The Lynching of Cleo Wright - Hardcover

9780813120485: The Lynching of Cleo Wright
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On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive.

Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe.

Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.

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About the Author:
Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University, is the author of Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 and Race Relations in Wartime Detroit.
From Kirkus Reviews:
A pat, scholarly reconstruction and analysis of the 1942 incident that occasioned the first federal investigation of lynching. Just weeks after America entered WWII, a black oil-mill worker named Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman and a white police officer in Sikeston, Mo., severely injuring both. Wright was seized by an angry mob, dragged across town behind a car, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Such brazen savageryat a time when unity against a supposedly barbaric totalitarian enemy was considered a matter of national survivalignited public censure nationwide (though not, significantly, in Sikeston). It also, Capeci (History/Southwest Missouri State Univ.) notes, raised pressing questions about personal responsibility and civic duty in a democratic society founded upon law and order. While Capeci delves into the sociological and psychological roots of Wright's violent crime and the violent reaction it instigated, he relies too much on the jargon of those disciplines and too little on original interpretation. His most provocative assertion (that the Wright case marked the beginning of a long federal activism that ultimately culminated with the prosecution of the murderers of civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman in the 1960s) is undercut by a chapter detailing the way in which Wright's lynching was both demographically divergent from and similar to other Missouri lynchings. That chapter highlights the book's awkward straddle between a micro-view (which analyzes the lynching as just one of 85 in Missouri between 1889 and 1942) and the macro-view (which posits it as a benchmark of Progressive-era federal activism). Capeci does a service in shining the light of history on the little-known incident that ``signaled the beginning of the end of one kind of racial oppression,'' but it raises more questions than it answers about the pivotal, lasting impact of Wright's lynching. (7 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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