Mississippi Delta: Returning Home to Its Haunted Past

My father, Warren Eubanks, arrived in the Delta in 1949. He was a young, idealistic World War II veteran, an Alabama native, and a recent graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, a pioneering Black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. With an agronomy degree in hand, he moved to Mileston, an all-Black New Deal resettlement community aligned with Tuskegee’s particular ideas about racial uplift. Established in 1940 on land that had once been a plantation, the federal project at Mileston was designed to transform the lives of 110 families—former sharecroppers who would become landowners. My father’s title was “Negro county agent,” which meant that he advised Black farmers in Mileston’s surrounding county, Holmes.

My parents had met at Tuskegee and married in 1951, and my mother, Lucille Richardson, then moved from south Alabama to the Delta, where she taught elementary school in Mileston. She was skeptical about Washington’s view of agriculture as a means of Black progress. Like the unnamed Black narrator in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, she wondered whether heavy reliance on practical vocations was misguided, stalling progress through lowered expectations about what Black people could achieve.

Both of my parents were products of the segregated South, but my mother had been raised in an interracial family whose very existence defied Jim Crow. Lucille, who looked white, knew the rules of segregation, but her family never really followed them. That had to change when she arrived in the Delta.

In the years immediately after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down “separate but equal” schools in Brown v. Board of Education, there was a harsh backlash of white resistance in the South—not only to school integration, but to Black progress in general—and the Delta became dangerous, especially for a couple who refused to follow the racial script society had handed them. Emmett Till’s murder served as one sign of looming hostility. There were many others in mid-1950s Mississippi, since it was effectively open season on Black people during that period. As educated professionals, my parents had a target on their backs.

My father understood that staying in the Delta, and doing public work to help advance his race, could cost him his life. My parents moved to south Mississippi in 1956, a year before I was born. I learned from later trips with my father to the Delta that he never wanted to leave. And that’s part of why I keep coming back: I need to understand the society he inhabited, and to work through feelings I have of survivor’s guilt.

One of my childhood friends, Edward Vaughn, once said to me—not in anger, but as fact—that if my family had stayed, the way I view the world would be completely different. He grew up in the Delta town of Clarksdale, the son of a Tuskegee graduate who’d chosen to remain after my family left. I grew up on a safe, isolated 80-acre farm near a town called Mount Olive, a place Edward visited regularly, experiencing a sense of freedom he didn’t have in the Delta. His point was that my relatively comfortable upbringing gave me a more expansive view about what I might be able to achieve in places far away from Mississippi.

Both my father’s longing and my friend’s comment led me to spend years studying the history and culture of the Delta. During my time back in Mississippi—and particularly through interviews and conversations with local residents—I’ve witnessed firsthand how economic shame creates a sense of powerlessness and isolation among the people here. (There’s a great deal of agricultural wealth in the Delta, but the 13 counties it comprises, which are all more than 50 percent Black, consistently suffer from some of the highest poverty rates in the nation.) I’m now writing a book about the Delta, with the aim of revealing why the sources of struggle are so persistent. I also hope to offer what might be a path forward, away from the shadows of the past.

No, I didn’t grow up here, but my history is here. To tell the complicated and layered story of the Delta, I seek out spaces that appeal to my lifelong love of the outdoors. It’s during my walks, hikes, and bike rides that I’ve come to have an even more profound connection to this land.