Itta Bena is a city in Leflore County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 2,049 at the 2010 census. The town’s make known is derived from the Choctaw phrase iti bina, meaning “forest camp”. Itta Bena is portion of the Greenwood, Mississippi micropolitan area. It developed as a trading center of an area of cotton plantations.

The original Choctaw Indians occupied the Delta region for hundreds of years prior to the introduction of European settlers, with ancestors stretching thousands of years into the past. The first removal deal carried out under the Indian Removal Act was the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, by which the Choctaw ceded just about 11 million acres of the Choctaw Nation (now Mississippi) to the United States in dispute for very nearly 15 million acres in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, a declare senator from Claiborne County, Mississippi, is attributed with the founding of Itta Bena. Following several crop failures in the 1850s at his house in Claiborne County, Humphreys took a trip by river steamer up into the Yazoo wilderness to look for a new farming opportunity in the former Choctaw area.

He found such an opportunity upon Roebuck Lake, a stretch of out of date channel that the river had discarded a few miles west of Greenwood, in what was after that Sunflower County. Bringing a activity of slaves going on from his plantations during the winter, when boats could use tall water to pass from the Yazoo into Roebuck, he directed them in clearing timber and brush from the overgrown bottomland to produce agricultural fields for gardening of cotton. Longtime Claiborne County contacts became avid in his project, and others began to Get land in the area two years later.