Customer Reviews

Texas Gulag: The Chain Gang Years 1875-1925

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

... and before the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago, there were equally horrific forced labor camps in 19th Century Tsarist Russia, out there in frozen Siberia, as described in painful honesty by Fydor Dostoevsky in the House of the Dead. But historical honesty requires me to mention the chain gang prison labor atrocities of the American South during the apartheid era from the end of the Civil War to the advent of Civil Rights. No author of Solzehenitsyn's or Dostoevsky's stature has written about the chain gangs, which were largely populated by African-Americans, but a surprising number of the survivors of such abuse wrote memoirs of various lengths and literary qualities. Those memoirs are the basis of the book Texas Gulag, which I read several years ago but haven't been able to forget.

Another book worth reading, if you can handle the cruel truth is:
Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David Oshinsky

One has to wonder what grueling tales might be written by the survivors of the torture camp at Guantanamo.