A socioeconomic excavation of the oft-mythologized Mississippi Delta, the poorest region of the United States, that unearths gangrenous roots of white supremacy and systemic racism
When It's Darkness on the Delta is a book that will change its readers' way of seeing not only the Mississippi Delta, but the issue of poverty and income inequality in this country. Weaving together personal history, archival research, reporting, blues, and popular culture, historian W. Ralph Eubanks' tells a deeper history of this famous alluvial plain, exploring why many residents of this region persist in trying to transform a place that has been deemed broken and beyond repair.
The Mississippi Delta is often viewed as a regional backwater, a place frozen in time and cut off from the modern world. It is also referred to as "the most Southern place on earth," a designation that defines its current state as an exclusive product of the culture and political forces of the American South.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, Mississippi segregationists created economic policies that kept their racist worldviews intact, even as civil rights activists contested racial power structures. Those politicians fought against the policies that could combat income inequality, undermining the impact of those programs in the Delta.
But the Mississippi Delta's story is also a story of this country's thirst and ambition for transformation and reinvention, often made on the backs of the poor and disadvantaged. When It's Darkness on the Delta reckons with the history of the Mississippi Delta as well as its present-day challenges, and asks what we might learn from it. W. Ralph Eubanks is 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. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, 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.
