Forty-seven years of free lawyers on Lynch Street

Lucille W. called us in March because a man from Memphis had offered her cousin eleven thousand dollars for his share of the family land. She didn't know her cousin had a share. She didn't know she had one either.

Her father bought forty acres off Pickens Road in 1951 and farmed it until he died in 1988. He never wrote a will. Under Mississippi law the land passed to all his children together, and then to their children, and by the time Lucille called there were twenty-two owners, three of them in Chicago and one nobody had heard from since 2004.

Twenty-two names on one deed

Heirs' property is the most common way Black families in the Delta have lost land. Any one owner can sell a share, and the buyer can ask a court to force a sale of the whole place. The family that has paid the taxes for thirty years can end up with a few thousand dollars and nowhere to go.

I drove up to Lexington four times. Lucille made coffee, her sister brought the family Bible with the births written in the front, and we drew the whole tree on butcher paper across the kitchen table.

Over the summer we tracked down every heir. Nineteen of them signed deeds giving their shares to a family trust that Lucille and her nephew now run. The cousin turned down the man from Memphis. The last three shares are still being worked out, but the land can no longer be forced into a sale.

Cases like this take a lawyer forty to sixty hours over a year. They don't come with a fee, and they almost never make the news. They are also why 1,940 acres in three counties are still owned by the families who worked them.