A family artifact dating back to the early 1900s, now on display at the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, speaks to the connection between African-Americans in the Delta and the cotton industry.
Gwen Lymon of New York, whose mother, Earnestine Lymon, lives in Greenwood, found the Mound Bayou Oil Mill & Manufacturing Company’s stock certificate among her grandmother’s things when Rhoda Daniel Lowery, a longtime school teacher in Morgan City, died in 1995.
“I thought it was kind of cool that her father had the wherewithal to buy this stock for his children,” Lymon said.
Mound Bayou in Bolivar County was founded as an independent black community in 1887 by former slaves. Lowery’s grandfather was a slave.
Lymon donated the stock certificate and some other items early in the planning stages of the museum, and attended the opening on Sept. 25, not knowing whether any of her donated items would be exhibited.
“The museum is huge. It’s so big you can literally be there for at least three full days for sure,” Lymon said. “Millions of items were donated by people like me.”
Lymon said she and her friends were just about to leave when she took one more turn through the exhibit labeled “The Era of Segregation,” and there on display was her grandmother’s stock certificate.
The placard reads: “The Mound Bayou Cottonseed Oil Mill was one of the very few black-owned cooperative mills in the country. Booker T. Washington attended its dedication in 1912. Gwen Lymon in Loving Memory of Rhonda Daniel Lowery.”
Lymon didn’t notice until she looked afterward at the photo she’d taken that her grandmother’s name was spelled incorrectly on the placard.
That didn’t diminish the thrill, she said: “I was completely overcome to see it there.”
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
