Cleo Wright

Shortly after Pearl Harbor—you know, it's the day that will live in infamy, December 7th, 1941—well, in January 1942, when the U.S. is fully into the Second World War, this war against supremacy, this war for democracy, this war for human rights, in Sikeston, Missouri, in January 1942, you have the lynching of Cleo Wright.

Now, the way this began is that Cleo Wright had broken into a white woman's home and attempted to rape her. She fought him off, and she's yelling, "Get him! Get him! Get him!" The cops come, the cops are running after Cleo, they catch him, he fights, he slashes one of the police officers. They fight back, they shoot him, and he gets about eight bullet wounds in him. I mean, he's almost done for. Now, the thing is, he's still alive. So they think, "Okay, I guess we got to get him some medical care." So they take him to the hospital. Well, it's a whites-only hospital because medical care in the United States in the 1940s is Jim Crow, and there are no black hospitals in the United States, particularly in the bootheel of Missouri.

So they take him to the white hospital, they begin to plug him up, you know, put a little gauze here, a little gauze there, but the doctor's very clear: "Okay, now, you know, he's black. He can't stay here. So we've done the best we can do. I don't know where you're going to take him, but he's not staying here overnight." So they try to find a place, and eventually, they take him back to the jail. But by the time they get him back to the jail, the lynch mob has formed. They are absolutely incensed because, when you begin to think about it, this is a black man who has tried to rape a white woman and then has slashed a police officer. I mean, he has violated every last single code in Jim Crow America.

Now, you would also think that, okay, now he's in jail, he can go through the criminal justice system if he happens to survive his wounds. But that wasn't enough for the mob. When you hear the statements from the lynch party, they describe, "Oh, it is time. They've gotten a little uppity. It is time to put them back in their place." And so, the lynch mob storms the jail, pulls Cleo Wright out of the jail—and again, this is a man that's got eight bullet wounds in him—they tie him to the back bumper of a car, then they take off driving into the black neighborhood. And you can imagine this body, riddled with eight bullets, bouncing along the rough roads of Sikeston, Missouri.

They stop the car in the black neighborhood near a black church where folks are in there on Sunday morning, singing praises to God. They cut Cleo Wright's body loose from that bumper. Somehow, he is still alive. They then take five gallons worth of gasoline, pour it over him, and light a match. Witnesses describe the roasting carcass, the smell wafting through the air, coming into the black church. Black folks looking around, going, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" And Cleo Wright, raising his hand to God, begging for mercy—the mercy of death to take him out of that agony.

Now, that's bad enough. When the grand jury holds its hearing to figure out whether somebody could be charged for this—I mean, you stormed a jail, you tied a man to the back of a bumper, you drove miles into another neighborhood, then you deliberately went and got five gallons worth of gasoline, and you poured it over him, and then you lit a match—clearly, something has really gone wrong here. The grand jury came back and said, "No crime has been committed here because he was already dying."

Now, when the NAACP investigated this, what the NAACP said is, "Cleo Wright, and all of the Cleo Wrights before him, are indicative of the lack of human rights for African-Americans in the United States, the lack of education." They said because what is happening is that when blacks were imported into the bootheel of Missouri to pick cotton, the point was to keep them as barely educated and as impoverished as possible so that they could be a cheap, exploitable labor pool that would have absolutely no rights. And Cleo Wright, in fact, best exemplifies that.