Lynching stories: family and community memory in the Mississippi Delta

Myltree Adams’ interview is part of the Delta Oral History Project (DOHP), which tape recorded 116 oral interviews with African-American community leaders in Bolivar, Coahoma, Sunflower, and Washington counties of the Mississippi Delta between 1995 and 1997. These counties had majority black populations for most of their histories, and were developed as cotton planting regions in the late 19th century. All of these counties produced strong civil rights movements in the 1960s, and have also experienced the mechanization of cotton agriculture, a decline in farm tenancy and share-cropping, and massive outmigrations of African-Americans since the 1940s (Cobb 1992).