A Photographer Saw An Arkansas Town Fading. His New Book Keeps Its Stories Alive

By Melody Rowell

Published June 26, 2021 at 6:23 AM EDT

Rte. 42 in Twist, Ark., is one of many towns that comprise the Arkansas Delta. Photographer Eugene Richards noticed a migration from the area. "It's not the massive migration that we all know, huge numbers of people leaving the Delta for Chicago and the cities," he said. "Mainly, the farm work was gone. And to this day, the manufacturing is gone."

The town of Earle, Ark., is disappearing.

Or at least, that's what it looked like to photographer Eugene Richards.

Joseph Perry on a farm in Marianna, Ark. "I was raised up on a segregated system. I got 'Colored' on my goddamn birth certificate right now," Perry told Richards.

In the postscript of his new book, the day i was born, Richards writes about returning to the area in 2019 after years away and noticing the overwhelming presence of absence:

No men and women picking cotton. No old folks on the porch staring out at you. No children running and jumping around. The sharecropper shacks that were here 50 years ago have vanished. Once there were four or five of them every couple of miles — tin roofs, plastic sheeting over the windows, front yards rutted with tire tracks, littered with rusted-out cars, bed springs, things that once meant a lot to someone, but didn't any longer.

Earle, Ark., is about 30 miles northwest of Memphis, Tenn. In addition to working in cotton fields and mills, many people in the Delta worked in manufacturing jobs, producing everything from Christmas ornaments to truck tires. But as commercial soybean farms overtook small cotton farms and manufacturing jobs moved overseas, people in the Delta had to go elsewhere for work.

In the book, that epilogue is the only time we hear Richards' voice. The rest of the text to accompany his photos are the first-hand accounts of six people, all of whom are Black, over 50 and most have lived in Earle for much of their lives: Joseph Perry, Jr., Stacy Abram, Lovell Davis, Jackie Greer, Timothy Way and Jessie Mae Maples. The photos capture daily life for these six as well as other Earle residents, in addition to the stark and impoverished landscape of the Delta.

Eugene Richards photographed Cummins Prison Farm in Grady, Ark., in 1970.

Though the town may look to Richards like it's fading, its history is very much alive. In preserving them in the day i was born, Richards ensures that these stories — of racism and segregation, of voter suppression, of homophobia, of poverty, of gun violence and police brutality — won't also disappear.

Stacy Abram's appliance store with portraits painted by Timothy Way. "I was walking down the street one day and [Abram] pulled up, gave that job to me," Way said in <em>the day i was born</em>. "I mean, he thought I was totally weird, the clothing and all. 'Yeah, you'll paint the freedom fighters on my walls, those against discrimination.' And we started from there." — Stacy Abram's appliance store with portraits painted by Timothy Way. "I was walking down the street one day and [Abram] pulled up, gave that job to me," Way said in *the day i was born*. "I mean, he thought I was totally weird, the clothing and all. 'Yeah, you'll paint the freedom fighters on my walls, those against discrimination.' And we started from there."

Richards' relationship with the Arkansas Delta goes back decades. He first arrived in the Delta in 1969 as a VISTA volunteer. VISTA, which stands for Volunteers in Service to America, was designed to be the domestic version of the Peace Corps. Richards, who is white, spent three years in the Delta working in predominantly Black communities as a social worker and a photographer, and also running a small community newspaper. He looks back on that time not in a self-congratulatory way, but as a matter of course. In an interview with NPR, he remembered, "because of the Vietnam War happening and Dr. King happening, and the assassinations all happening all the time, you took the admonitions to get involved quite seriously. And that was it. So it isn't something that you think about later. It became kind of natural."

"My mom told me that before I came out of her womb, I woke my dad up. I was crying inside of her. He asked her, 'What that hollering?' She said, 'It's the baby.' So he gotten up about 1:00, got the midwife and they delivered me," Abram told Richards.

the day i was born almost came about as an accident. In 2019 Richards was working on a project about abandoned houses for a large newspaper and went back to the Delta for material. Then, he said, "I drifted over into Earle because I was curious about what the towns look like today that I remembered from a long time ago." Following Main Street, he came to an appliance store covered in paintings of people like Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Tupac Shakur.

When Richards entered the store a couple days later, he was greeted by owner Stacy Abram, and the two struck up a conversation. Richards had a recorder, and he turned it on while Abram told him about a childhood with an imprisoned father, a job as a teenager at the cotton gin and the first days of schools integrating. Soon, Lovell Davis entered the store and told Richards about growing up as best friends with Abram, about going to school hungry, about his own time in prison after robbing a bank. Timothy Way, an eccentric gay man who painted the freedom fighter portraits on the store, also showed up and shared his life stories with Richards. "So it wasn't like I searched people out," Richards said. "I never thought about any kind of book at the time. But the storytelling was so direct and compelling."

When he returned home to New York City and turned in the photographs and the interviews to the newspaper he'd been working for, he never heard any response. "You have to create your own narrative when you don't hear from anybody," Richards said. He figured his dispatch from Earle had fallen flat with his editors. "So the narrative was everything sucked, and I didn't think it did. I knew there were stories there."

Pastor Oglesby, Shiloh MB Church in Crawfordsville, Ark., 10 miles from Earle.

He decided to make a book of the work. "I kind of went overboard," he said. "It could've been a tiny book. But the [subjects] deserve a really nice book."

The stories are all too familiar today, mirroring incidents that have sparked national conversations and worldwide demonstrations. "It's not only this town, it's the world." says Lovell Davis in the book's epigraph.

In 1970, a group of about 150 Black residents — including Jackie Greer and Jessie Mae Maples — marched to city hall to protest the continued segregation of the schools. A group of about 30 white people showed up, supported by local police, with clubs and guns and descended on the protestors. They fired shots, grazing Greer's head and critically injuring Maples. No charges were ever filed against the white assailants, but Greer's husband — the Rev. Ezra Greer, who was beaten by the mob and suffered a broken arm — was charged with inciting a riot.

"My mom and my father [farmed]," Jackie Greer said in <em>the day i was born. "</em>And later on my mother was a maid, housekeeper, babysitter, you name it. And from that my mother and father sent me to school." — "My mom and my father [farmed]," Jackie Greer said in *the day i was born. "*And later on my mother was a maid, housekeeper, babysitter, you name it. And from that my mother and father sent me to school."

"In these little towns, people rose up without any support," Richards said. "I mean, nobody was coming in from other places. It wasn't like protests now when people come from all over. All these people stood up in their little towns, all by themselves."

"The march, it's mostly forgotten," Greer says later in the book. "Earle is nothing but a little out-of-the-way place that most people haven't heard anything about. We never did really get much news coverage. We're too far from Little Rock. And in Memphis, unless there's a murder, they hardly holler, didn't bother about coming."