Myrtle Sue Lyles Eakin, known as Sue Eakin (December 7, 1918–September 17, 2009), was an American professor, newspaper columnist, and historian from Bunkie in Avoyelles Parish, who researched Louisiana history, particularly the plantation system of the Old South.
Eakin was born in the Lyles community in south Rapides Parish, the eldest child of Sam Lyles and the former Myrtle Guy. She graduated from Lecompte High School in nearby Lecompte. In 1941, Sue Lyles married Paul Mechlin Eakin (July 19, 1917–February 6, 1995) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, later New Jersey. They resided in Bunkie, where she was a professional freelance journalist and a columnist for the Alexandria Daily Town Talk, the Opelousas Daily World, in Opelousas, the seat of St. Landry Parish, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, traditionally the state’s largest newspaper. From 1957 to 1959, Paul and Sue Eakin owned and operated the Bunkie Record newspaper.
At the age of forty-two, she began commuting to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to earn two master's degrees, one in journalism and one in history. She was one of thirteen students in the nation to receive an educational grant from the American Association of University Women.
Eakin then began a 25-year teaching career at Louisiana State University at Alexandria, which had been established in 1960 as a junior college, later made a four-year institution. In an interview with The Town Talk, her LSUA colleague, Patsy K. Barber of Lecompte recalled that Eakin as "a master teacher [who] researched, she knew her topic and knew how to place her topic into the larger setting. She could hold you spellbound. The creative ideas just spilled out." Barber and Eakin collaborated on several books about the history of Rapides Parish and Lecompte.
Eakin's best known work is an edited 1968 version of the slave diary by Solomon Northup: And Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Northup was a free black man from Saratoga, New York, who was captured into slavery in 1841 and brought to Louisiana. The book is considered one of the best firsthand accounts of slave life in existence. She co-authored with her sister, Manie L. Culbertson, the textbook Louisiana: The Land and Its People
Eakin received numerous research grants, awards, and honors, including the 1970 designation as "Outstanding American History Professor" from the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1987, she was named to the "Distinguished Faculty of the LSU System". The Bunkie Rotary International named her "Citizen of the Year" in 1985. In 1980, she was named "Distinguished Artist of Avoyelles Parish". In 1995, she was grand marshal of the Festival du Courtableau, or Washington Catfish Festival in Washington in St. Landry Parish. In 2001, she was named to the Hall of Fame of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications in Baton Rouge, named for Douglas Manship, former publisher of Baton Rouge Morning Advocate.
At the age of sixty, Eakin received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. She continued writing and research projects after her retirement as a professor emeritus at LSUA. Another of her works is Avoyelles Parish: Crossroads of Louisiana..
Eakin died at the age of ninety at her home in Bunkie. She was survived by four children, Dr. Paul M. Eakin and his wife, Scottye Eakin, of Lexington, Kentucky; Dr. Sara Eakin and her husband, Dr. Stephen Kuhn, of Signal Mountain, Tennessee; Sam Eakin and his wife, Joan Eakin, of Gaffney, South Carolina, and Frank Eakin and his wife, Jan Eakin, of The Woodlands near Houston, Texas. She had six surviving sisters, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
In addition to her husband, Eakin was predeceased by a son, Russell Lyles Eakin (1944-2002). Services were held on September 21 at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Cheneyville in her native south Rapides Parish. She is interred beside her husband at the Trinity church cemetery.
In a 1977 interview with The Town Talk, Eakin said "I can never remember a time when I didn't want to learn about the South and tell about it and [its] people."
Eakin was the second Louisiana historian to die in less than a month. On August 28, Hubert D. Humphreys, formerly of the founding faculty at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and a specialist in oral history, died at the age of eighty-six.
