Note: This blog is participating in Blog Action Day 2008 in which bloggers across the world try to turn their spotlights and soapboxes to one issue. This year’s issue is poverty.

I pass the book around the room.

My students study the photos. The challenge for them is to determine a five-year period in which these photos were taken.

They look closer. In the black and white photos, they see black faces, weathered by age and hardship. Worn-out shoes. Ancient cars. Tar-paper shacks with bare light bulbs. Rooms filled with scraps of lives spent picking cotton or cleaning homes. Children with grim faces, already robbed of a childhood and perhaps a future.

I write their guesses on the white board. Some guess as early as the 1910s and 20s. Most guesses are between the 1940s and 1960s. One savvy student proposes 1970-1975. He’s the closest and he’s not that close.

Some are shocked when I tell them that all the photos in Ken Light’s collection, Delta Time, were taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some are indifferent. For me, when I first bought this book in 1997 after seeing Light’s photos in the Oxford American magazine, I was shocked, saddened and angered, all at once. Then most of these photos from the poorest spots in West Mississippi were just a few years old, most of them taken when I was in high school.

For my students, some of these are close to 20 years old. I ask them if we travelled to these areas today if things would look different. Most, in pessimistic but realistic frankness, answer “No.”

I think of the great blues guitarist Robert Johnson. The legend is that he died at the age of 27 of poisoning (by the husband of a woman he had been seeing) in 1938, near the Delta community of Greenwood, Miss. The whole truth of the matter is that Johnson didn’t die until days after the incident. The poison contributed to his death, but Johnson’s contemporary and friend, blues singer Honeyboy Edwards, implied that the lack of a doctor being available in these poor, minority-inhabited Delta areas was also a factor.

I wonder how much has changed since 1938.

The synopsis for Light’s book says

…in a land where times have brought little change. The legacy of sharecropping, racism and poverty in the Deep South are captured in more than 100 duotone images.

The word legacy is troubling to me. It’s partly because I typically think of legacies in a positive light. But also partly because legacy seems to permanent. What can be done to turn the tide of generational poverty?

I wish I had answers. I don’t. The best I can do right now is to continue to raise the question.