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When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land
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.
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.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 13, 2026
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About the author
W. Ralph Eubanks
17 books63 followersW. Ralph Eubanks is author of When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land, which will be published January 13, 2026 by Beacon Press. He is also the author of three other works of nonfiction: A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, Ever is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippis Dark Past, and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. Eubanks has contributed articles to The Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, and National Public Radio. He is a recipient of a 2021 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a national fellow at the New America Foundation. Eubanks lives in Washington, D.C., and is faculty fellow and writer in residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 30, 2026
Part history, part memoir, the book is a social narrative of the Mississippi Delta as seen through the prism of small towns and persistent themes. The author was born in the Delta, but his family moved to south Mississippi during his childhood to escape racial persecution. Occasionally, his father would take him on nostalgic trips through the Delta to visit old homesteads or locales that lived in his memory. Dr. Eubanks’ well-written prose is steeped in a lament for what might have been and lost opportunities.
The analysis of the Delta in this book is presented from the perspective of progressive liberalism. It is a story of Black people oppressed by white supremacy, and where structural racism is still the driving force of Delta society. The only solutions considered are rendered by government programs or non-profit social justice organizations. The book presents plenty of evidence that the actions of these entities have been ineffective for over 60 years, but the explanation is always that not enough resources were expended.
Eubanks is a great storyteller, and he uses oral history interviews to capture the joys and sorrows of the lived experiences of many Black people in the Delta. His personal connections from childhood and his settling in Clarksdale lend poignancy and authenticity to his prose.
The analysis of the Delta in this book is presented from the perspective of progressive liberalism. It is a story of Black people oppressed by white supremacy, and where structural racism is still the driving force of Delta society. The only solutions considered are rendered by government programs or non-profit social justice organizations. The book presents plenty of evidence that the actions of these entities have been ineffective for over 60 years, but the explanation is always that not enough resources were expended.
Eubanks is a great storyteller, and he uses oral history interviews to capture the joys and sorrows of the lived experiences of many Black people in the Delta. His personal connections from childhood and his settling in Clarksdale lend poignancy and authenticity to his prose.
Displaying 1 of 1 review