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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 whitewashed 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.
“Native son, erudite scholar, and deep-seeing observer, Eubanks gets down into the nitty-gritty of Mississippi with this marvelous Delta travelogue and analysis. He makes those lonely backroads come alive in all their difficult, complicated history.”
—Richard Grant, author of Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
“This is an important book. Eubanks speaks truth to power about an iconic and ill-understood American landscape and proves beyond question that as the Mississippi Delta goes, so goes our republic.”
—Richard Ford
“When It’s Darkness on the Delta is as brilliant and necessary as the greatest books made by a Mississippian, but it is wholly singular in the way Ralph Eubanks nimbly, and profoundly, rides the voices of the folks making the Delta today. This book is not interested in representation; it is what happens when the responsible love of a people, a region, and an utterly legendary skill meet. Goodness gracious. We are thankful.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy