When It's Darkness on the Delta - by W Ralph Eubanks (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 digs through this loamy topsoil, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality, and introduces people like

• Theodore G. Bilbo and William Whittington, segregationist congressmen who sabotaged federal reparations for former sharecroppers in the 1940s and '50s
• Gloria Carter Dickerson, founder of the Emmett Till Academy, whose parents were instrumental in desegregating schools in Drew, MS, where Till was murdered
• Calvin 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

With clear-eyed analysis and heart-rending prose, Eubanks exhumes a rich seedbed of racist political machinations and economic turmoil. Yet scattered within, yearning for transformation and reinvention, are the undying seeds of the oppressed. Their thirst, Eubanks argues, is one that can be quenched by thoughtful policymaking--and by investing in the very people whose ancestors tilled such fertile land.

About the Author

W. Ralph Eubanks is a faculty fellow and writer in residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, as well as two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road. He is a writer and an essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, the American Scholar, the Georgia Review, and the New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 Mississippi Governor's Arts Award for excellence in literature and in recognition of his role as a cultural ambassador for the state of Mississippi.