, led by Mayor George Flaggs Jr. of Vicksburg, to find a replacement for Pelicia E. Hall, the former prison commissioner who announced her resignation in late December to take a private-sector job.

The agency is being overseen in the interim by Thomas Taylor, a former state lawmaker and mayor of Boyle, a town of roughly 600 people in the Mississippi Delta.

The search committee for a permanent leader announced its criteria for candidates on Wednesday, including a proven history of turning around a government agency and the ability to maintain strong relationships with elected leaders, law enforcement officials and the broader public. "Work experience dealing with correctional institutions is preferred," the job posting said.

"Mississippi deserves a strong, experienced leader at the helm of the department," Mr. Reeves said in a statement. "Someone who can rebuild trust in the system. We are raising the level of expectation in our department leadership to ensure the safety and dignity of inmates, officers, and all Mississippians."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
After a Dozen Deaths, Justice Dept. Investigates Mississippi Prisons (Published 2020)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For weeks, Mississippi's prisons have been gripped by crisis, including at least a dozen inmate deaths. On Wednesday, the Justice Department responded to the turmoil. For weeks, Mississippi's prisons have been gripped by crisis. At least a dozen inmates have been slain or killed themselves, and feuding gangs have forced lockdowns.

# data[].attributes.body
Jesmyn Ward discusses growing up in Mississippi, the real-life inspiration behind her stories, and giving a voice to the community around her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fiction Writer Jesmyn Ward | 2017 MacArthur Fellow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

VODOU is a sometimes misleading, but nevertheless common, name for the religious practices of the majority of Haitians. Outsiders have given the name Vodou to the complex web of traditional religious practices followed in Haiti. Only recently, and still to a limited extent, have Haitians come to use the term as others do. Haitians prefer a verb to identify their religion: they speak of "serving the spirits."

A mountainous, poverty-stricken, largely agricultural country of approximately eight million people, Haiti has a land area of 10,700 square miles and occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic.

This is where Caribbean Vodou began, but Haiti is not the only place Vodou in practiced. Vodou is also a central part of everyday life in Haitian diaspora communities in New Orleans and Santiago, Cuba, both products of the upheaval caused by the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). More recent political and economic struggles in Haiti have also led to Vodou communities in New York City, Miami, Montreal, and Paris.

In Haiti, vodou originally referred to one ritual style among many in their syncretic religious system, the style most closely connected to Dahomey and the Fon language. The word vodou is derived from the Fon vodun, which means "god" or "spirit." Hoodoo is a related term from the same Fon word, yet, in the United States, it is almost always used as a derogatory term that focuses on black magic spells and charms.

Sensationalized novels and films, as well as spurious travelers' accounts, have painted a negative picture of Haitian religion. Vodou has been depicted as primitive and ignorant. Vodou rituals have been described as arenas for uncontrolled orgiastic behavior, and even cannibalism. The same writers stir up fear of Vodou and suggest that if whites get too close to a Vodou ceremony terrible things could happen. These distortions are attributable to the fear that the Haitian slave revolution sparked in whites. Haiti achieved independence in 1804, and thus became the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere at a time when the colonial economy was still heavily dependent on slave labor.

In Vodou there are three (not always clearly distinguished) categories of spiritual beings: lemò, lemistè, and lemarasa (respectively, "the dead," "the mysteries," and "the sacred twins"). While certain Vodou prayers, songs, and invocations preserve fragments of West African languages, Haitian Creole is the primary language of Vodou. Creole is the first and only language of more than one half the population of Haiti. It has a grammatical structure familiar to speakers of West African languages and an eighteenth-century French vocabulary mixed with a smattering of English words and expressions.

Although individuals and families regularly serve the Vodou spirits without recourse to religious professionals, throughout most of Haiti there is a loosely organized priesthood open to both men and women. The male priest is known as an oungan and the female priest is a manbo. There is a wide spectrum of Vodou ritualizing. There are individual acts of piety, such as lighting candles to petition particular spirits, and elaborate feasts, sometimes lasting days and including the sacrifice of several animals as part of the meals offered to the spirits. Energetic singing, dancing, and polyrhythmic drumming accompany the larger rituals. In the countryside, rituals often take place outdoors, on family land set aside for the spirits, and there is often a small cult housePage 9635 on that land where the family's altars are kept. Urban Vodou rituals tend to take place in an ounfò ("temple"). Urban altars, dense with sacrificial food and drink, sacred stones, and chromolithographs of the Catholic saints and other images, are maintained in jèvo ("altar rooms") off the central dancing and ritualizing space of the temple, the peristyl. In the cities, those who serve the spirits also tend to keep more modest altars in their own homes.

The goal of Vodou drumming, singing, and dancing is to chofè, to "heat up," the situation sufficiently to bring on possession by the spirits. As a particular spirit is summoned, a devotee enters a trance and becomes that spirit's chwal ("horse"), thus providing the means for direct communication between human beings and the spirits. The spirit is said to ride the chwal. Using the person's body and voice, the spirit sings, dances, and eats with the people and also deals out advice and chastisement. The people in turn offer the spirit a wide variety of gifts and acts of obeisance, the goal being to placate the spirit and ensure his or her continuing protection.

There are marked differences in Vodou as it is practiced throughout Haiti, but the single most important distinction is that between urban and rural Vodou. Haitian society is primarily agricultural, and the manner in which peasants serve the spirits is determined by questions of land tenure and ancestral inheritance. Urban Vodou is not tied to specific plots of land, but the family connection persists in another form. Urban temple communities become substitutes for the extended families of the countryside. The priests are called "papa" and "mama"; the initiates, who are called "children of the house" or "little leaves" refer to one another as "brother" and "sister." In general, urban Vodou is more institutionalized and often more elaborate in its rituals than its rural counterpart.

Haiti's slave population was built up in the eighteenth century, a period in which Haiti supplied a large percentage of the sugar consumed in Western Europe. Vodou was born on sugar, sisal, cotton and coffee plantations out of the interaction among slaves who brought with them a variety of African religious traditions, but due to inadequate records, little is known about this formative period in Vodou's history. It has been argued by Haitian scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot that the religion did not coalesce until after the revolution, but others suggest it had an effective presence, particularly in northern Haiti, during the latter part of the eighteenth century. James G. Leyburn in The Haitian People (1941) and Carolyn Fick in The Making of Haiti (1990) argue that Vodou played a key role in the organization of the slave revolt.

Among the African ethnic groups brought to Haiti as slave laborers, the most influential in shaping Haitian culture, including Vodou, were the Fon, Mahi, and Nago from old Dahomey (the present Republic of Benin), those who came to be known as the Yoruba (Nigeria), and Kongo peoples (Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Many of the names of Vodou spirits are easily traceable to their African counterparts; however, the spirits have undergone change in the context of Haiti's social and economic history. For example, Ogun among the Yoruba is a spirit of ironsmithing and other activities associated with metal, such as hunting, warfare, and modern technology. Neither hunting nor modern technology plays much of a role in the lives of Haitians. Haiti, however, does have a long and complex military history. Thus, the Haitian spirit Ogou is first and foremost a soldier whose rituals, iconography, and possession-performance explore both the constructive and destructive uses of military power, as well as its analogues with human relations-anger, self-assertion, and willfulness.

Africa itself is a powerful concept in Vodou. Haitians speak of Ginen ("Guinea") both as their ancestral home, the Guinea coast of West Africa, and as the watery subterranean home of the Vodou spirits. Calling a spirit franginen, ("fully and completely African") is a way of indicating that the spirit is good, ancient, and proper. The manner in which an individual or a group serves the spirits may also be called franginen, with similar connotations of approval and propriety.

For the most part, the slaveholders were Catholics and baptism for slaves was mandatory by French law. Many have argued that slaves used a veneer of Catholicism to hide their traditional religious practices from the authorities. While Catholicism may well have functioned in this utilitarian way for slaves on plantations, it is also true that the religions of West Africa from which Vodou was derived, already had a tradition of borrowing the deities of neighbors and enemies alike. Whatever Catholicism represented in the slave world, it was most likely also used as a means to expand Vodou's ritual vocabulary and iconography, thus helping captive laborers function in a nominally Catholic world. In 1804, immediately after Haiti declared its liberation, the Catholic Church withdrew all of its clergy from the new republic. Yet Catholicism survived in Haiti for fifty years without contact with Rome and it did so through the imitative ritualizing of a Vodou figure known as prêtsavan ("bush priest") as well as the competitive market for healing charms and talismans that was kept going by defrocked Catholic priests and the self-appointed "clergy" who ended up in Haiti in the early nineteenth century.

Catholicism has had the greatest influence on the traditional religion of Haiti at the level of rite and image rather than theology. This influence works in two ways. First, those who serve the spirits call themselves Catholic, attend Mass, and undergo baptism and first communion. Because these Catholic rituals at times function as integral parts of larger Vodou rites, they can be even directed to participate by their Vodou spirits. Second, Catholic prayers, rites, images, and saints' names are integrated into the common ritualizing of Vodou temples. The prêtsavan is an active figure in Vodou. He achieves his title by knowing the proper, that is the Latin or French, form of Catholic prayers.

Over the years, a system of parallels has been developed between the Vodou spirits and the Catholic saints. For example, Dambala, the ancient and venerable snake deity of the Fon people, is venerated in Haiti both as Dambala and as St. Patrick, who is pictured in the popular chromolithograph with snakes clustered around his feet. In addition, the Catholic liturgical calendar dominates in much Vodou ritualizing. Thus the Vodou spirit Ogou is honored in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora on July 25, the feast day of his Catholic counterpart.

Bondye, "the good God" is identified with the Christian God, and is said to be the highest, indeed the only, god. The spirits are said to have been angels in Lucifer's army whom God sent out of heaven and down to Ginen. Although the Vodou spirits may exhibit capricious behavior, they are not evil. Rather, they are seen as intermediaries between the people and the high god, a role identical to the one played by the so-called lesser deities in the religions of the Yoruba and Fon. Bondye is remote and unknowable. Although evoked daily in ordinary speech (almost all plans are made with the disclaimer si dye vle ("if God wills"), Bondye's intervention is not sought for help with life's problems. That is the work of the spirits.

Both the Catholic Church in Haiti and the government of Haiti have participated energetically in the persecution of those who serve the Vodou spirits. The last "antisuperstition campaign" was in the 1940s, but clerical and upperclass disdain for the religion has persisted much longer. In the twentieth century, Catholic clergy routinely preached against serving the spirits, and those who served them remarked, "That is the way priests talk." Many Catholic holy days have a Vodou dimension that church officials routinely manage to ignore.

For years Catholicism was the only religion in Haiti with official approval. Thus, the degree to which Vodou has been attacked, oppressed, tolerated, or even encouraged through the years has been largely a function of local politics. Presidents Dumarsais Estime (1946-1950) and Francois Duvalier (1957-1971) stand out from other Haitian heads of state because of their sympathy with Vodou. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was first elected president in 1990, was also a supporter of Vodou; in fact he changed the balance of religious power. On April 5, 2003, President Aristide fully recognized and fully empowered Vodou as a Haitian religion that could legally exercise its influence throughout Haiti according to the constitution and the laws of the republic.

The Rada spirits (named after the Dahomean principality Allada, once a busy slave depot) comprise a collection of ancient, sweet-tempered, wise, and usually patient lwa. Then there are the fiery and powerful Petwo spirits. The origin of the name "Petwo" is contested, but the strong Kongo influence is not. The home of the Ogou, also hot spirits, is the Nago nanchon, a Dahomean name for Ketu Yoruba. Most big feasts end with the playful Gede, inveterate rule breakers, who insist they are a fami ("family"), not a nanchon. In rural Vodou, a person may inherit responsibilities to one or more of these nanchon through maternal or paternal kin. Familial connections to the land, where the lwa are said to reside in trees, springs, and wells, may determine which particular spirits are served. In urban Vodou, there are a few important spirit nanchon that make their appearance, according to seniority and importance, in most major rituals. In Port-au-Prince, two nanchon, the Rada and the Petwo, have emerged as dominant largely by absorbing other nanchon. Rada and Petwo spirits contrast sharply. The Rada are dous, "sweet," and the Petwo, cho,"hot." When an individual, family, or temple is described as ritualizing in a mode that is Rada net ("straight Rada"), a great deal is being said about how that person or group functions socially as well as ritualistically. Each spirit has drum rhythms, dances, and food preferences that relate to its identifying characteristics. For example, Danbala, the gentle Rada snake spirit, is said to love orja, thick sugary almond syrup. His devotees perform a graceful spine-rippling dance called yanvalu. By contrast, the Petwo rhythm played for rum-drinking spirits is energetic and pounding, and the accompanying dance is characterized by fast, strong body movements.

In Vodou teachings the human being is composed of various parts: the body, that is, the gross physical dimension of the person who perishes after death, in addition to two to four souls, of which the most widely acknowledged are the gwo bonanj, and ti bonanj. The gwo bonanj ("big guardian angel") is roughly equivalent to consciousness or personality. When a person dies the gwo bonanj lingers, and immediately after death it must be protected because it is most vulnerable to capture and misuse by sorcerers. During possession, it is the gwo bonanj who is displaced by the spirit and sent to wander away from the body, as it does routinely during sleep. The ti bonanj ("little guardian angel") may be thought of as the spiritual energy reserve of a living person and, at times, as the ghost of a dead person.

Each person has one special lwa who is their mèt-tet, "master of the head." (The top of the head and the back of the neck are places where spirits may enter and leave.) The mèt-tet is the most important lwa served by a particular person and it reflects that person's personality to some degree. A Haitian whose family serves the spirits may inherit spiritualPage 9637 responsibilities to a deceased family member's mèt-tet. That is a big responsibility, but there are also things that can be gained. If the mèt-tet is conscientiously fed and honored, good luck and protection from both ancestor and lwa will be gained. In addition to the so-called masters of the head, most people who serve the spirits have a small number of other lwa with whom similar reciprocity has been established.

Unlike Catholic saints who are usually known through formulaic hagiography, Vodou lwa have richly developed histories, personalities, needs, desires, character strengths, and flaws, and even taste in food and drink. Because the lwa are fully developed characters and interact so intimately with vivan-yo, "the living," the practice of Vodou also functions as a system for categorizing and analyzing human behavior, in the individual and in the group. One of the characteristics of virtually all Caribbean African-based religions is the great amount of care given to analyzing social behavior and dealing with the results of that behavior.

Cemeteries are major ritual centers in both urban and rural Haiti. The first male buried in any cemetery is known as Bawon Samidi. Bawon's wife (or sister) is Gran Brijit, the first woman buried in the cemetery. Most cemeteries have a cross for Bawon either in the center of the cemetery or near its gate. Lakwa Bawon ("Bawon's Cross") marks the site's ritual center. Lighted candles and food offerings are left at the base of this cross. People stand with their hands on the cross praying aloud. Rituals for healing, love, or luck performed in rural cult houses or urban temples are not considered complete until physical remnants of the "work" are deposited at crossroads or at Bawon's Cross, which is itself a kind of crossroads marking the intersection of the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Haitians who serve the lwa usually make a clear distinction between the dead and the spirits. Yet a few of the ancestors, particularly if they were exceptional people when alive, actually evolve into spirits or lwa. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and John Kennedy have all been reported making cameo appearances through possession in Vodou ceremonies. The group of spirits, known as the Gede, have Bawon as their leader and are spirits of the dead as might be expected, but they are not ancestral spirits. Instead, they stand in for the entire community of human beings now deceased and in this context, Gede's crude comic performances make some sense. They are designed to bring the haughty to their knees and convince them that in the end, human beings all face the same fate. The Gede are inclusive, with no limits, and therefore almost any image will work on a Gede altar. Statues of the Buddha, LaoTzu, King Kong, St. Gerard, and Elvis Presley have all been sighted on Vodou altars. In and around Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti and its largest city, the Gede are the object of elaborate ritualizing in the cemeteries and Vodou temples during the season of the Feast of All Souls, Halloween.

The Gede are not only spirits of death but also boosters of human sexuality, protectors of children, and irrepressible social satirists. Dances for Gede tend to be boisterous affairs, and new Gede spirits appear every year. The satirical, and often explicitly sexual, humor of the Gede levels social pretense. The Gede use humor to deal with new social roles and to challenge alienating social structures. Through possession-performance, they not only appear as auto mechanics and doctors, they also critique government bureaucrats, military figures, and Protestant missionaries.

In some parts of rural Haiti, the ideal Vodou ceremony is one that serves the spirits as simply as possible because simplicity is said to reflect discrete but strong spiritual power, the African way of doing things (Larose, 1977). In practice, rural ritualizing tends to follow the fortunes of extended families. Bad times are often attributed to the displeasure of family spirits. When it is no longer possible to satisfy the spirits with small conciliatory offerings, the family will hold a large drumming and dancing feast that includes animal sacrifice. Urban Vodou, by contrast, has a more routine ritualizing calendar, and events tend to be larger and more elaborate. Ceremonies in honor of major spirits take place annually on or around the feast days of their Catholic counterparts and usually include sacrifice of an appropriate animal-most frequently a chicken, a goat, or a cow.

Annual pilgrimages draw thousands of urban and rural followers of Vodou. The focal point of these Catholic-Vodou events is often a church situated near some striking featurePage 9638 of the natural landscape that is sacred to the lwa. The two largest pilgrimages are one held for Ezili Danto (Our Lady of Mount Carmel) in mid-July in the small town of Saut d'Eau, named for its spectacular waterfall, and one held for Ogou (St. James the Elder) in the latter part of July in the northern town of Plain du Nord, where a shallow, muddy pool adjacent to the Catholic church is dedicated to Ogou.

The "work of the left hand" should not be confused with more ordinary Vodou ritualizing that can have a magical flavor, such as divination, herbal healing, and the manufacture of wanga, charms for love, luck, or health, or for the protection of the home, land, or person. Much of the work of Vodou priests is at the level of individual client-practitioner interactions Theirs is a healing system that treats problems of love, health, family, and work. Unless a problem is understood as coming from God, in which case the Vodou priest can do nothing, the priest will treat it as one caused by a spirit or by a disruption in human relationships, including relations with the dead. Generally speaking, Vodou cures come about through ritual adjustment of relational systems.

Drought and soil erosion, poverty, high urban unemployment, and political oppression have led to massive emigrations from Haiti in the last half-century. Vodou has gone along with the Haitians who, in search of a better life, have come to major urban centers of North America. In New York, Miami, and Montreal, the cities with the greatest concentrations of Haitian immigrants, Vodou ceremonies are carried on in storefronts, rented rooms, high-rise apartments, and basement storage areas. North American rituals are often somewhat truncated versions of their Haitian counterparts. There may be no drums, and the only animals sacrificed may be chickens. However it is possible to consult a manbo or oungan in immigrant communities with ease, and the full repertoire of rituals can be followed there, in one form or another. Even the pilgrimages are duplicated. On 16 July, rather than going to the mountain town of Saut d'Eau to honor Ezili Danto, New York Vodou practitioners take the subway to the Italian-American Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in East Harlem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The most complete, although not necessarily the best, history of Haiti and Haitian Vodou is still James G. Leyburn's The Haitian People (1941, rev. ed. with a new introduction by Sidney Mintz, New Haven, 1966). Joan Dayan's Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, Calif., 1998) brings postmodern analytic skills and fresh archival work to her gendered account of Haiti's revolutionary history. Carolyn Fick's The Making of Haiti: The San Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990) makes a carefully researched and convincing argument that Vodou played a significant role in Haiti's revolution and did so from the beginning. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who argues that Vodou came together only in the first half of the nineteenth century, does a brilliant job in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1997) of problematizing other versions of Haiti's taken-for-granted history.

Anne Greene's The Catholic Church in Haiti: Political and Social Change (East Lansing, Mich., 1993) provides important informationPage 9639 about the role of Catholicism in Haiti, as does Terry Rey's Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary In Haiti (Trenton, N. J., 1999). Leslie G. Desmangles's The Faces of the Gods: Voudou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993) explores the syncretism dimension of the relationship between Vodou and Catholicism. Robert Ferris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York, 1981) contains the best analysis yet done on the specific African retentions within Haitian Vodou.

A handful of scholarly works cover new areas in Vodou scholarship. E. Wade Davis opened the world of the secret societies in The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York, 1985) and Passage of Darkness (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988). Elizabeth McAlister's Rara: Vodou Power and Performance in Haiti and the Diaspora (Berkeley, Calif., 2002) changes the relationship between Vodou temples and Carnival, and thus, to some extent, between the sacred and the secular. My own work, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley, Calif., updated edition, 2001), provides an extensive case study of Vodou in diaspora.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
VODOU is a sometimes misleading, but nevertheless common, name for the religious practices of the majority of Haitians. Outsiders have given the name Vodou to the complex web of traditional religious practices followed in Haiti. Only recently, and still to a limited extent, have Haitians come to use the term as others do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

In the earliest American prisons, work was given prisoners only as a favor. Later, forced labor was seen as a form of rehabilitation and atonement. Convicts worked in prison-owned industries or were leased to private companies. Since U.S. courts have never held that prisoners have a constitutional right to be paid wages for their work, most states and lessees provided merely a token wage. The convict lease system thus provided industrialists in some parts of the United States with the steady, cheap labor necessary for modernization at high profit. Statutes limiting the use of convict labor as unfair competition became a priority of the rising union movement, and by the mid-twentieth century prison labor was largely confined to public works projects, some by chain gang, and prison industries. The issue of the competition of convict with free labor continues to be controversial. Today, the use of prison labor for private profit is again widespread, especially with the advent of work-release programs and the trend toward private prisons. This poses serious threats to prisoner rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledges no constitutional right of a prisoner to a job, although he or she cannot refuse if asked to work. Courts have upheld solitary confinement as a legal punishment for refusing to work. Because the Thirteenth Amendment defines imprisonment as just cause for involuntary servitude, most courts do not consider inmates "employees" and their labor does not belong to themselves but to the state. Consequently, demands by prisoners to be paid the prevailing minimum wage have failed.

Increasingly, states are subcontracting the construction and operation of prisons to private, for-profit companies, some of which are now traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Today financial and political interests are joining to create criminal justice policy. One result is that the prison population has skyrocketed, fed by a widening criminalization of behaviors. An unlimited supply of new prisoners seems to be the raw material needed to guarantee long-term growth of the prison industry.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the earliest American prisons, work was given prisoners only as a favor. Later, forced labor was seen as a form of rehabilitation and atonement. Convicts worked in prison-owned industries or were leased to private companies. Since U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Voodoo, also spelled Vodou (following the official Haitian Creole orthography) or vodoun, refers to traditional religious practices in Haiti and in Haitian-American communities such as the sizable ones in New York City and Miami. New Orleans has the oldest Haitian immigrant community, dating from the eighteenth century. In New Orleans priests and priestesses are sometimes called "voodoos," and throughout the southern United States the term is also used as a verb, to "voodoo" someone, meaning to bewitch or punish by magical means. More frequently "voodoo," or "hoodoo"-as well as "conjure," "root-work," and "witchcraft"-is a term used to refer to a diverse collection of traditional spiritual practices among descendants of African slaves in the United States.

Haiti, a small, mountainous, and impoverished West Indian country, was a French slave colony and a majorPage 2244 sugar producer during the eighteenth century. The strongest African influences on Haitian Vodou came from the Fon and Mahi peoples of old Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin); the Yoruba peoples, mostly in Nigeria; and the Kongo peoples of Angola and Zaire. The term vodun is West African, probably Ewe, in origin and came to the Western Hemisphere with Dahomean slaves. Today, "vodun" is the most common Fon term for a traditional spirit or deity.

Haitian Vodou is said to have played a key role in the only successful slave revolution in the history of transatlantic slavery, the plotters being bound to one another by a blood oath taken during a Vodou ceremony. The ceremony, conducted by the legendary priest Makandal, took place in Bois Cayman in northern Haiti. It is also claimed that word of the uprising spread via Vodou talking drums, and Vodou charms gave strength and courage to the rebels.

Haiti declared its independence in 1804, when the United States and much of Europe still held slaves. For approximately fifty years the Catholic Church refused to send priests to Haiti, and for nearly a century the struggling black republic was economically isolated from the larger world. Political concerns played a major role in shaping the negative image of Haitian Vodou in the West. Vodou has been caricatured as a religion obsessed with sex, blood, death, and evil. The reality of Haitian Vodou, a religion that blends African traditions with Catholicism, is strikingly different from the stereotypes.

Following independence, large numbers of Haitians acquired small plots of land and became subsistence farmers. This agricultural base distinguishes Vodou from other New World African religions. Central to Vodou are three loyalties: to land (even urban practitioners return to conduct ceremonies on ancestral land), to family (including the dead), and to the Vodou spirits. Most Haitians do not call their religion Vodou, a word that more precisely refers to one style of drumming and dancing. Haitians prefer a verbal form. "Li sevi lwa-yo," they say, "he (or she) serves the spirits." Most spirits have two names, a Catholic saint's name and an African name. Daily acts of devotion include lighting candles and pouring libations. Devotees wear a favored spirit's color and observe food and behavior prohibitions the spirits request. When there are special problems, they make pilgrimages to Catholic shrines and churches and undertake other trials. Most important, they stage elaborate ceremonies that include singing, drumming, dancing, and sumptuous meals, the most prestigious of which necessitate killing an animal. Possession, central in Vodou, provides direct communication with the lwa, or spirits. A devotee who becomes a "horse" of one of the spirits turns over body and voice to that lwa. The spirit can then sing and dance with the faithful, bless them, chastise them, and give advice. In Vodou persons are defined by webs of relationship with family, friends, ancestors, and spirits. The central work of Vodou ritual, whether performed in a community setting or one-on-one, is enhancing and healing relationships. Gifts of praise, food, song and dance are necessary to sustain spirits and ancestors and to enable them to reciprocate by providing wisdom and protection to the living.

The large Haitian immigrant communities that have grown up in the United States over the last forty years are thriving centers for Vodou practice. Hundreds of Vodou healers serve thousands of clients who are taxi drivers, restaurant workers, and nurse's aides. Most of the rituals performed in Haiti are now also staged, albeit in truncated form, in living rooms and basements in New York and Miami. Vodou "families" provide struggling immigrants with connections to Haitian roots and an alternative to American individualism.

Voodoo in New Orleans is more distant from its Haitian roots. Scholars believe there were three generations of women called Marie Laveau who worked as spiritual counselors in New Orleans. The first was a slave brought from Haiti to Louisiana during the time of the slave revolution. The most famous Marie Laveau, the "voodoo queen of New Orleans," born in 1827, was the granddaughter of this slave woman. The religion she practiced was a distillation of Haitian Vodou. She kept a large snake on her altar (a representative of the spirit Danbala Wedo), went into possession while dancing in Congo Square, presided over an elaborate annual ceremony on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain on St. John's Eve (June 24), and above all, worked with individual clients as a spiritual adviser, healer, and supplier of charms, or gris-gris. Contemporary New Orleans voodoo is largely limited to these last activities.

Hoodoo, or voodoo as practiced throughout the American South, is similarly limited to discrete client/practitioner interactions. This type of voodoo is not a child of Haiti but the legacy of Dahomean and Kongo persons among North American slaves. As with Haitian Vodou, engagement with hoodoo has typically worked as a supplement to Christianity, most likely because hoodoo addresses issues Christianity ignores-issues of spiritual protection, romantic love, and luck. Harry M. Hyatt (1970) said it well: "To catch a spirit or to protect your spirit against the catching or to release your caught spirit-this is the complete theory and practice of hoodoo." The spiritual powers used in voodoo or hoodoo are morally neutral (e.g., souls of persons not properly buried) andPage 2245 can therefore be used constructively or destructively. Yet clear moral distinctions in how they are used are not always easy to make.

In hoodoo the illness in one person may be traced to an emotion in another, jealousy being the most destructive. In such a case, attacking the jealous person may be the only way to a cure. A related dynamic emerges in love magic, a very common type of healing that inevitably tries to control another's will. Zora Neale Hurston collected this cure for a restless husband: "Take sugar, cinnamon and mix together: Write name of a husband and wife nine times. Roll paper ... and put in a bottle of holy water with sugar and honey. Lay it under the back step." There have been root doctors-conjure men and women-who have used their powers unethically and maliciously, but hoodoo's fear-provoking reputation is unmerited. Most hoodoo or voodoo is of the type described in Hurston's example.

Bibliography

Brown, Karen McCarthy. "The Power to Heal: Reflections on Women, Religion, and Medicine." In Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, pp. 123-141. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.

Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti. 1970. Reprint, New Paltz, N.Y.: McPherson, 1983.

Herskovits, Melville. Life in a Haitian Valley. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "Hoodoo in America." Journal of American Folklore 44 (1931): 316-417.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Hyatt, Harry Middleton. Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted by Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks and Whites. Hannibal, Mo.: Western Publishing, 1970.

Laguerre, Michel S. American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.

McAlister, Elizabeth A. Rara: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Metraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti, trans. by Hugo Charteris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Voodoo, also spelled Vodou (following the official Haitian Creole orthography) or vodoun, refers to traditional religious practices in Haiti and in Haitian-American communities such as the sizable ones in New York City and Miami. New Orleans has the oldest Haitian immigrant community, dating from the eighteenth century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Arts

Located about 100 miles south of Memphis in the Mississippi River Delta, the birthplace of the blues, Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, has become as much a historical landmark as it is a penitentiary. It's about 30 miles from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and surrounded by uninhabitable swampland.

Parchman's storied history is the basis for the prison farms featured in the movies "Cool Hand Luke" and "O Brother Where Art Thou?", it's referred to as "destination doom" in a William Faulkner's novel "The Mansion," and it is now a haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award-winning 2017 novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing."

Growing up on Mississippi's southern coast, Ward said that Parchman loomed over her childhood. "When I thought about prison, that's the prison that came to mind," she said. "I didn't know much about it, but I knew it was a place I never wanted to end up. And the danger that I would end up there was a real thing, for me and for people that I know and loved."

Ward writes about two generations of prisoners at Parchman, including two young black inmates in the early part of the century and a white inmate, Michael, who's just been released. "Pop," a father and grandfather, and the ghost of a boy named "Richie" both remember a harsh, painful prison farm of the past. In the present-day of the novel, Michael's character and Richie's ghost says little has changed.

"Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain't changed none," Richie tells the young narrator, JoJo. "It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same."

The Pride of Mississippi

The history of Mississippi State Penitentiary is a history of failed reforms. Its creation in 1901 was borne of a statewide shame and frustration at the contemporary system of convict leasing, writes David Oshinsky, historian and author of "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice."

In the Reconstructionist south, states' coffers were empty, prisons destroyed, and their former free labor supply was emancipated. Many southern states, including Mississippi, began arresting almost exclusively young, black men on charges ranging from laundering to larceny to murder. Some were legitimate, but many more were fabricated or embellished. The state began leasing the prisoners to wealthy contractors, who would further sublease them to companies.

"The convicts, under convict leasing, would do the kind of work that free labor would not want to do. In other words, the work a white worker might not want to do," Oshinsky said.

Under convict leasing, the inmates were essentially slaves again, Oshinsky said. They worked long hours for no pay, were poorly fed, and slept in tents at work sites doing dangerous jobs like dynamiting tunnels for railroad companies and clearing malarial-filled swamps for construction. Convicts, sometimes including children under age 10, were whipped and beaten, underfed, and rarely given medical treatment. Oshinksy writes that between 9 and 16 percent of convicts died yearly in the 1880s.

But poor whites began to resent the system that drove wages down for free workers. In 1904, Mississippi elected a new governor - James Kimble Vardaman - who aimed to reform the system, in part to benefit the lower-class whites. Parchman's first year of operation was in 1905. It was massive, remote, and modeled after a traditional southern plantation.

Convicts worked six days a week, lived in barracks with no separation or classification by crime, and were often subject to punishment by a whip referred to as "Black Annie."

Parchman was originally comprised of three separate farms: a small farm, which was maintained by white convicts, a smaller one farmed by women (mostly black), and a huge sprawling plantation for the prison's black convicts. Over 20,000 acres and 46 miles, it was intended to be self-sufficient and profitable for the state, and it was.

Convicts, called gunmen, picked cotton under the watch of the most violent offenders, who were given guns and called trusty-shooters, or trusties, Oshinsky said. Hogjaw and Kinnie, the trusties Ward writes about in "Sing, Unburied, Sing," were also real men; in 1947 Hogjaw was pardoned for killing an escaping convict. The farm was profitable; in 1918, Oshinsky wrote that the prison had a net revenue of $825,000, or about $800 per inmate.

In 1911, The New York Times ran a sprawling spread in the Sunday edition which heaped praise on the prison.

"The pride of Mississippi, however, is the 'Parchman Place,'" the article read. "Actually instances have been known of when negroes were turned out of the penitentiary, given a new suit and $10 in money, they would not want to leave and would inquire if there was not some way by which they could stay there."

But the reality, says Oshinksy, is that Parchman was nearly uninhabitable. Convicts worked six days a week, lived in barracks with no separation or classification by crime, and were often subject to punishment by a whip referred to as "Black Annie."

Destination Doom

Parchman Farm stayed this way, more or less, for the next 70 years. Cotton picking became mechanized and the state instituted some small reforms. A relatively impotent parole board deferred to the superintendent, Oshinksy writes, and small vocational and educational programs excluded black prisoners. A maximum security unit with a guard tower, fences, and gates housed individual cells, a gas chamber for executions, and a solitary confinement wing.

Otherwise, Parchman remained frozen in time, a segregated, harsh prison farm. It was during this period that it housed some of its most famous prisoners: Elvis Presley's father Vernon was imprisoned in 1938 for "check forgery," and blues singers Bukka White and Son House for dubious claims of violence. After his release, White composed his famous "Parchman Farm Blues," which warned young men about the horror of the prison.

Some of the Freedom Riders, a group of interracial young civil rights activists who boycotted Jim Crow laws, served time at Parchman, although they were segregated from the general population. Claude Liggins, 77, said the racism by the guards at Parchman was mostly directed at 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."

In 1971, a civil rights lawyer named Roy Haber visited a convict at Parchman who was challenging his conviction. While there, Haber heard accounts from other inmates and personally witnessed the conditions, which he described as the last legal vestiges of slavery.

Almost a century earlier, the 13th amendment had abolished slavery in all cases except in penal servitude. "You can make somebody work if they're a prisoner. Using that distinction, they were able to maintain a slave state within the prison," Haber said.

Haber represented the inmates in a class action lawsuit against the prison in the now landmark case of Gates v. Collier. In 1971, the judge ruled in favor of the inmates, and throughout the next decade, he forced the prison to desegregate, eliminate "Black Annie" and other unconstitutional forms of punishment, and end the forced field labor.

You can make somebody work if they're a prisoner. Using that distinction, they were able to maintain a slave state within the prison.

The state began to build facilities with real cells and walls, ended the trusty system, and hired professional, often black, guards and administrative staff. At last, it seemed like the prison might function as a rehabilitative facility instead of a slave plantation.
Problems persist
Fast forward closer to the present, and reform has not come easily to Mississippi State Penitentiary. Since Gates v. Collier, a number of lawsuits have brought attention and middling reforms to the prison, which is now about 67 percent black. according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections Monthly Fact Sheet. In 1999, Margaret Winter, at the time associate director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU, represented HIV positive inmates who were not receiving necessary antiviral HIV combination therapy. They alleged that they were segregated from the general population, were barred from holding jobs, and lived in squalor. They were re-integrated in 2001, and the ACLU later reported that conditions for them improved.

In 2002 and 2003, Winter and the ACLU pursued a series of cases on behalf of the death row inmates in the supermax unit, Unit 32. They alleged the conditions were inhumane and that the temperature reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit in some cells. Inmates described to the ACLU intense stench from sewage backups, extreme isolation, and lack of personal hygiene.

Ultimately, a years-long reevaluation of the classification system revealed that approximately 80 percent of the inmates who were determined "high risk" offenders and who were segregated from the general population in the hole were misclassified. Over four years, some 800 previously high-risk prisoners, who had wrongly been in supermax based on the violence of their crime rather than their behavior in prison, were reintegrated back into general population. Educational and rehabilitative programs were instituted. For the first time, the prison had mental health services.

At the time, Christopher Epps, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, was leading the charge. He'd battled the ACLU through the various lawsuits and ultimately elected to spearhead the changes to the penal system. Before Unit 32 was shuttered, Epps instituted various education and life skills programs, and allowed exercise and made efforts to reduce solitary confinement at Parchman.

But in 2014, Epps was indicted on federal charges of bribery and kickbacks. In 2016, Epps was sentenced to just under 20 years in prison. In an ironic twist, he was held in solitary confinement in a Tennessee correctional facility.

In today's Parchman, prisoners complain of leaky roofs, broken windows and easy access to contraband. Anthony Sims, a prisoner at Parchman since 1988, when he was convicted of manslaughter, aggravated assault and burglary, says he knows of at least four men who died in his prison unit last year, all from overdoses of smuggled drugs. Five prisoners that the NewsHour spoke with, along with attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center, say there are few educational or rehabilitative programs.

The prison disputes this. Grace Fisher, communications director for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said in an email that the agency has an onsite maintenance department that addresses infrastructure problems when presented. She also said the prison has "zero tolerance for any person - staff, inmate, visitor or vendor - who is instrumental in introducing contraband and that "all inmates have access to programs, based on classification status."

In "Sing, Unburied, Sing," Parchman's historical presence was crucial to Ward. "Because that place casts such a large shadow in Mississippi and in my family, in my community I really wanted to write about it," she said.

And she wanted to tell the prisoners' stories.

"I realized that people just didn't know that there was so much human suffering tied to that place," Ward said. "I wanted it to seem real to people, and I wanted them to know so that the people who suffered in that place, and the people who live with the legacy of that place today, are not forgotten."

The Pride of Mississippi

Destination Doom
Problems persist

Jesmyn Ward on the moment in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' that changes her character forever

'Persist. Read, write, and improve.' Jesmyn Ward shares the best writing advice she's ever received

Discussion questions for 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'

What is the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inside Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, has a long history as a penitentiary. And it features as a haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward's National Award-winning 2017 novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing."

# data[].attributes.body
Jesmyn Ward profiles her home town of DeLisle, Mississippi in this essay from Harper's Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I was six, a pit bull tried to rip out my throat. I was walking down my parents' oystershell driveway when the dog attacked me, probably because another dog, brown and shaggy in my memory, was nearby and in heat. My attacker was white, muscled, wide across the chest, and tall; brandishing his weapon of a mouth, he blocked my path and sidled close to me. He was so still, and his back bumped my waist. "Move," I told him. "Get." Instead, he growled and jumped, and I fell beneath him. His growl rose to a pulsing grind. He sliced my scalp. My ear. My back. I curled in on myself, collapsed the target, and fought him. Beat his ribs with my fists. Kicked his soft underbelly. I screamed so loudly that my aunt ran down the street with a broom and beat him off of me, and then she walked me home. I wailed, covered in blood. On the way to the hospital, my mother put my head in her lap. I don't remember crying in the car. I was in shock.

Back from the hospital, through the cotton muffling my reconstructed ear, I heard my father say this: "She survived because she fought him. If she hadn't -" He shook his head and stopped speaking.

Now my father's words sound different. As an adult and a parent who works in part to provide health insurance for her children, I think about the fact that his health insurance, which he acquired through his job at a bottling factory, paid for the doctor who reattached my ear. Paid for the nurses who held me down as they administered a tetanus shot. Paid for me to go back to the hospital to get the stitches taken out. That Medicaid, which covered us children after our father lost his job, meant that I could return to the doctor for aftercare. That my parents did not have to pay the bulk of my medical bills themselves and lose their car, destroy their credit, go into bankruptcy. That I was able to seek treatment and avoid scarring, infection, sepsis, and death.

Both my maternal and paternal families have lived in rural Mississippi for generations, since well before the advent of Medicaid in 1965. There were thirteen children in my grandmother's family, all delivered by midwife. My grandmother's twin died at birth, and my great-grandmother put my grandmother in a drawer, a makeshift bassinet, and assumed that she wouldn't live through the night. My grandmother is in her late seventies now, but when she was growing up she had no access to preventive services, and her body bears testament. Her dental health was so abysmal when she was young that she was fitted for dentures in her twenties. She says that her uncles taught the children to brush their teeth by chewing on twigs, mushing them into a pulpy mass that they could use to scrub. This would have been in the 1940s. She grew up on a steady diet of beans and fatback and biscuits. Access to fruit and vegetables depended on the crops her father grew.

In this country and this state, access to health care depends on access to health insurance. This, in large part, depends on race and class. My family members have had access to health insurance on and off in their adult lives. My grandmother, and many of my other relatives, worked in the kinds of jobs that would not have provided them with insurance: My grandmother has been a hairdresser, a seamstress, and a domestic.

Once her children were over eighteen and no longer covered by Medicaid, they, too, hustled for jobs that would provide them with access to doctors. My mother and father both lived for years without health care because their jobs could not or would not offer it. When my mother worked as a domestic for fifteen years, she did not have health insurance. When my father worked as a gas-station attendant or in an oyster factory, he did not have health insurance.

My grandmother and her siblings and the children of my family have suffered a variety of health conditions related to their diet, genetics, and the lack of good long-term preventive medical care: diabetes, kidney disease, lupus, preterm birth, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cancer. Add to this depression and bipolar disorder and other undiagnosed mental illnesses. Many have died needlessly. Before dying, many fell into alcohol and drug addiction. My extended family presents a stark picture of what it is to live in a state, in a country, that does not think that access to quality physical and mental health care is a human right.

My senators supported the Obamacare repeal wholeheartedly. I contacted them many times, concerned that millions would lose their health insurance and that the bill would underfund those with special needs, with disabilities, and hamstring the elderly. In my community, repealing the Affordable Care Act would mean that insurance premiums would rise exorbitantly, that families would have to choose between health care and electricity. It would mean that those struggling with addiction would continue to fight alone. It would mean that those diagnosed with cancer (there have been many in my small town) would find themselves facing lifetime caps again: would find themselves facing death. The politicians supported the bill.

Right now, more than 700,000 Mississippians are covered through Medicaid. Half are children - more than 350,000. Ten percent are the elderly, and this number includes many people who can't pay for nursing homes. Around 10 percent are parents, caretakers, and pregnant women. Astonishingly enough, Medicaid pays for two thirds of all births and 75 percent of nursing-home care in Mississippi. My family members who work - and even under the A.C.A. can't afford to purchase private health insurance - may face the ugly fact that their prospects of being covered under Medicaid in the future are abysmal.

What does it mean to live as an adult without health insurance in Mississippi? For much of my twenties, I was that adult. It meant praying that I wouldn't get into a catastrophic accident that would saddle me with exorbitant emergency-room bills. It meant that when I swam through the floods of Hurricane Katrina and developed a staph infection from whatever toxic sludge floated in the storm surge, I suffered with it for weeks until I was able to visit a free clinic. It meant living with failing vision, displaced dental fillings, abscessed teeth, and strep throat. It meant living with migraines so crippling that I could not stand. Migraines that felt like a burning spike was being driven into my right temple again and again while my eyeball was being squeezed out of its socket. Migraines that came every afternoon at the same time (three o'clock) for two and a half months, every spring and fall, every year. Migraines that could be averted only with an Imitrex shot. Imitrex shots, with insurance, cost a hundred bucks, came two to a pack, and should have been used once a month. When I was uninsured, I couldn't see a doctor to get a prescription and couldn't afford the medicine even with one. Living without health insurance meant suffering depression so deep after my brother died that my mind was unspeakable. For years.

Sometimes I imagine what it might be like to leave Mississippi, a state that's been milk-drunk on an ideology of white exceptionalism and self-determination since its infancy, its slaveholding beginnings, when it was the Wild West of the United States. When black children and women and men were gold. When every white man, with enough capital, could be a master, every white woman a mistress. How slaveholding and the vast cotton fields shimmered for them all: the original American dream. But then I remember who I am, where I come from, whom I am with, here in modern Mississippi. Where illness and disability are marked as personal failures and ascribed moral fault. A place I can leave but my family can't. Where the descendants of the enslaved are tied and knotted by the bonds of institutional racism before we are even born, marked by the neglect of our mothers' pregnant health. How these ties tighten as we age, pulled taut by the stress of racial prejudice, so that we, too, bear preterm babies, manifest diabetes, fall rigid with stroke, swallow gun barrels and pull the trigger.

My nephew wears glasses three years out of date: His last pair was paid for in part by Medicaid when he was covered as a seventeen-year-old. He has painful back spasms often; we've talked about having me pay for acupuncture treatments. I do the best I can within a system designed to deny him access to health and education at every turn: I buy his college textbooks, help him pay for job training, and give him gas money so that he can one day find his way to a job that will offer him some health insurance. For other relatives, I've cosigned loans to help them pay for doctors' visits and surgery. I gave my grandmother the money to purchase nicer dentures one Christmas. When I have means, I grease the cogs that I can. I write to my congressmen. I retweet and sign petitions and send letters and give keynote speeches about health inequalities in the South; I do what I can with what I've been given.

You are currently viewing this article as a guest. If you are a subscriber, please sign in. If you aren't, please subscribe below and get access to the entire Harper's archive for only $23.99/year.

= Subscribers only.
Sign in here.
Subscribe here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
united states. patient protection and affordable care act

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
[Forum] | DeLisle, Mississippi, by Jesmyn Ward | Harper's Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When I was six, a pit bull tried to rip out my throat. I was walking down my parents' oystershell driveway when the dog attacked me, probably because another dog, brown and shaggy in my memory, was nearby and in heat.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Vodou, also spelled Voodoo, Voudou, Vodun, or French Vaudou, a traditional Afro-Haitian religion. Vodou represents a syncretism of the West African Vodun religion and Roman Catholicism by the descendants of the Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other ethnic groups who had been enslaved and transported to colonial Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known then) and partly Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries. The word Vodou means "spirit" or "deity" in the Fon language of the African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin).

Vodou is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. Humans are spirits who inhabit the visible world. The unseen world is populated by lwa (spirits), mystè (mysteries), anvizib (the invisibles), zanj (angels), and the spirits of ancestors and the recently deceased. All these spirits are believed to live in a mythic land called Ginen, a cosmic "Africa." The God of the Christian Bible is understood to be the creator of both the universe and the spirits; the spirits were made by God to help him govern humanity and the natural world.

The primary goal and activity of Vodou is to sevi lwa ("serve the spirits")-to offer prayers and perform various devotional rites directed at God and particular spirits in return for health, protection, and favour. Spirit possession plays an important role in Afro-Haitian religion, as it does in many other world religions. During religious rites, believers sometimes enter a trancelike state in which the devotee may eat and drink, perform stylized dances, give supernaturally inspired advice to people, or perform medical cures or special physical feats; these acts exhibit the incarnate presence of the lwa within the entranced devotee. Vodou ritual activity (e.g., prayer, song, dance, and gesture) is aimed at refining and restoring balance and energy in relationships between people and between people and the spirits of the unseen world.

Vodou is an oral tradition practiced by extended families that inherit familial spirits, along with the necessary devotional practices, from their elders. In the cities, local hierarchies of priestesses or priests ( manbo and oungan), "children of the spirits" ( ounsi), and ritual drummers ( ountògi) comprise more formal "societies" or "congregations" ( sosyete). In these congregations, knowledge is passed on through a ritual of initiation ( kanzo) in which the body becomes the site of spiritual transformation. There is some regional difference in ritual practice across Haiti, and branches of the religion include Rada, Daome, Ibo, Nago, Dereal, Manding, Petwo, and Kongo. There is no centralized hierarchy, no single leader, and no official spokesperson, but various groups sometimes attempt to create such official structures. There are also secret societies, called Bizango or Sanpwèl, that perform a religio-juridical function.

A calendar of ritual feasts, syncretized with the Roman Catholic calendar, provides the yearly rhythm of religious practice. Important lwa are celebrated on saints' days (for example: Ogou on St. James's Day, July 25; Ezili Danto on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, July 16; Danbala on St. Patrick's Day, March 17; and the spirits of the ancestors on All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, November 1 and November 2). Many other familial feasts (for the sacred children, for the poor, for particular ancestors) as well as initiations and funerary rituals occur throughout the year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vodou | Definition, History, West African Vodun, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vodou, a syncretism of the West African Vodun religion and Roman Catholicism by the descendants of the Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other ethnic groups who had been enslaved and transported to colonial Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and partly Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

In the late nineteenth century the chain gang became an important way of mobilizing labor to construct and maintain public roads. It was also designed to reduce the costs of feeding and housing convicts. Outside the South, such states or territories as New York, New Mexico, Michigan, and Montana had laws providing for convicts to work on the roads "secured by ball and chain" or "well chained and secured" (Steiner and Brown, The North Carolina Chain Gang, p. 17). Most of the eleven former Confederate states used convict labor on public roads by the mid-1880s, and the rest did so by the early twentieth century. As the language of the statutes suggests, convicts could be chained individually to a heavy ball, coffled together at their labors, or otherwise controlled.

Although authorized in most states, the chain gang developed a particularly strong association with the South. It emerged there after the end of slavery in 1865, and it later grew in tandem with the Good Roads movement, a turn-of-the-century campaign by town merchants and commercial farmers for improved transportation. During the first generation after the Civil War, southern states established the system's roots, and by the second generation it was in full flower.

The Civil War left southern jurisdictions bereft of funds, in need of public works, and awash in freedmen who could be mobilized for work on the roads. In Georgia, the city of Milledgeville convicted Charles Harris, a freedman, of a misdemeanor in August 1865 and put him to work for fifteen days "wearing Ball and Chain and working on the streets" (Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South, p. 198). In Atlanta the next year, a Fulton County grand jury proposed that misdemeanor convicts be "organized in chain gangs and put to work on our public roads" (Wallenstein, p. 199).

The Georgia legislature authorized the chain gang in 1866 to deal with road maintenance and criminal punishment, and other states took a similar approach. The system sometimes encountered official opposition, however, as when a Freedmen's Bureau agent in Alabama directed that "the chain gang system of working convicts on the streets" in Selma be discontinued because, he said, it conflicted with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, p. 393).

In the 1880s and 1890s, southern states moved more aggressively to adopt the chain gang as a significant way, even the preferred way, to secure labor for public roads. An 1887 law spurred development of the chain gang in North Carolina, as did an 1891 law in Georgia. Georgia took the final step into the world of the chain gang in 1908 when the legislature abolished the convict lease system and directed that felony convicts, like their misdemeanor counterparts, be placed in chain gangs working on the roads. Under a program adopted two years earlier, Virginia reassigned to work on the roads convicts who had been sentenced to the penitentiary.

Like the convict lease system, the chain gang rose and then fell in public favor and in the number of people caught up in its toils. In the South its high point came in the first third of the twentieth century. Late in its reign, Robert E. Burns published a book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! (1932), that recounts in vivid fashion the realities of life in a peculiarly American gulag.

SIDEBAR: Statute Labor, Road Duty, Corvée

In colonial times, through much of the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth century, an ancient method persisted of securing labor on public roads in the United States. Widely used, it was variously known as "statute labor" or "road duty," and it resembled a French system, the corvée. A tax, paid in labor rather than cash, was levied on most men, who were called out a few days each year to work on the roads. Citizens sometimes challenged the system in the courts, citing the Thirteenth Amendment and other constitutional grounds, but only in Nevada (1874) and Virginia (1894) were such efforts successful. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the system in a case from Florida, Butler v. Perry (1916). In most states, therefore, the system came to an end through legislation or declining local use.

As the traditional system faded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the North and the South diverged. In the North, a cash tax and a free labor force, recruited through the offer of wages, replaced the corvée. In the South, the chain gang, recruited through the administration of the criminal justice system, replaced it. In the early stages of the transition, southern states used misdemeanor convicts. As reliance on the chain gang grew, those states added felony convicts who had formerly been subject to the convict lease. Most members of southern chain gangs were black men, whose unfree labor on the roads and cruel life in work camps escaped the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition on slavery "except as a punishment for crime."

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the late nineteenth century the chain gang became an important way of mobilizing labor to construct and maintain public roads. It was also designed to reduce the costs of feeding and housing convicts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In January 1901 the state of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County for a prison. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm or simply Parchman, became the main hub for Mississippi's penal system. Parchman Farm was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M. Stone in 1896. By 1917, Parchman was separated into twelve male camps and one female camp, and racial segregation was considered of paramount importance.

The convicts worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and slept in long, single-story buildings commonly called "cages" that were constructed of bricks and lumber produced on site. Most male prisoners were employed in farming, but some also worked in the brickyard, sawmill, cotton gin, and prison hospital. The female camp produced clothes and bed sheets for the entire farm. On Sundays, the convicts would attend religious services and often formed baseball games between opposing camps.

Because of the remote location and vast size of Parchman Farm, a sophisticated system of walls and fences was considered unnecessary. Prison officials would employ convicts they considered trustworthy as armed guards. These prisoners were known as "trusty guards" or "trusty shooters" and were separated from the general prison population.

These two photograph collections, designated PI/1996.0006 and PI/PEN/P37.4, showcase photographs taken at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the early twentieth century. They document Parchman facilities and activities from 1914 to the early 1940s.
Collection Description General & Tech Data

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman) Photo Collections PI/1996.0006 and PI/PEN/P37.4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In January 1901 the state of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County for a prison. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm or simply Parchman, became the main hub for Mississippi's penal system. Parchman Farm was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M.

# data[].attributes.body
On this edition of Fresh Air on NPR, Jesmyn Ward reads the first few pages of the novel and discusses her inspiration for the characters and the relationship between the fictional town of Bois Sauvage and its relationship to her hometown of DeLisle, Miss.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ward's National Book Award-winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is set in a small town modeled after her own rural hometown. It centers on a biracial young boy confronting the South's racial legacy.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's been quite a year for author Jesmyn Ward. She received a MacArthur Fellowship, and this month her novel "Sing, Unburied, Sing" won the National Book Award for fiction. Her previous novel, "Salvage The Bones," also won that award. "Sing, Unburied, Sing" tells the story of Jojo, a mixed race 13-year-old boy. He lives with his black grandparents. His grandmother is dying from cancer. His drug-addicted mother Leonie is unreliable. She's self-medicating her grief from the covered-up murder of her brother when they were in high school. Jojo's white father, who was never much of a presence in Jojo's life, is doing time for drugs at the state penitentiary, the infamous Parchman Farm. Helping bolster Jojo through these trying circumstances is the unfaltering love between him and his grandfather and his toddler sister Kayla.

Ward's characters live in the fictional rural town of Bois Sauvage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Ward based it on the town she grew up in and lives in today called DeLisle. Jesmyn Ward has written and edited other books, including the memoir "Men We Reaped" about five men from her hometown who died young, including her brother who was killed in a car crash. She spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger.

SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: I'd like to start with a reading, if you could - maybe the beginning of the book. And maybe just set it up for us. Who's speaking here?

JESMYN WARD: So the narrator here is Jojo. He is a 13-year-old mixed race boy. He's growing up in a small town in the South, in rural Mississippi, called Bois Sauvage. And the novel opens on his 13th birthday.

(Reading) I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it's something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger. That's how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I've earned these 13 years, so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody.

(Reading) Today's my birthday. I grab the door so it don't slam, ease it into the jam. I don't want Mam or Kayla to wake up with none of us in the house. Better for them to sleep. Better for my little sister, Kayla, to sleep because on nights when Leonie's out working she wake up every hour, sit straight up in the bed and scream. Better for Grandma Mam to sleep because the chemo done dried her up and hollowed her out the way the sun and the air do water oaks.

(Reading) Pop weaves in and out of the trees, straight and slim and brown as a young pine tree. He spits in the dry red dirt, and the wind makes the trees wave. It's cold. This spring is stubborn. Most days it won't make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad draining tub. I left my hoodie on the floor in Leonie's room where I sleep and my T-shirt is thin, but I don't rub my arms. If I let the cold goad me, I know when I see the goat I'll flinch or frown when Pop cuts the throat. And Pop, being Pop, will see.

BRIGER: That's Jesmyn Ward reading the beginning of her new novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing." Jesmyn, you have three narrators in this new novel. One of them is Jojo, who we just heard from. Can you tell us a little bit more about him? I heard that part of the reason you wanted to write this book was you wanted to tell the story of a biracial boy growing up in Mississippi.

WARD: Yeah. You know, Jojo is the character that came to me first when I was casting about for novel ideas. He popped into my head. And I wondered what it would be like to write about a kid like him, a biracial kid. You know, one parent is black. The other is white. I knew, because I'm writing about him at this moment in his life when he is attempting to figure out what it means to be a man, what it means to be a black man in the South, in America - I knew that this would be a moment that had a lot of dramatic potential.

And he's confronting basically the history of the South - right? - you know, of racist violence, of slavery, you know, of Jim Crow. But he's - it's a very personal battle for him because of who his family members are. And I just thought that he as a character, that - you know, that he would be a very rich character to write about.

BRIGER: And speaking of his family, his father Michael is white, and he's in prison for drug charges, and his mother Leonie is black, and she's one of the other narrators of the book. And you've written her into a pretty bad place. I mean, she's addicted to drugs. She's doing meth and cocaine. She's neglectful of her children.

And I don't think you ever spell this out, but I think the reason that she's addicted to drugs is that she's, you know, self-medicating her grief from her brother's murder. He was shot by a white man and it was covered up as a hunting accident. To make things more complicated for her, the father of her kids is cousin of the person that killed her brother, and his father was an ex-sheriff who helped cover it up. So why did you want to write her into such a hole?

WARD: Bois Sauvage - right, so the fictional town that I write about is actually, I guess, a fictional twin of my hometown, DeLisle, Miss. I feel like in every book that I commit to telling the truth about the place that I live in, and also about the kind of people who live in my community. There are a lot of people in my community who struggle with addiction. Back in the '80s and the '90s it was basically a crack epidemic in my town. But now I'd say in the past five years that crack epidemic has transformed into a meth epidemic.

And I think that I connected Michael to Leonie's brother's killers because I feel that often racist violence in the South is intimate. You know, it's - it - in some ways it reminds me of what I know about domestic violence. Like, these crimes seem to be very intimate crimes. They happened between people who know each other, you know, who live around each other, who share community sometimes. And so I think I wanted Leonie's situation to reflect that. But I think you're totally right about the wound that she's carrying with her, the wound of her grief and the loss of her brother. And I think that does motivate a lot of her struggles with addiction.

BRIGER: You know, you have actual ghosts in your novel. You have two ghosts. There's one who's Richie, who was a 13-year-old boy who Jojo's grandfather, Pop, met at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, when Pop was pretty much kidnapped and forced to work there. And then there's also Leonie. Whenever she gets high she sees her brother's ghost, Given. Why did you decide to have actual ghosts haunt the work?

WARD: I knew that Leonie would see a phantom of her brother from the very beginning of the rough draft, right? But I wasn't convinced that he was an actual ghost. I thought, well, maybe he's just a figment of her imagination. Maybe he's just the embodiment of her grief and her guilt that comes alive whenever she uses drugs, whenever she's high. And I thought this until I - you know, I was doing research about Parchman prison in order to write about it.

And I was reading a book called "Worse Than Slavery" by David Oshinsky. And in that book I read that there were boys as young as 12 and 13, young black boys, who were charged with small crimes and then sent to Parchman prison. And, you know, those children were enslaved and suffered and were tortured and sometimes died in Parchman prison, and their suffering had been erased from history in some ways. And so I was so, like, horrified and also heartbroken when I read that that I thought, OK, I have to write about a kid like this, and this child has to have agency. This child has to have voice. You know, this child has to be able to act in the present moment with Jojo, you know, with Pop, with Kayla. And the only way that I could do that was by making this character a ghost. And so then I understood that I was writing a ghost story too.

BRIGER: You know, a lot of your book seems to be about the personal traumas the characters are trying to cope with, but there's also trauma on a larger, systemic level. These characters are burdened with a history of oppression that shaped their lives and, you know, limited the choices available to them. And I think that Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, looms large as sort of a symbol of that in your book. Is that true?

WARD: That's totally true.

BRIGER: Can you tell us a little bit about it?

WARD: Yeah, I mean, you know, Parchman prison is the large state - Mississippi State Prison. And when it was established, the people in power sort of changed the laws and criminalized really small offenses or criminalized things that, you know, weren't even really criminal acts, like loitering - right? - vagrancy, right? They also criminalized a lot of, like, petty thievery. And they did all of this in the hopes that they could arrest and send a lot of black men to Parchman and populate Parchman because basically, they wanted to work them, right?

They wanted free labor, and that's what they did. You know, I mean, Parchman was mostly black - mostly black men. They were basically enslaved again, and they worked the fields, right? So Parchman prison was basically a big plantation in the 1930s, the 1940s. Those inmates were also - so they worked the plantation. They worked Parchman prison.

But they were also rented out to regional, like, industrial barons. They were rented out to these men who used them to, you know, clear large tracts of land, to lay train tracks, right? So any jobs that, you know, these men wanted them to do, that's what they did. And so, yes, they were re-enslaved. I mean, Richie is based on a real - real children who were charged with petty crimes and then sent to be slaves - right? - and to die in Parchman prison.

BRIGER: When you were growing up in Mississippi, did you know of Parchman Farm? Was there the presence in your life?

WARD: It sure was. I mean, I didn't know, you know, specifically, like, what happened. I didn't - I wasn't - I didn't know the history of Parchman prison. But I knew that it was a bad place that you never wanted to go. But I also knew that the danger of being sent there was, like, ever-present for people like me, for black people, right? I remember being very, very young. And I wrote about this briefly in "Men We Reaped." But I remember being 7, 8 years old and having nightmares about my uncles and my father being arrested and being sent to Parchman prison.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger recorded with Jesmyn Ward. Her latest novel is called "Sing, Unburied, Sing." We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JASON MORAN SONG, "GENTLE SHIFTS SOUTH (LIVE)")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger recorded with Jesmyn Ward about her latest novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing," which won a National Book Award this month.

BRIGER: As you said, your novel is based on a fictional town called Bois Sauvage, but it's also based on the town you grew up in and live in now, DeLisle, Miss. Can you describe it?

WARD: So DeLisle is situated on the back of the Bay of St. Louis, right? And it's very small. I think - I don't know the exact population count, but it can't be much more than a thousand. You know, maybe it's 1,500. Most of the black people who live in the town have lived there - you know, their families have lived there for generations. And, you know, this is the case with my family.

It's interesting because it's the kind of place where family and community are sort of the same thing. You know, I'm related to a lot of the black people who live in the town. Like, if I just count my maternal grandmother's people - so my grandmother's sisters and brothers, and then all their kids, and then their kids and then their kids - there are over 200 of us.

BRIGER: Wow.

WARD: That's just a fourth of my - you know, like, of my family tree.

BRIGER: But you left. You left the town to go to college and grad school, and I think for work too, and, you know, stayed away for a while. And you've said before in earlier interviews how much you dislike the town because of the history of racism, and the state and how it limits the opportunities for African-Americans there, but now you've moved back. How did you come to that decision?

WARD: Well, I did. I returned around six years ago, and I have mixed feelings about it. You know, on one hand, I love my town, you know? And I love the place where I'm from, and I think in part it's because of my family. I think it's because of my community. I think it's because of the beauty of that place. But, you know, it's really frustrating to live in a place where you can see that, you know, the people in power do not care about your community. They don't care about your family. They don't care about people like you. They don't invest in your neighborhoods. They don't invest in your community.

You know, when I think about, like, just living in Mississippi and I feel like my elected representatives never represent my interests, ever, it's very frustrating because I can see what happens when generations of people live in poverty. I can see what happens when generations of people, like, struggle to bear up under the yoke of racism - of systemic racism. I see that when so many of the people in my community are addicted to drugs, you know, when so many of the people in my community never go on to seek education beyond high school - if they graduate from high school - right? - when so many people in my community spend their entire lives without health insurance, without dental insurance, without mental health treatment, when so people in my community spend their entire lives working dead-end jobs only to, you know, become senior citizens and then survive on grease, basically - and because their family members take care of them.

Like, all of that is very frustrating for me. And because I have two kids now, like, I don't know if I will stay there. I don't know if I want my children, you know, to live there as teenagers. In some ways, I feel like I might be - I don't know, like I might be doing them a disservice.

BRIGER: Yeah, I was wondering.

WARD: ...You know, by...

BRIGER: ...If you were feeling ambivalent.

WARD: ...By remaining there.

BRIGER: ...About raising your kids there.

WARD: Yeah, I definitely am. I mean, I felt that way when I had a daughter, but I especially feel that way now that I have a son.

BRIGER: Yeah, yeah. Can you describe that a little bit?

WARD: You know, I - you know, my brother died when he was 19, right? He didn't even make it to 20, and he was hit by a drunk driver, and then no one was held accountable for his death. And I want my son to live. You know, I want him to live to be an adult. And not only do I want him to live, I want him to thrive, and I don't necessarily know if he will live or thrive, you know, if he spends his teenage years in Mississippi - in rural Mississippi. You know, that - I don't know. You know, part of me is really thinking that it might not be possible.

BRIGER: You've had some success in life. You've - you were able to - I think you were the first person in your family to go to college. Is that right?

WARD: Yeah, in my immediate family, so...

BRIGER: In your immediate family, right - and then you went to grad school. And you - you know, you've had success as a novelist. And it feels like you have a responsibility - that you feel responsibility to your family in Mississippi. I was wondering if that's also one of the reasons why it's hard for you to leave.

WARD: Definitely, yeah - because I do. I feel a sense of responsibility to them - right? - because I am at this point in my life where I have more resources than they have, so therefore, I feel like I should help. And so, you know, I do what I can. And it does. It does. It makes it harder for me to leave.

BRIGER: So there's that - the joy of having an extended family close to you, but then there's also responsibilities that come with that.

WARD: Yeah, definitely - plenty of responsibilities.

(LAUGHTER)

BRIGER: Well, Jesmyn Ward, thanks so much for talking with us.

WARD: Thank you.

GROSS: Jesmyn Ward's new novel is called "Sing, Unburied, Sing." She spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR...

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PRESIDENT SHOW")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, the 45th and final President of the United States.

GROSS: My guests will be the two stars of the Comedy Central series "The President Show" - Anthony Atamanuik, who plays President Trump, and Peter Grosz, who plays Vice President Pence. The show is like a late-night talk show hosted by the president with the vice president as his sidekick. "The President Show" Christmas special will be shown Thursday on Comedy Central. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF JASON MORAN'S "LULU'S BACK IN TOWN")

GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Mooj Zadie, Thea Chaloner and Seth Kelley. Therese Madden directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF JASON MORAN'S "LULU'S BACK IN TOWN")

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Jesmyn Ward, Writing Means Telling The 'Truth About The Place That I Live In'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ward's National Book Award-winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is set in a small town modeled after her own rural hometown. It centers on a biracial young boy confronting the South's racial legacy. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's been quite a year for author Jesmyn Ward.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Synopsis

In the early 1900s, most prisons were involved in selling on the open market products made by inmates. The money earned from these sales was most often used to finance the prison itself. However, manufacturers, employers, and labor leaders in the open market argued that they could not compete with the prisons, which had a free labor force that could not strike. State governments could outlaw the sale of convict-made goods from their own state, but they had no control over the sale of prison-made goods imported from other states. The passage of the Hawes-Cooper Convict Labor Act in 1929 allowed states to remove the interstate commerce nature of prison-made goods and to prohibit the sale of such goods in their state, even if the goods were produced in another state.

Timeline

1914: On the Western Front, the first battles of the Marne and Ypres establish a line that will more or less hold for the next four years.

1919: Treaty of Versailles is signed by the Allies and Germany, but rejected by the U.S. Senate. This is due in part to rancor between President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Senate leaders, and in part to concerns over Wilson's plan to commit the United States to the newly established League of Nations and other international duties. Not until 1921 will Congress formally end U.S. participation in the war, but it will never agree to join the League.

1924: In the United States, Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, along with oil company executives Harry Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, is charged with conspiracy and bribery in making fraudulent leases of U.S. Navy oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The resulting Teapot Dome scandal clouds the administration of President Warren G. Harding.

1927: Charles A. Lindbergh makes the first successful solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic and becomes an international hero.

1929: The Lateran Treaty between the Catholic Church and Mussolini's regime establishes the Vatican City as an independent political entity.

1929: On "Black Friday" in October, prices on the U.S. stock market, which had been climbing wildly for several years, suddenly collapse. Thus begins the first phase of a world economic crisis and depression that will last until the beginning of World War II.

1929: Edwin Hubble proposes a model of an ever-expanding universe.

1931: Financial crisis widens in the United States and Europe, which reel from bank failures and climbing unemployment levels. In London, armies of the unemployed riot.

1933: Newly inaugurated U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt launches the first phase of his New Deal to put depression-era America back to work.

1935: Second phase of New Deal begins with the introduction of social security, farm assistance, and housing and tax reform.

1941: Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December brings the United States into the war against the Axis. Combined with the attack on the Soviet Union, which makes Stalin an unlikely ally of the Western democracies, the events of 1941 will ultimately turn the tide of the war.

1944: Creation of International Monetary Fund and World Bank at Bretton Woods Conference.

Event and Its Context

Passed on 19 January 1929, with an effective date of 1934, the Hawes-Cooper Act stated that all goods produced wholly or in part by convict labor "transported into any State or Territory of the United States and remaining therein for use, consumption, sale, or storage, shall upon arrival and delivery in such State or Territory be subject to the operation and effect of the laws of such State or Territory," thus allowing individual states to prohibit the sale of goods made by convicts on the open market whether those goods had been made within or outside of their state. The Hawes-Cooper Act was the product of cooperation between organized labor and business, and stemmed from the competition between the prisons and the free market.

Prisons used five different systems of labor: the lease system, contract system, piece-price system, public account system, and state use or state account system. In the lease system, prisoners were literally leased to another party who paid the prison for the use of the prisoners. A number of prisons supported themselves using the contract system, which took the revenue made by selling convict-manufactured goods to pay the prison's operating costs. The piece-price system was similar to the contract system, except the contractors provided the raw materials while the prisons provided the labor. The public account system was like the piece-price system, except the state provided the raw materials. Finally, in the state use or state account system, the goods produced were only sold to the manufacturing institution of other state institutions.

With each of these labor systems, the production and sale of convict-produced goods proved a serious competitor in the open market. Prison-made goods were cheaper to produce and sold for less. Prisons were in a unique position to cheaply and efficiently produce such items as brooms, brushes, shoes, iron moldings, and cigars. Besides the free labor, prisons also had low overhead. For instance, taxes paid for lighting, heating, and water whether the prisoners were working or sleeping. Free-market employers felt they had few options for competing with prison labor. Their choices included lowering the quality of work or abandoning the area of competition.

State governments could control the products made in their home state, but they had a harder time controlling the items brought in from other states. Before the passage of the Hawes-Cooper Act, individual states could not prevent the sale of convict-made goods from other states. Hawes-Cooper made convict-produced goods subject to the laws of the state in which the items were sold. Thus, if an individual state outlawed the sale of prison goods in their state, then the sale of prison-produced goods imported from neighboring states also would be prohibited. This feature made the Hawes-Cooper Act an enabling act: it let individual states decide whether to permit the sale of prison goods on the open market.

In 1932, two years before the Hawes-Cooper Act went into effect, a Department of Labor study found that of 158,947 convicts in 104 prisons, 82,276 (or 52 percent) were involved in some sort of manufacturing. The majority of the 104 prisons (42 percent) used the state-use labor system. About 38 percent of the goods, worth more than $28 million, were destined for the open market: 40 percent of these products were sold in the state where the goods were manufactured, while the remaining 60 percent were sent to markets out of the state where the goods were made.

Most of the convicts involved in making goods received no wages; for inmates who were paid, the wage was approximately 2 to 15 cents per day. The Department of Labor study also produced a list of the industries most affected by prison labor; the top prison industries included making shirts, pants, binding twine, chairs, and farm, garden, and dairy items. In the open market, businesses suffered not only because of the volume of items prisons produced but also because their specialization in making a particular item could threaten a regular business.

Most prison officials opposed the Hawes-Cooper Act. One of the most cited arguments against Hawes-Cooper was that its passage would leave prisoners idle. The American Prison Association stated that idleness destroyed the inmates' physical, mental, moral, and spiritual well-being. Others pointed out that some prisons used the proceeds from their manufacturing to support themselves, thus lessening the tax burden on citizens.

The enforcement of the Hawes-Cooper Act caused a financial crisis in a number of prisons. The cost of supervising and disciplining idle prisoners proved more expensive and many prisons lost a valuable source of income for the prisons' upkeep and staffing. In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Prison Industries Reorganizing Administration to foster state cooperation through a national program to give inmates meaningful work.

The constitutionality of the Hawes-Cooper Act was challenged in Whitfield v. Ohio (1936), but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hawes-Cooper by stating that free labor could not compete "with enforced and unpaid or underpaid convict labor." Other legislative acts followed Hawes-Cooper, including the Ashurst-Sumners Act (1935), Walsh-Healey Act (1936), Sumners-Ashurst Act (1940), and Comprehensive Crime Control Act (1984), which encouraged prison manufacturing to help control the cost of incarceration.

Key Players

Cooper, John Gordon (1872-1955): Cooper immigrated to the United States from England in 1880 and settled in Youngstown, Ohio. He attended public schools and worked in steel mills and for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. A Republican, Cooper served as a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives from 1910 until 1912. In 1915 he was elected to Congress, where he served until 1937.

Hawes, Harry Bartow (1869-1947): Hawes was born in Kentucky and attended Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Missouri. He represented Hawaii during its annexation and served as the president of the St. Louis police board from 1898 until 1904. Hawes also served as a state representative for Missouri (1916-1917). During World War I he served with the Military Intelligence Department of the General Staff and later was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Madrid. A Democrat, in 1921 he was elected to Congress and served until 1926, when he resigned to take a Senate seat. He served in the Senate until his retirement in 1933.

Books

Commons, John R., and John B. Andrews. Principles of Labor Legislation. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967.

Convict Labor: Model Amendments to Solve Prison Labor Competition. Washington, DC: American Federation of Labor, 1930.

Hallett, Michael A. "Hawes-Cooper Act." In Encyclopedia of American Prisons, edited by Marilyn D. McShane and Frank P. Williams III. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the early 1900s, most prisons were involved in selling on the open market products made by inmates. The money earned from these sales was most often used to finance the prison itself. However, manufacturers, employers, and labor leaders in the open market argued that they could not compete with the prisons, which had a free labor force that could not strike.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The first and third Tuesday of every month, Lola and Archie Flowers make the two-and-a-half hour round trip to see their son. On April 3, they woke up early, and by 7 a.m. they were driving west from Winona, Mississippi, in their blue Nissan Versa, barely talking, radio playing low. Lola's hair was neatly curled. Archie wore a crisp plaid shirt and exhaled a raspy gospel hum through clenched teeth as he navigated a series of county roads.

"You ain't gonna see nothing but fields," Lola said. A few minutes out of town, the hills began to recede, and the land on either side of the road became sunken, wet and expansive. The occasional plantation home still stands back along the tree line, far from the passing cars. In the summer, these fields burst alive with white cotton bolls.

An hour and a quarter later, a roadside sign hinted that the prison was near. "State penitentiary area," it read. "Emergency stopping only." Razor wire was visible in the distance, and a faint collection of shacks and sheds. "What you see up there now is Parchman," Lola said.

This is the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a notorious prison in the Delta often referred to as Parchman Farm, where Curtis Flowers has spent most of the past two decades. He's been incarcerated since his arrest, on Jan. 13, 1997, for allegedly murdering four people at Tardy Furniture in Winona. Through the many twists and turns in his case, he's never walked free, not after his conviction was overturned three separate times and not after two other trials ended in hung juries. After winning his appeals, he just remained behind bars waiting for prosecutors to try him again.

In 20 years, Archie and Lola have missed only a handful of visiting days - one for a surgery and the others during prison lockdowns. "We know y'all are coming," the guards sometimes tell them. "Don't nobody else show up." They search the Flowers' car as the couple pulls into the parking lot. They direct Archie and Lola through a metal detector and tell them to take off their shoes. They pat them down. Then the Flowers get on a bus to the building where their son waits. Before they're allowed inside, they are frisked and screened again. When they finally see Curtis, he's seated behind a thick glass partition.

"I go there to talk to Curtis, whatever he wants to talk about," Lola said. They speak through telephone receivers. They haven't touched since Curtis' sixth trial, in 2010. Still, these visits are more human contact than Curtis is used to. On every other day, he is just inmate R2436, one of 43 men housed in solitary 8-by-12 cells on Mississippi's death row.

Parchman is often called one of the worst prisons in America. In the past century, the penitentiary has been the site of numerous injustices: It used slave labor long after emancipation; it perpetuated segregation long after the Civil Rights Act; and violence has long been commonplace. Federal court rulings and a series of reforms have improved conditions in recent years. But life inside Parchman, the life Curtis Flowers has had to endure, is a brutal one.

Replacing slavery

The origins of Parchman Farm reach back to the fall of the Confederacy. In 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and from one day to the next, the population of free blacks in Mississippi nearly doubled. To whites, especially those with money and power, this posed an existential threat.

"The plantation owners, as best they could, wanted blacks to return to the same place as they had been as slaves," said historian David Oshinsky, whose book "Worse Than Slavery" details the creation of Parchman. There was one exception in the 13th Amendment that gave plantation owners an opening: The protection against enslavement didn't extend to convicted criminals.

It took the Mississippi Legislature less than a year to pass a series of laws designed to subjugate African-Americans anew. Known collectively as the Black Codes of 1865, the laws used an expansive definition of vagrancy to criminalize all types of people: beggars, jugglers, drunkards, night-walkers and "all other idle and disorderly persons" who neglected their work or misspent their money. The Black Codes made it easy to run afoul of the law, and law enforcement used them to systematically arrest African-Americans. Before long, the population of black lawbreakers in Mississippi surged.

But there was no prison system to accommodate it. The state penitentiary in Jackson had been torched by Union troops in 1863, and it had only really housed white prisoners anyway - black slaves had been disciplined on the plantation by their masters. "No time ... to stay in jail; they had to work," one freedman explained at the time, according to Oshinsky.

In post-emancipation, pre-Parchman Mississippi, the state needed a way to contain its new convicts. So it started leasing them out as laborers to plantation owners, railroad builders, lumber titans and the like. In exchange, these private companies paid a small fee to the state and covered the convicts' cost of living.

"They needed a workforce," Oshinsky said. "The best workforce and the cheapest workforce they could get were convicts who were being arrested for largely minor offenses and then leased out for $9 a month."

The convicts were kept in horrible conditions. Their leaseholders could treat them even worse than slaves because they cost less to replace. They underfed them, left them to sleep outside while chained together and forced them to work endlessly long days. If a convict escaped or died - and they did - another one was sent in. This cheap and inexhaustible labor supply became a major profit-driver for big businesses. Soon, the state of Mississippi decided to get in on the action.

"There were two reasons for Parchman," Oshinsky said "One was money-making and the other was racial control. They went hand in hand."

The birth of Parchman

News broke in The Clarion Ledger on December 17, 1900, under a headline that read, "NEW CONVICT FARM." The Mississippi Penitentiary Board of Control had purchased 13,000 acres of land in fertile Sunflower County, along the Yazoo-Delta railroad.

"The land is all uncleared and none of it has ever been in cultivation," the article stated. "The purchase is a rich tract of virgin soil and the members of the board feel confident that when placed in proper condition it will make prolific yields."

The following year, state prisoners were moved to Parchman and ordered to prepare the area for farming.

The new penal project found its most vocal supporter when James Kimble Vardaman was elected governor in 1903. Vardaman was a populist and virulent racist, and Parchman fit neatly into his platform. He opposed convict leasing because it benefited big business operators, not the poor rural whites who had voted for him.

In his 1905 governor's address, Vardaman stoked hysteria about the "criminal tendency of the negro" and set forth an agenda both punitive and paternalistic.

"I want the negro protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, the product of his labor and the pursuit of happiness," Vardaman said. "And the only way to do it, is to enforce vigorously the law against the vagrants."

By the end of its second full year of operation, the new penitentiary had earned $185,000 for the state (roughly $5 million in today's dollars), generated mainly by the many farm camps scattered across the Parchman plantation.

In that same two-year period, according to the 1905 report of the Penitentiary Board of Control, the prison housed roughly 1,100 prisoners. Ninety-one percent of them were black. The races were housed separately and assigned to segregated work crews. And 76 inmates - 7 percent of the total population - died, mostly from pneumonia and tuberculosis.

The workdays could run 15 hours long and 100 degrees hot. Though the inmates suffered from exhaustion, heat stroke, illness and injury, the prison kept running. According to Oshinsky, a traveling sergeant named Long-Chain Charlie regularly collected new farmhands from county jails around the state. A leather whip known as Black Annie was used liberally on inmates. Corporal punishment was administered by and according to the whims of the "trusties," armed inmates drawn from the ranks of Parchman's most violent offenders who were empowered by prison officials to brutally maintain order.

In the decades that followed, inmates grew peas, oats, corn and potatoes. They raised hogs and cattle. They planted cotton, picked cotton and ginned cotton. The women's camp stitched the cotton into clothes, including those worn by inmates.

In the 1940s and '50s, folklorist Alan Lomax visited Parchman several times. He taped the work songs and field hollers of inmates for the Library of Congress' folk song archive. His recordings brought a glimpse of life at Parchman to a new audience.

"Negro prison songs from the South," wrote a New York Times music critic in 1958, "have caught the sounds and essence of a life so distant from the urban North as to make one doubt at moments if the singers and the listeners are living in the same country."

That distance between New York and Parchman closed in 1961. During a summer of civil rights protests in the Mississippi state capital, the jails in Jackson began to overflow with Freedom Riders. More than 100 were sent to Parchman and housed in a maximum-security unit, allegedly for their own safety.

As a result, the deplorable conditions inside Parchman were reported by the national media. The governor of Minnesota sent a delegation to check on the well-being of several young Freedom Riders from his state who were being held at the prison.

Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett defended his treatment of the activists, reportedly telling the Minnesota delegates, "When people come here to willfully violate the laws, you can't expect them to be treated like they were at a tea party."

Change comes to Parchman

With the passage of a state prison reform bill in 1964, small changes began to take hold at Parchman. Use of the lash, Black Annie, was banned. Mechanical equipment was brought in to increase agricultural yields and ease the physical toll of farm work. Vocational training and job counseling were offered for the first time.

"We're trying to get away from the idea that while a man's here we've got to get out of him every pound of cotton there is in him," Parchman Superintendent C. E. Breazeale told The New York Times in 1968. "We're trying to think of the man when he's getting out."

This represented quite an ideological evolution for Breazeale, a Delta planter by trade, not a trained penologist. But the evolution on the ground was slow. Years after the Civil Rights Act abolished segregation across the United States, the camps at Parchman preserved the practice. At the end of the 1960s, nearly 80 percent of Parchman guards were still armed inmates who often brutalized those they'd been charged to watch.

In 1971, four Parchman inmates - Nazareth Gates, Willie Lee Holms, Hal Zachary and Mathew Winters - sued the prison superintendent, the six members of the state penitentiary board and Mississippi Governor John Williams in federal court. Their complaint claimed that the living quarters at Parchman were infested with maggots and rats, that raw sewage was dumped in the open, and that inmates were overworked, underfed, denied medical care and subjected to routine violence.

Federal Judge William Keady agreed. In his 1972 judgment, Keady found that "the living conditions provided for the inmates ... are generally deplorable and subhuman."

Keady called for an immediate end to the unequal treatment of black inmates at Parchman, who made up two-thirds of the prison population. He ordered the integration of work crews and residential camps, and condemned the Jim Crow-era practices the prison had dragged into the 1970s.

"Approximately twice the number of blacks are required to live in the same amount of dormitory space as white inmates," Keady wrote. "Black inmates ... have been subjected to greater punishment or more severe discipline than have white inmates for similar infractions of penitentiary rules."

The judge's harshest rebukes were reserved for the prison's violent trusty system. Keady called the arbitrary and severe corporal punishment exacted by trusties unconstitutional. He also criticized Parchman's three founding principles: that the prison must profit at any cost, that armed inmates were effective guards, and that fear was an acceptable means of control. His ruling put a decisive end to many of Parchman's most egregious practices.

"The most significant thing about Parchman is that it was a continuation of the slave system," said Roy Haber, the civil rights attorney who filed the landmark suit. "With a lot of pushing and shoving ... there were some improvements made."

Parchman today

Curtis Flowers was sent to Parchman in 1997. At that time, death row was housed in Unit 32, the prison's infamous supermax facility. We haven't heard Curtis' account of life there because the Mississippi Department of Corrections denied our request to interview him. However, there's one man in Mississippi who was condemned to death row and is now free to tell his story.

Kennedy Brewer is just about Curtis' age - 48 - and was already on death row at Parchman when Curtis arrived. Brewer had been convicted of the 1992 rape and murder of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter, largely on the basis of dubious bite mark analysis. Brewer was exonerated in 2008 by DNA evidence and released after 13 years behind bars.

He lives again in the town where he grew up, about an hour east of Winona, near the Alabama border, and works at a chicken processing plant. Brewer says he has tried to forget Parchman. He talks a lot about the faith it took to get through those 13 years. He doesn't dwell on the conditions he endured. "It's a rough place," Brewer said. "You got to have a strong mind."

The cells on death row were small, about 8-by-12 feet, and solitary. Inmates weren't allowed to decorate them. The walls were concrete, the floor was concrete, even the bed was concrete. Brewer was given a foam mattress roll to sleep on. It started out soft, but once he'd lain on it for a while, it became matted and tough. "When it gets wore out on that side, you just flip it over," Brewer said. And then after a while, you flip back.

Inmates spent 23 hours a day alone in their cells reading, writing letters and listening to the radio. Some went crazy from the intense heat - cell blocks at Parchman weren't and still aren't air-conditioned - the boredom and the constant noise. You couldn't see the inmates in the cells next to or across from you, but you could hear their chatter and shouts, the whirring of their fans and the drone of their TVs. For many, TVs were their only real source of information. Four inmates were executed during the time Brewer was on death row. He found out about their deaths by watching the news.

There was a little window in each cell, high on the wall, covered with a metal grate. Brewer would stand on his bed and look out of it. "Wishing I was free," Brewer said. "Nothing out there but the yard and grass and fence. Just a great big opening."

For one hour a day, usually after breakfast, inmates were allowed to gather in small groups either in an indoor break room or on an outdoor basketball court enclosed by a chain link fence. Brewer said he would use that hour to work out, doing push-ups and sit-ups in a corner of the yard. And he'd chat with other inmates.

"Mostly people talked about when they were in the free world. 'I used to go here, do this or do that,'" Kennedy said. "What a person was accused of, nobody never speak about it. You talk about everything else but that."

Brewer has a way of making Unit 32 sound difficult but not defeating. But there's evidence that it was significantly worse.

In 2002, the ACLU successfully sued Mississippi corrections officials on behalf of death row inmates at Parchman. A federal judge ruled that the conditions on death row constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Cells were filthy - crusted with food scraps, covered in raw sewage from backed-up toilets and flooded by rain water. In the summer, the unit was also plagued by extreme heat and mosquitoes.

The court found that at least six severely psychotic prisoners were treated with indifference and neglect, left to "scream at night, throw feces, and generally make life miserable for the inmates."

"The isolation of Death Row, along with the inmates' pending sentences of death and the conditions at Unit 32-C, are enough to weaken even the strongest individual," the judge wrote. He ordered immediate improvements.

In the decade that followed, the ACLU sued again, and Parchman began relocating large numbers of inmates from Unit 32. In 2011, Unit 32 closed. Curtis Flowers and the other men on death row were moved to Unit 29.

According to Curtis' mother, Lola, conditions are still quite bad.

"It is so hot, they just be sweating, just wringing away the sweat," she said. "And Curtis said there be so many mosquitoes coming in their cell at night. He said the man next door caught five rats on one of those little strips."

At the new death row, the cells are dank and the lighting is dim. There's no real time on the yard. Inmates are allowed an hour outside, but they spend it in individual pens. Curtis usually skips it, Lola says.

She worries about his health and that he isn't eating well. Curtis gets very little exercise and has become diabetic in prison. "If you're hungry, and your sugar drops, you're going to be really sick," Lola said. "The kitchen been out of order for a year now. And they bring them a little food in these Styrofoam plates."

Curtis calls his parents nearly every day from a phone that gets wheeled into his cell. They're allowed to talk for 12 minutes, just enough time to exchange quick updates.

When Archie and Lola visit, they have an hour or two to pray, complain, joke and dream with their son. Curtis talks about the heat and the bugs and about what he'll do if he's ever released. He plans to cook elaborate meals he reads about in magazines. One day, maybe, he'll open a restaurant.

On the outside, performing gospel music was one of Curtis' favorite pastimes. In the years before he went to prison, he sang nearly every week, sometimes with his father, who's been in gospel groups for decades. Music has always connected the two men, through Curtis' youth, the trying years of his six trials and his time on death row. These days, they do it through a glass divider.

"Sometimes we'll hit a little number over there at Parchman," Archie said. "Mm hmm. We got a song that he loved to sing."

Say you love Jesus.
Say you love Jesus.
If you love Jesus,
You ought to show some sign.

"Yep," Archie said. "He can tear that one up."

The second season of the In the Dark podcast is about the case of Curtis Flowers, who was tried six times for the same crime. Learn more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Letter from Parchman: Inside Mississippi's notorious prison

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The state penitentiary began more than a century ago as a way to subjugate African-Americans after the end of slavery, and it later maintained segregation well into the 1970s. And it's where Curtis Flowers has spent much of his adult life, sometimes in brutal conditions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
subscribe to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast

subscribe to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast

Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

Companies like Walmart, AT&T, Whole Foods and Victoria's Secret have all relied on the labor of incarcerated people. And right now there are people in prisons all over the country working for little to no money making hand sanitizer and face masks to help fight COVID-19.

This industry is not well understood. Incarcerated workers are not included in official employment statistics and there's not a ton or economic research done on this topic, so it can be difficult to know just how substantial this sector of our economy actually is.

Today on the show, we bring you one person's story of working behind bars, and we look at what it can tell us about how America's prison labor system functions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Uncounted Workforce : The Indicator from Planet Money

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
subscribe to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast subscribe to The Indicator from Planet Money podcast Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

# data[].attributes.body
Clint Smith's book How the Word is Passed is described by The New York Times as a "cross-country survey of slavery remembrance." Smith visits nine places that memorialize or distort their link to the legacy of slavery and looks to answer the question: “How different might our country look if all of us fully understood what had happened here?” This particular chapter details his visit to Angola Prison (the Louisiana State

Penitentiary).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
See the article in its original context from
April 28, 1996, Section 7, Page 9 Buy Reprints

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

'WORSE THAN SLAVERY" Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. By David M. Oshinsky. Illustrated. 306 pp. New York: The Free Press. $25.

Authors are not always well served by the publicity releases their publishers send out. The Free Press acclaims " 'Worse Than Slavery' " as "a window into a shocking and neglected century of despair . . . a forgotten era in black history." The story of despair may indeed be shocking to many readers, but it has been neither neglected by historians nor forgotten by African-Americans, whose music, art and folklore have preserved it in all its depressing but vital diversity.

David M. Oshinsky, who teaches history at Rutgers University, would be the first to acknowledge his debt to historians like C. Vann Woodward, Vernon L. Wharton and many others whose work on the history of race relations in the South, and in Mississippi specifically, has made this field one of the most thoroughly cultivated in American historiography. Building on their studies of emancipation, Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction "New South," Mr. Oshinsky places the story of Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison farm in the context of sharecropping, convict leasing, lynching and the legalized segregation that replaced slavery. In vigorous, hard-hitting prose, he exposes the nature of the new system of race relations that was indeed worse in some ways than the kind abolished in 1865.

Yet this book makes clear that Parchman in its heyday as a prison farm was not the worst part of this new slavery. Actually, it may have been one of the least of the evils that characterized Mississippi's racial injustice. Mr. Oshinsky portrays Mississippi as consistently the nation's most violent state from the 1830's to the 1930's. Its frontier status in the early years of the antebellum cotton boom produced an astonishing crop of murders, duels, cuttings and gougings among white men. It also produced record crops of cotton grown by slaves working in a brutally repressive plantation system.

During Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan and local rifle clubs murdered hundreds of freed slaves, now Republican voters, in the successful effort to make Mississippi safe for the Democratic Party. In the New South Mississippi led the nation "in every imaginable kind of mob atrocity: most lynchings, most multiple lynchings, most lynchings of women, most lynchings without an arrest, most lynchings of a victim in police custody and most public support for the process itself." Nearly half a century later, in the 1930's, "Mississippians earned less, killed more and died younger than other Americans. They were five times more likely to be illiterate than a Pennsylvanian and ten times more likely to take another person's life."

This culture of violence provided the setting for the most infamous form of criminal justice in American history, the convict leasing system that prevailed in most Southern states for a generation or more after emancipation. Not surprisingly, Mississippi invented convict leasing. Under slavery, black criminals had been punished on the plantation. Virtually the only jail inmates were whites. The Civil War destroyed many jails and penitentiaries, while emancipation more than doubled the free population. The crime wave and political violence that accompanied Reconstruction overwhelmed the few and inadequate jails. In desperation, Mississippi and other states turned to an expedient that quickly became an institution: the leasing of convicted criminals to private contractors, who paid a fee to the state and agreed to feed, clothe and shelter the convicts during their term of punishment.

But the motives of lessees were most emphatically not altruistic; they were in this business for profit. They used convicts to build railroads, to mine coal and iron, and to fell timber, make turpentine, clear land and grow cotton. Since nearly all leased convicts were black, few whites cared what happened to them. And if the supply of convicts fell below the demand, compliant legislators and country sheriffs stood ready to increase the supply. In 1876 the Mississippi legislature enacted the egregious "pig law" defining the theft of a farm animal or any property valued at $10 or more as grand larceny, punishable by up to five years in state prison. The convict population quadrupled overnight. Many contractors made fortunes from the cheap labor that they could exploit with impunity. Slaves had at least possessed the protection of their value as property; the lives of black convicts had no value in the eyes of whites. Mortality rates in convict camps rose to shocking levels. The death rate among convicts in Mississippi during the 1880's ranged from 9 to 16 percent annually. "Not a single leased convict," Mr. Oshinsky notes, "ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of 10 years or more."

It was this system, not the Parchman prison, that the Southern reformer George Washington Cable described as "worse than slavery." By the 1880's the barbarism of convict leasing had become an embarrassment even to white Mississippians. Reformers in all Southern states crusaded against the system. By the early 20th century they had succeeded in getting it abolished almost everywhere, though in several states it was replaced by state or county chain gangs -- not necessarily a great improvement.

In Mississippi, convict leasing was replaced by Parchman, a prison farm located on 20,000 acres of the world's richest cotton land, in the Yazoo-Mississippi delta. The best chapter in " 'Worse Than Slavery' " describes life and work for the inmates at Parchman from 1904 to the 1930's. During that time the proportion of black inmates declined from 90 to 70 percent. Whether Parchman was "worse than slavery" is not clear from Mr. Oshinsky's account. What is clear is that it was very much like slavery. The superintendent functioned like a slaveowner. The white guards ("sergeants") were the overseers, and the "trusties" armed with shotguns and rifles resembled nothing so much as the black drivers on slave plantations. And Parchman was a huge plantation, growing thousands of bales of cotton, which produced a handsome profit for the state of Mississippi. Exploitation, violence, racism and repression characterized Parchman. Mr. Oshinsky reproduces the words of several blues songs that portray the Parchman experience with sad eloquence. But what emerges from Mr. Oshinsky's account is a set of ironies that he implicitly acknowledges but does not explicitly develop. Parchman was better than convict leasing. It was probably less brutal in its treatment of black inmates than the prisons or chain gangs of other Southern states. And in an odd twist, it may have been better in some respects than what the civil rights revolution of the 1960's forced it to become.

At that time, with in-your-face spite, Mississippi officials jailed hundreds of civil rights activists for a brief time at Parchman, including James Farmer and Stokely Carmichael. Their reports of dismal conditions focused a national spotlight on Parchman's dark corners that resulted in a class-action suit. A Federal district court ordered the state to reform, upgrade and desegregate the prison. Since 1970 it has been "reformed." As a consequence, inmates who formerly worked from dawn to dusk in Parchman's cotton fields and fell into an exhausted sleep in the barracks now sit in their cells with little to do except vent their energy in deadly fights with one another. In desegregated barracks, black and white convicts who were once kept rigidly separated now prey on each other in organized gangs. "The Federal court had shifted the balance of terror from the keepers to the inmates," Mr. Oshinsky writes, and in 1990 the Parchman emergency room treated the "staggering number" of 2,305 cases of assault.

Perhaps the ultimate irony was voiced by an elderly black inmate of almost 50 years at Parchman. In the old plantationlike prison, he said, he had "the feeling that work counted for something . . . kept us tired and kept us together and made me feel better inside." But today, he added, "I look around . . . and see a place that makes me sad."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
See the article in its original context from April 28, 1996, Section 7, Page 9 Buy Reprints TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The origin of the Vodou emerged in Haiti in the 16th Century, as a massive amount of African slaves were transported to the island, then known as Saint Domingue. Vodou is a creolized religion, meaning its birth was the result of a mixture of different cultures such as ethnic African religions and Catholic principle present in Haiti, then a French colony.

Cosmology : Similar to Yoruba cosmology, Vodou origins tell of one supreme god, Bondye, who is responsible for the creation of the universe and overseer of human activity.

Beneath Bondye are les invisibles, spirits that act as intermediaries between Bondye and humans; these spirits could be ancestors or Iwa, the Vodou equivalent of orishas.

Broken into categories based on African origin, Iwa are divided into "nations of deities," the two most significant being:

Rada Iwa - benevolent spirits who are wise and helpful, gifted with candy and perfume (Nigirian origin)

Petwa Iwa - malevolent spirits who are aggressive and gifted with gunpowder, rum, and firecrackers (Congo origin)

Vodou Iwa & Catholic Saints : Vodou being a combination of multiple different religious traditions and ethnic traits, Iwa were paired with a Catholic saint and represented by similar iconography and purposes:

Damballa/Saint Patrick - associated with snakes and perceived as a grandfather figure (St. Patrick drove snakes out of Ireland in Catholicism)

Ogou/Saint George - warrior deity who presides over war, politics, and fire (St. George known for fighting a dragon in Catholicism)

Papa Legba/Saint Peter or Lazarus or Anthony - guardian of the crossroads and trickster deity, he is known for being persuasive and deceptive.

Erzulie Dantor - depicted as the Black Madonna of Poland, notion brought to Haiti by Polish soldiers; became known as the Mother of All Haitians, Protector of Children and Patron Saint of the Nation.

Baron Samedi - Iwa of the dead, sex and ressurection. Commonly pictured with a top hat and tuxedo, he is known for obscenity and debauchery, and also for the guarding of the dead so they do not transform into zombies.

Vodou & the Haitian Revolution
During the period from 1791-1804, tensions began to escalate in the French colony of Haiti between enslaved Africans, white plantation owners and affranchis (freed, mixed race citizens). Seeking better trade options with Great Britain and America, settlers began to protest France. Simultaneously, slaves who had run from their plantations were slowly organizing and raiding plantations.

During this era, there were about 250,000 slaves in the colony.

These slaves were ruled by only 25,000 white settlers and 30,000 affranchis.

Two prominent slaves and Vodou priests, Boukman and Makandal, became early examples of leaders of the revolution.

Vodou was not recorded via text, so slave masters could not necessarily gain access to what was being planned; utilizing religion as a group conscience, Vodou allowed organization and mobilization of the uprising.

Ceremonies involving sacrifices were initiated at the beginning of the revolution, and many believe that Haitian Vodou played a decisive role in the victory.

In 1804, the colony permanently overthrew French control and became the first instance of a colony ruled by former slaves.

Though freedom was gained, Haiti became economically isolated due to its reputation and fear of further revolts; Catholic clergy fled after the revolution and did not return until 1860, which allowed a free mixture of Catholic motifs into Vodou religion without controversy.

Once returned, Catholic presence in Haiti persecuted followers of Vodou assuming that it relied heavily on superstition and resembled Satanic rituals and included acts like cannibalism. (1896 Anti-Superstition Campaign)

Overtime persecution ceased, yet Vodou is still seen as a symbol of backwards digression.

Rituals & Practices
Vodou rituals take place in what an ounfo, a temple of sorts. Inside the ounfo, veves are drawn with chalk on the peristyle, the floor of the temple; these veves pertain to a certain Iwa and animal sacrifices are typically made in their name.

During certain rituals, individuals may be possessed by an Iwa (typically of the opposite sex) and through this trance may give prophecies.

Trances and possessions can last for hours, with the person affected acting differently and having no memory of the event after the ritual is concluded.

People who practice vodou are known as vodouisants; priests and priestesses are known as oungans and mambos, and are called on to help people with problems they may have by utilizing divination.

A great number of people practice Vodou in the privacy of their homes, and focus on worshipping the particular Iwa they are assigned to upon initiation.

Negative connotations of magic in Vodou culture such as "voodoo dolls" and the reanimation of corpses into zombies (Haitian tradition, not specific to Vodou religion) are exaggerated in popular culture; situations such as these have some truth to it, but it is told that this is rare and only done in self-defense by harnessing the power of the Iwa.

Vodou Culture in the United States
During the years following the Haitian revolution, many Haitian refugees traveled to the United States in search of a fresh start, and brought their cultural and religious traditions with them. The blending of Vodou with other American religions is sometimes known as "Voodoo-Catholicism." Today Vodou culture is still practiced in New Orleans.

In the mid-19th Century, after years of increased immigration of black refugees to the United States, particularly Louisiana and other southern states, Vodou became extremely popular in areas such as New Orleans.

Incorporating the principle of syncretism, once practiced in the United States, Vodou and other Afro-Caribbean religions would incorporate elements of prominent American religions such as Christianity, which would progress into the 20th Century.

In some instances, Christian ministers would also display certain Vodou traditions in their sermons or masses.

During the 19th Century as Vodou was becoming increasingly prominent in New Orleans culture, leaders of the religion, known as Voodoo Kings and Queens, were revered not only as spiritual leaders but political figures as well.

Dr. John - Also known as "Bayou John," he remains one of the most famous Voodoo Kings of New Orleans. Born in Senegal then brought to Cuba as a slave, he eventually settled in New Orleans and became highly involved in the Vodou community, gaining a reputation as a skilled healer and fortune teller.

Marie Laveau - Legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans who has become the symbol of New Orleans Vodou culture. Mentored by Dr. John, she lived in the French Quarter and offered help to all, from enslaved servants to prominent businessmen. She also was a devout Catholic, attending mass on a regular basis.

Readings/Resources:
Apter, Andrew. "On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou." American Ethnologist 29, no. 2 (2002): 233-60. www.jstor.org/stable/3095167.

Fandrich, Ina J. "Yorùbá Influences on Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo." Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 5 (2007): 775-91. www.jstor.org/stable/40034365.

Hebblethwaite, Benjamin. "The Scapegoating of Haitian Vodou Religion: David Brooks's (2010) Claim That "Voodoo" Is a "Progress-Resistant" Cultural Influence." Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 1 (2015): 3-22. www.jstor.org/stable/24572926.

Long, Carolyn Morrow. "Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo: Sin, Fraud, Entertainment, and Religion." Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 6, no. 1 (2002): 86-101. doi:10.1525/nr.2002.6.1.86

Pasquier, Michael. "The Invisibility of Voodoo, Or, the End of Catholic Archives in America." American Catholic Studies 125, no. 3 (2014): 12-15. www.jstor.org/stable/44195643.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Origin & Beliefs The origin of the Vodou emerged in Haiti in the 16th Century, as a massive amount of African slaves were transported to the island, then known as Saint Domingue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Given the scope and scale of prison labor in the modern era, one could reasonably expect some degree of compliance with modern labor standards. However, despite the hard-won protections secured by the labor movement over the past 100 years, incarcerated workers do not enjoy most of these protections.

Employment law makes the status of the worker as an "employee" a critical distinction. If you are an employee, you get protections; if not, you don't. Courts look to the character of the relationship between the parties and aim to assess, first, whether the employer has sufficient control over the work conditions and, second, whether the relationship is primarily of an economic character.

Incarcerated workers are not expressly excluded from the definition of employee in workers' protection statutes like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or the National Labor Relations Act. However, in the cases where incarcerated workers have sued their prison-employers to enforce minimum wage laws or the FLSA, courts have ruled that the relationship between the penitentiary and the inmate worker is not primarily economic; thus, the worker is not protected under the statutes. By judging the relationship between prisons and incarcerated workers to be of a primarily social or penological nature, the courts have placed wage and working condition protections out of reach for incarcerated workers.

Incarcerated persons or, more specifically, the "duly convicted," lack a constitutional right to be free of forced servitude. Further, this forced labor is not checked by many of the protections enjoyed by workers laboring in the exact same jobs on the other side of the 20-foot barbed-wire electric fence.

* * *

Angola for Life raises questions about the potential rehabilitative nature of prison labor. Work, warden Cain posits, is an important part of the rehabilitative process. Prison labor provides a way to pay society back for the costs of incarceration, as well as a pathway to correct deviant behavior and possibly find personal redemption.

Meaningful work helps cultivate self-esteem, self worth, and the sense that one's existence on this Earth matters. Yet, while some form of work for the incarcerated may be important, the current form is troubling. These workers are vulnerable to the kind of workplace exploitation that America has otherwise deemed inhumane.

Another justification for compulsory prison labor comes from a fairness concern. Why should prisoners sit with idle hands when the rest of us must work to put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies? Perhaps the low-to-no wages paid to incarcerated workers are a form of pay garnishment, a sort of compensation for the costs of room and board?

Yet those costs are not fairly calculated. The American criminal-justice system is rife with fees that shift the financial burden of incarceration to the charged and convicted and their families. Like the "company store" in isolated mining towns which overcharged workers of old, prisoners are left open to similar forms of exploitation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Given the scope and scale of prison labor in the modern era, one could reasonably expect some degree of compliance with modern labor standards. However, despite the hard-won protections secured by the labor movement over the past 100 years, incarcerated workers do not enjoy most of these protections.

# data[].attributes.body
This discusses the practice of conjure and its implications as a form of resistance and rebellion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Conjure Magic and Power The Influence of Afro-Atlantic Religious Practices on Slave Resistance and Rebellion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Explore the Timeless World of Vodou, Deep Within the Caves of Haiti

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Photographer Troi Anderson captures the religion that has been misunderstood for centuries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Haiti, the saying goes, is "70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou". Vodou is everywhere in the Caribbean nation, a spiritual system infusing everything from medicine and agriculture to cosmology and arts. Yet it is almost nowhere to be seen: ceremonies are not just expensive, but targets of hate crime. Nowadays, some say, Vodou is in danger.

In the heart of remote Île-à-Vache of Haiti's southern coast, however, the religion is alive and well. Completely off the grid, the island has only two medical clinics for 14,000 residents and so Jeom Frichenel Sisius, the island's principal Vodou priest, is a spiritual leader, doctor and midwife all at once.

His remedies, which he claims can fix everything from diseases and haunted houses to career and love problems, are kept in a carefully locked shed in a room adorned with skulls and an nzambi (zombie) painted on the walls.

"If someone has a headache and the doctors cannot heal it, I can," he explains, taking swigs of herbal rum from a gigantic bottle as he speaks. "The only things Vodou can't do are radiography and mammography." Vodou is necessary, he stresses, and the only people who fail to understand that are the Christians.

On top of this knowledge and divine healing powers, Sisius also happens to throw the best parties.

Here, Vodou defies cliches of zombies, pins in dolls and black magic. There are none of the cornflour drawings, animal sacrifices or rattles that characterize orthodox Haitian Vodou ceremonies: just a lot of dancing and ecstasy fuelled by rum, drums and divine presence. It's almost full moon, and lured by the music and beauty of it all, the spirits - lwas - begin to arrive.

Only weeks after Sisius's ceremony, a great mapou tree fell. Not literally, of course. In local folklore, the sacred species (silk-cotton tree in English) is the embodiment of someone heroic and Haiti was mourning the death of Max Gesner Beauvoir, the supreme chief of Vodou.

Beauvoir, who stumbled into spiritualism after 15 years as a biochemist in the US, worked tirelessly to protect vodouisants from defamation and persecution. At his home in Mariani, he drank coffee with scholars, seekers, journalists and even Christians, patiently explaining what Vodou was ("the soul of Haitian people and a way of life") - and what it was not.

At a time when Haiti still had tourism, he held spectacles of entranced women, legs akimbo and biting heads of chickens, even staging a honeymoon ceremony for the Clintons.

While perhaps creating some stereotypes of his own, few did more than Beauvoir in battling distorted horror-flick cliches still associated with Haitian Vodou.

"The most popular Haitian word in the world is zombie," explains Richard Morse, a musician and owner of Port-au-Prince's Hotel Oloffson (who insists he never met an undead creature). "And that's a reflection of the world more than it is of Haiti."

At a time when "world music" was all the rage, Morse came to Haiti in 1987 for musical inspiration. Growing up in suburban Connecticut to a Haitian mother and American father, Morse never expected to get into Vodou beyond the glimpses of folklore he'd seen at home. In 2001, he was officially initiated.

"I only came for the rhythms initially," he recalls, seated on the veranda of the hotel that became his livelihood and permanent home. "Then I found out that the rhythms don't walk alone. The rhythms walk with dance steps, with colors, with spirits, with prayer. The rhythms walk with God."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Lunise Morse, lead female singer, and Richard Morse, founder, songwriter and lead male singer of the mizik-rasin (roots band) RAM. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

Every Thursday for the past 23 years, Morse's 13-member roots band - which includes his wife and son - plays fiery, upbeat interpretations of traditional Vodou prayers. Aid workers dance next to local hipsters, elderly couples next to a local LGBT chapter. This is his part in dispelling myths about the practice.

"Most Americans don't know that they don't know what Vodou really is," explains Elizabeth McAlister, scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, specializing in Haitian Vodou. They think Vodou is about sorcery, maybe love magic, usually some sort of sinister practice."

The 1920s and 1930s cinema - the heyday of B-films like White Zombie and pulp fiction - helped reinforce caricatures of Africans as hypersexualized, superstitious and demonic.

"The best thing that ever happened to racism is Vodou," explains Ira Lowenthal, an anthropologist, Vodou arts collector and former aid worker originally from New Jersey, who has lived in Haiti for over 40 years. "They made up their stories about it and their stories confirmed every prejudice of every white person in the world. It tells that person from Ohio that they're right about black people as scary and dangerous ... you can actually see on a screen your own racist beliefs justified."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

The west's romance with a misguided understanding of Haitian folklore just happened to coincide with the US occupation of the country - which set out to modernize Haiti, while attempting to systematically erase Vodou.

The religion was born with institutional slavery. Ripped from homelands and heritage, thousands of those who would become Haitians were shipped across the Atlantic to an island, where the indigenous population had already been wiped out, for backbreaking labor in cane plantations.

"They were treated as cattle. As animals to be bought and sold; worth nothing more than a cow. Often less," says Lowenthal.

"Vodou is the response to that. Vodou says 'no, I'm not a cow. Cows cannot dance, cows do not sing. Cows cannot become God. Not only am I a human being - I'm considerably more human than you. Watch me create divinity in this world you have given me that is so ugly and so hard. Watch me become God in front of your eyes.'"

And so Vodou, unlike eastern spirituality which is often focused on the mind, begins in the human flesh: Haitians dance, rather than think, their way to ecstasy; a transcendence into a more beautiful reality.

Divine possessions are reserved for Haitians, who inherit their spirits through bloodlines, explains Lowenthal, who attended countless rituals in mountain villages during his research. Foreigners can never be vehicles - chwals ("horses") - to be ridden by the divine.

"That power is stunning. It's not scary. It's stunning. It shows you what a human being can do. And what we can't do. White people lost their spirits centuries ago. We lost it all. The Haitians believe we used to have spirits, but we were too stupid to keep them."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Animal sacrifices are still common during Vodou ceremonies. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

Without the lwas, Haiti might never have become a nation at all.

On the night of 14 August 1791, slaves from nearby plantations gathered deep in the woods of Bois Caïman, of what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. By the fire, a young woman possessed by Ezili Dantor, the warrior-mother lwah often iconized as Black Madonna, slit the throat of a large black creole pig and distributed its blood to the revolutionaries, who swore to kill the blancs - white settlers - as they drank it.

With otherworldly strength, the legend goes, the world's richest colony was overthrown and the first black republic proclaimed. Haitian Vodou became a religion with rebellion and freedom at its heart.

Perhaps these are the roots of the west's fear of Vodou, Lowenthal speculates: it is an unbreakable revolutionary spirit threatening to inspire other black Caribbean republics - or, God forbid, the United States itself.

"These people will never be conquered again," Lowenthal emphasizes. "They will be exploited, they will be downtrodden, they will be impoverished - but you can tell not a single Haitian walks around with his head down ... They're more human than the people who enslaved them. They were better than their masters, able to live in another realm. There's no other more articulate response to oppression than that. And that's why Vodou is here - because Vodou is the soul of Haitian people."
***
Ricardo Marie Dadoune (known to friends and worshippers as "Bébé") has known he was homosexual since he was eight years old. He's now 26 and has a boyfriend, though he doesn't broadcast it: several gay men he knows have already been killed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Ricardo Marie Dadoune, a 26-year-old gay hougan (Vodou priest) in the Port-au-Prince peristyle where he worships. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

In a bustling neighborhood in Port-au-Price, his peristyle (vodou temple) is tucked away between colorful barbershops and vendors hawking barbecued chicken. On a table in a windowless room, plaster saint statuettes are lined up next to African dolls, perfume bottles, candles and a ram's skull, horns still attached. Ricardo shakes a beaded rattle in all four directions and then pours rum on the cement floor three times: first to his left, then to his right and finally right in front of his orange flip-flops.

"This is a safe place," he explains. "When we have a ceremony here, nothing happens. People like us here, so we're not afraid to come and enjoy."

He may be in a Justin Bieber T-shirt and jeans now, but the peristyle is the only place Ricardo can dress the way he really prefers: with lipstick, earrings, a cloth on his head the way women do in the countryside, and a dress.

While homosexuality in Haiti is not illegal, it is not socially acceptable. To avoid discrimination, violence and even murder, many gays and lesbians lead double lives.

"In other countries the gays are free," he says. "They can wear what they want to wear, but not here in Haiti. After the ceremony I have to take off the clothes because I can't walk the street dressed like a woman here."

Today, peristyles across Haiti have become makeshift religious gay clubs, safe havens where the LGBT community isn't just tolerated but actively welcomed.

The lwas, much like the Haitian ancestors themselves, travel far: underwater, from the heart of Africa all the way to Hispaniola.

While Haitians too worship an almighty God - Bondye in Creole - he is believed to stand above petty human matters. The lwas, not so much. Each with its own area of expertise, lwas have individual tastes: some like champagne and perfume, others five-star Barbancourt rum and animal sacrifices. Spirits only choose those they love, and some prefer to occupy non-straight chwals.

"Many, many gays and lesbians are valued members of Vodou societies," explains McAlister, who has devoted years to researching LGBT in Haitian religion. "There is an idea that Vodou spirits that are thought to be gay 'adopt' and protect young adults who then become gay."

"Vodou 'does gender' totally differently than the Christian tradition," McAlister explains. After all, Vodou has gender fluidity at the core: men might become mediums for female spirits, women for male spirits. "But Christians, especially evangelicals, have zero flexibility for this; they see homosexuality as a sin, period."

Stigmatized as a primitive, or even wicked religion, Vodou is inherently progressive and inclusive, McAlister continues.

"Vodou tends to be radically unjudgmental," she explains. "The alcoholic, the thief, the homeless, the mentally ill, all of these people are welcomed into a Vodou temple and given respect."

In reality, McAlister emphasizes, Vodou is far more similar to a close-knit church community than most Americans could ever imagine. Or as Morse puts it: with food-centered rituals to please spirits, it's sort of like Thanksgiving - just several times a year. And it's feminist too, advocating equal status for male and female priests.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Mireille Ain, a French manbo (Vodou priestess), in front of her peristyle in Jacmel, on the southern coast of Haiti. Photograph: Caterina Clerici/The Guardian

For missionaries and churches already hell-bent on demonizing Vodou, the religion's progressive outlook may be just another nail in the coffin. Throughout history, Christians have often identified Vodou as the root of all Haiti's problems.

As 2010's earthquake killed perhaps 230,000 and displaced 1.5 million people, US reverend Pat Robertson asserted that Haiti had brought it upon itself through a "pact with the devil", referring to Bois Caïman's uprising. The subsequent cholera epidemic, most likely caused by leaked sewage from a UN camp, was also blamed by some on vodouisants, triggering mobs to murder dozens across the country.

It is perhaps not surprising that a religion born out of colonial subjugation and the trauma of slavery would irk Christians - who also happened to be the slave-masters. On arrival, slaves had eight days to convert - though their native faith was often later on blended with Catholic practices, resulting in today's wildly eclectic pantheon of African spirits alongside Catholic saints "creolized" to walk among them.

In fear of a rival power base, the church repressing Vodou became a recurring theme in Haitian history, McAlister explains.

"The Christians humiliate us by saying that Vodou is evil," Ricardo says. "It's not true. Vodou is not a bad thing. They have their faith, we have ours."

Two days earlier, evangelicals came to his temple and interrupted his ceremony to preach the gospel. They told him he must embrace Jesus as his personal savior, as he continued to perform his rituals, unfazed. This time, it didn't turn violent.

For a long time, even Haiti itself shied away from a religion so quintessential to its national identity. While President Michel Martelly described Beauvoir's passing as a "great loss for the country", the government itself wasn't always so sympathetic, with Vodou officially outlawed until 1934. Even though it became an official religion in 2003, no one knows how many vodouisants Haiti has today.

Vodou is still something many Haitians, including the diaspora, keep underground. Peristyles, even sacred mapou trees, are regularly targets for vandalism and arson. Worshippers risk harassment and violence, with lynchings not unheard of.

Countless attacks against it have forged a newfound solidarity among priests and worshippers as they carve out a political voice. And slowly, things are changing: a new statute is allowing Vodou leaders to perform funerals and weddings, and university courses are now researching the religion. While Beauvoir's successor is yet to be announced, his legacy may be only the beginning.

Ricardo is cautiously optimistic: one day, Vodou may be a catalyst for a more inclusive Haiti. He's waiting to go abroad - anywhere - where he can open about who he is ("This is my life, this is who I am and I will be gay forever").

But until then, he'll be in the peristyle. "There is a lot of love inside the Vodou: it is our heart and blood. So we will not back down. We have an important and strong force with us. Without it, we could not exist today."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vodou is elusive and endangered, but it remains the soul of Haitian people

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Haiti, the saying goes, is "70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou". Vodou is everywhere in the Caribbean nation, a spiritual system infusing everything from medicine and agriculture to cosmology and arts. Yet it is almost nowhere to be seen: ceremonies are not just expensive, but targets of hate crime.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CAMDEN - When browsing through novelty stores, one might find an old-fashioned Hoodoo remedy that promises to ward off bad vibes and change luck. But a Rutgers-Camden scholar says there's much more to Hoodoo than hex-breaking oils and candles.

In her new book, Mojo Workin': The Old African-American Hoodoo System (University of Illinois Press, 2012), Katrina Hazzard-Donald tells the true story of the African-American tradition of herbal healing.

"Scholars who write about African traditions in the United States have become concerned over the work that has been done by those who are outsiders to cultural traditions," says Hazzard-Donald, an associate professor of sociology, anthropology and criminal justice at Rutgers-Camden. "For example, some of the material on African culture and tradition presents premises that are inaccurate. This has happened a lot with Hoodoo."

Hoodoo is a form of traditional African-American folk magic that developed from a combination of beliefs of a number of separate African cultures after they came to the United States during the slave trade.

It is not to be confused with Voodoo or Vodoun, a West African religion, although Hoodoo began as a religion and lost its religious status after the 1880s.

In her book, Hazzard-Donald says Hoodoo first emerged in the southeastern United States when people from West African tribes of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and present-day Ghana came to America.

"The cultural profile of those three regions is very different and the religions are different," Hazzard-Donald says. "But after 1807, the African slaves are united under a common material culture and Hoodoo begins to emerge out of these three distinct African religious traditions.

"

Hazzard-Donald says Hoodoo beliefs are purely naturalistic and practices used naturally obtained supplies like herbs, minerals, and even animals. For example, "chewing the root" was done to release the sap of a plant to conjure spiritual power.

However, Hoodoo practices began to be commercially marketed, modified, and fabricated.

"A tremendous amount of exploitation has taken place among merchants and Hoodoo emerges as a commercial enterprise right around World War I among people who were not believers or practitioners even though they were willing to sell it," Hazzard-Donald explains. "What many people start to see is something that I call commercialized or tourist Hoodoo. It has been presented as the 'real authentic' Hoodoo."

Commercial marketers gleaned information from partial conversations with people uneducated on Hoodoo practices and other faulty assumptions, Hazzard-Donald says.

In commercial marketing, one might see "hot foot" powder, which is derived from a misunderstanding of the traditional "spell" known as "the walkin' foot," which was designed to make victims walk in unusual ways, or make their legs tremble.

It's the kind of novelty item found in many shops in New Orleans and across the country.

"Commercial marketers have capitalized on Hoodoo practices to make money," Hazzard-Donald says. "I wanted to go back and provide an account of how we turned a traditional African religion into a novelty; to something sold in curial shops. I wanted to point out the shortcomings in these interpretations and show readers what really happened."

Hazzard-Donald is the director of Rutgers-Camden's Africana Studies and Research Program. She is the author of Jookin: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Temple University Press, 1992) and numerous articles on African-American dance and culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rutgers-Camden Scholar Clears up Misconceptions about Hoodoo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CAMDEN - When browsing through novelty stores, one might find an old-fashioned Hoodoo remedy that promises to ward off bad vibes and change luck. But a Rutgers-Camden scholar says there's much more to Hoodoo than hex-breaking oils and candles.

# data[].attributes.body
Article about Mami Watu, an African water deity that is often associated with West African vodou.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MAMI WATA (Water as Mother) is a pidgin designation for a class of African water divinities and spirits or, occasionally, for the primordial divinities collectively. Mami Wata is a complex transcultural phenomenon composed of elements from widely disparate places and traditions that coalesced on the continent probably by the end of the nineteenth century. Shrines to Mami Wata are frequently found in coastal, riverine, or lacustrine areas of the continent. The roots of Mami Wata began with the traditional water divinities that were elaborated by the fifteenth century to include European influences, including the mermaid-man that Africans adopted as a new representation of the water divinities. Light skin and non-African features (markers of the spirit realm as well as of ethnicity), sunglasses, powder, and perfume also became familiar in representations of Mami Wata. Africans transplanted by slavery to Surinam in the seventeenth century discovered there a tradition about a riverine water divinity Watra Mamma, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was credited with helping slaves secure their liberation. The idea of water as mother was common to many cultures despite the difference in names ascribed to the divinity. These traditions were brought back to Africa in the nineteenth century, probably by Kru sailors, and Watra Mamma was identified in peoples' minds with local water divinities. The conflation of various traditions of water divinities in nineteenth-century West Africa created Mami Wata.

Devotees established shrines for Mami Wata decorated with objects reminiscent of the various traditions. Boats reminiscent of those the slaves on Surinam used to escape captivity became familiar objects at Mami Wata shrines. A nineteenth-century German chromolith of a female snake charmer with rich black hair inspired the additional representation of Mami Wata as a dark-skinned snake charmer dressed in exotic clothing. By the early twentieth century representations of Hindu divinities and cultic practices brought to the continent by traders from India also found a place in Mami Wata representations and praxis. African devotees acknowledge icons of divinity, such as mermaids and snake charmers, as symbolic revelations of the transcendent, and they are open to these new manifestations of the divine. At the same time they recognize that the spirits they represent are traditional. So despite the obvious layering of multiple cultural traditions in Mami Wata representations, she or he is generally not considered a new divinity or spirit by Africans.

Like other African water divinities known for their dispositional fluidity, Mami Wata can favor devotees with riches of all kinds, including spiritual wisdom, healing and divinatory powers, and beauty and wealth. Or she or he can create natural disasters and reverse traditional social expectations. Mami Wata is consulted for a variety of human concerns and is considered to be well suited to dealing with the problems of modernity introduced by colonialism and postcolonialism. Mami Wata's power is considered so great that she or he is petitioned by people from all classes, stations in life, and religious traditions who seek physical, spiritual, social, and economic assistance.

Although Mami Wata evolved from multiple cultural traditions, the divinity's praxis is culture specific. African communities situate Mami Wata in an existing community of divinities in which she or he has a particular place and genealogy. Mami Wata is normally worshipped traditionally, with invocations, sacrifices, and dances as other divinities are honored, but she or he is also honored with specific dance forms, rhythms, and rituals.

The gender system of a culture also affects the conceptualization of Mami Wata. Mami Wata can be represented as either female or male; indeed it would be unusual for an African divinity not to have a counterpart of the opposite gender. The male-gendered representation of Mami Wata is sometimes called Papa Wata. In some communities, the male Mami Wata is said to marry his female devotees and the female Mami Wata to marry her male devotees.

The exercise of priesthood by a Mami Wata priest (who is also a chief) in one patrilineal culture reflects the gendered role designated for males in his society. He has a spousal relationship to a female Mami Wata but one that does not include the experience of female receptivity through possession. He nourishes his community through animal and other sacrifices to Mami Wata and the divinities. In return he receives power from Mami Wata to protect and sustain his community through healing and to provide guidance through divination. In a matrilineal culture with a dual-gender system and a matrilocal or duolocal residence pattern, Mami Wata mermaid representations are gendered not by sexual characteristics but by the traditional symbols of a pot for the female and a fish for the male. A Mami Wata priestess in this community acts as a vessel to receive the divinity through possession, thus producing sustenance for the community. She constructs her election by Mami Wata as a commitment to a matrilineage in which the divinity is her mother and exercises control over her life, rather than as a marriage relationship. Her descriptions of Mami Wata's home under the sea resemble those of the homes of important women in her community. She does not maintain her own shrine for Mami Wata; instead, she goes to the shrines and festivals where she is invited, and in a state of possession, she provides healing remedies and inspired guidance for the community.

Mami Wata scholarship has explored the origins and representations of Mami Wata and its devotional service, and newer studies have focused on Mami Wata's role and function in particular cultures as a member of the community of divinities who protect and guide the community. At the level of praxis, the global interconnections characteristic of Mami Wata's origins continue, as Mami Wata devotional service is spread outside of Africa by both Africans and non-Africans. Mami Wata has a particular appeal for diasporic African people who seek to reclaim their roots and to identify with the power of their ancestral traditions, but non-Africans are also drawn to this powerful Water Mother. It is impossible to predict how Mami Wata traditions, representations, and praxis will change in response to this global reappropriation. But as long as Mami Wata continues to be effica-cious, humans will find Mami Wata a source of solace and guidance.

See Also

African Religions, overview article.

Bibliography

Caulder, Sharon. Mark of Voodoo: Awakening to My African Spiritual Heritage. St. Paul, Minn., 2002.

Isichei, Elizabeth. Voices of the Poor in Africa. Rochester, N.Y., 2002.

Rosenthal, Judy. Posession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. Charlottesville, Va., 1998.

Wicker, Kathleen O'Brien. "Mami Water in African Religion and Spirituality." In African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions, edited by Jacob K. Olupona, pp. 198222. New York, 2000.
Kathleen O'Brien Wicker (2005)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
mami wata
mami wata (water as mother) is a pidgin designation for a class of african water divinities and spirits or

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
for the primordial divinities collectively. mami wata is a complex transcultural phenomenon composed of elements from widely disparate places and traditions that coalesced on the continent probably by the end of the nineteenth century. shrines to mami wata are frequently found in coastal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MAMI WATA MAMI WATA (Water as Mother) is a pidgin designation for a class of African water divinities and spirits or, occasionally, for the primordial divinities collectively. Mami Wata is a complex transcultural phenomenon composed of elements from widely disparate places and traditions that coalesced on the continent probably by the end of the nineteenth century.

# data[].attributes.body
This site discusses the Jim Crow laws and touches on how these laws impacted the incarceration of people of color and resulted in involuntary labor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence.

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, as well as the national Democratic Party and President Andrew Johnson, thwarted efforts to help Black Americans move forward.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.

The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan, was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a private club for Confederate veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the South were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans found more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white city dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws soon spread around the country with even more force than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive as the Jim Crow era was, it was also a time when many African Americans around the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was later reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells also investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts against Jim Crow laws and lynching.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a North Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work as a teacher for the American Missionary Association.

After funding was withdrawn for that school, Brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the first Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society-some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Black and white people could not live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-only town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other former enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, clearing the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie-funded library, a hospital, three cotton gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is still almost 100 percent Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished within an oppressive society marked by violence.

Following World War I, the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter skin and could infiltrate white hate groups.

As lynchings increased, so did race riots, with at least 25 across the United States over several months in 1919, a period sometimes referred to as " Red Summer." In retaliation, white authorities charged Black communities with conspiring to conquer white America.

With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack and few opportunities for Black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated Black people out of the South, spurred on by publications like The Chicago Defender, which encouraged Black Americans to move north.

Read by millions of Southern Black people, white people attempted to ban the newspaper and threatened violence against any caught reading or distributing it.

The poverty of the Great Depression only deepened resentment, with a rise in lynchings, and after World War II, even Black veterans returning home met with segregation and violence.

Jim Crow in the North

The North was not immune to Jim Crow-like laws. Some states required Black people to own property before they could vote, schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and businesses displayed "Whites Only" signs.

In Ohio, segregationist Allen Granbery Thurman ran for governor in 1867 promising to bar Black citizens from voting. After he narrowly lost that political race, Thurman was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he fought to dissolve Reconstruction-era reforms benefiting African Americans.

After World War II, suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families, and Black people often found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain "red-lined" neighborhoods.

When Did Jim Crow Laws End?

The post-World War II era saw an increase in civil rights activities in the African American community, with a focus on ensuring that Black citizens were able to vote. This ushered in the civil rights movement, resulting in the removal of Jim Crow laws.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered integration in the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing to an end the era of "separate-but-equal" education.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalized by Jim Crow laws.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended discrimination in renting and selling homes, followed.

Jim Crow laws were technically off the books, though that has not always guaranteed full integration or adherence to anti-racism laws throughout the United States. Several recent pieces of legislation-such as House Bill 1020 in Mississippi, which aimed to disenfranchise the majority-Black capital city of Jackson by creating a new judicial district overseen by white leaders-are often compared to Jim Crow laws.

Sources

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Richard Wormser.
Segregated America. Smithsonian Institute.
Jim Crow Laws. National Park Service.
"Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery." The Conversation.
"Hundreds of black Americans were killed during 'Red Summer.' A century later, still ignored." Associated Press/USA Today.
"Here's What's Become Of A Historic All-Black Town In The Mississippi Delta." NPR.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts & Timeline | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jim Crow laws were state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Enacted after the Civil War, the laws denied equal opportunity to Black citizens.