Rooted Re-Run: W. Ralph Eubanks
"Seeking to understand the place where I am from has become a spiritual necessity."
This month, while I’m out and about promoting my new book, Split the Baby, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite interviews from the Rooted archives, sans paywall. This week’s interview with W. Ralph Eubanks is from 2023. I’m so excited to read Ralph’s forthcoming book, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became It’s Poorest Land, which is now available for pre-order.
Where are you from?
I’m from south Mississippi, a small town called Mount Olive that stands right in the middle of the Piney Woods region. When I was young, I thought of my part of Mississippi as a place where nothing much happened. As I have grown older, I have come to see how wrong I was.
Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?
Like many ambitious young black people from a small town in Mississippi, I felt I had no other choice but to leave. My high school years were spent in Mississippi during the early years of school integration, and if there is one insi…
