When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land

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. (Jan.)