When It's Darkness on the Delta
How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality—and the seeds of its transformation
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.
Mississippi native and award-winning writer W. Ralph Eubanks unearths the region’s buried history, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality through vivid portraits of key figures like
Theodore G. Bilbo and William Whittington, segregationist congressmen who sabotaged federal reparations for former sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50sGloria Carter Dickerson, founder of the Emmett Till Academy, whose parents were instrumental in desegregating schools in Drew, MS, where Till was murderedCalvin Head, a community organizer who runs a farming co-op in Mileston, who revived the legacy of his hometown, the only Black resettlement community in Mississippi
Eubanks delivers a powerful and insightful examination of how racism and economic instability have shaped life in the Mississippi Delta. He traces the enduring consequences of political decisions that have entrenched inequality across generations. At the same time, he brings attention to the resilience of local communities and the grassroots movements working toward meaningful change. The book offers a thoughtful framework for policy reform and community investment, underscoring the need to support those who have long sustained the region through their labor and lived experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Eubanks (A Place Like Mississippi) offers a ruminative chronicle of more than a century of political and economic life in the Mississippi Delta, spotlighting the contradiction at the heart of the region: what should be thriving farmland has instead been the site of race- and class-based oppression. After explaining how the Delta came to be ground zero for the depredations of slavery—the region's extremely fertile soil was uncovered by slaves forced to clear a hardwood jungle in the 19th century, and the area subsequently became a hub of the planation economy—the author profiles 20th-century activists who fought back against the feudal sharecropping system left in slavery's wake. These include the "ragtag group of Christian socialists" who established the integrated Delta Cooperative Farm in 1936, as well as civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Eubanks also examines the region's present-day economy, including the burgeoning blues tourism industry, which he suggests is having a deletirious gentrifying effect on residents. Throughout, he contends that oppression and the battle against it are both overly naturalized in mainstream history ("Why do we Americans see the War on Poverty as a failure and fail to see that there were people like Congressman Jamie Whitten... fighting a war on the War on Poverty?") It adds up to a poignant call for a richer understanding of why, and at whose behest, poverty persists in America.
