'THE LYNCHING OF CLEO WRIGHT'

In January 1942, just a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a 25-year-old black man named Cleo Wright broke into a white woman's house in Sikeston at 1:30 a.m., ostensibly to commit rape. After coming through the window, he was surprised to find that his intended victim, Laverne Sturgeon, was not alone. The first person he encountered was her sister-in-law, Grace Sturgeon, who fought with Wright and was stabbed before he fled.

Wright was arrested 30 minutes later, but on the way to the police station he pulled another blade form his boot and stabbed night marshal Hess Perrigan in the face. Wright himself was shot four times. He was taken to General Hospital, then to his family home and finally to the jail at City Hall, where a crowd of the curious became potential lynchers by noon.

Barely alive, Wright was hauled from the detention cell, his legs were wrapped around the bumper of a car and his body was dragged to the city's black Sunset Addition. There, before a crowd of onlookers, he was doused with gasoline and set afire. Hours later, a city dump truck arrived and carted the body away.

In "The Lynching of Cleo Wright," a new book published by the University Press of Kentucky, author Dominic J. Capeci Jr. exhaustively probes the case in an attempt to understand what happened that day and its significance.

The governor sent troopers, the NAACP and newspapers across the country took great interest, and Cleo Wright brought the federal government into the prosecution of a civil rights case for the first time. Though the government could not convince a federal grand jury in St. Louis to return indictments against any of Wright's lynchers, the same methods were later used with success in other cases -- including that of the civil rights workers slain in Mississippi in the 1960s.

Though he portrays Sikeston of 1942 as a Southern town where the wealthy kept poor whites and blacks under control by pitting them against each other, Capeci does not blame Sikeston for the lynching.

"A certain segment of Sikeston society lynched Cleo Wright. It's not as if every segment of the society lynched Cleo Wright," he said in a phone interview from Springfield. Capeci is a professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University.

"There's no question about the ugliness ..." Capeci said. "It's also important to realize there were individuals who did stand up -- both black and white."

The black community in the Sunset Addition armed themselves for protection after the lynching. "If white mobsters had tried to penetrate the Sunset Addition you would have had a race war," Capeci says.

That didn't happen because volunteers and state police stood guard that night. One of those troopers was Morley Swingle, father of Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle.

Two of the central figures in Capeci's book are then-Standard-Democrat publisher C.L. Blanton and his son David, the Scott County prosecuting attorney. The elder Blanton, who referred to himself as "the Pole Cat," represented for Capeci traditional white attitudes toward blacks at the time. He editorialized that Wright deserved what he got and defended the citizens of Sikeston against an onslaught of criticism from newspapers across the country and the world.

David Blanton, to whom Capeci ascribes more modern views, physically tried to prevent the lynching, suffering a broken rib at the hands of men who took Wright from his holding cell. He attempted in vain to get a local grand jury to return indictments against some of the lynchers.

David Blanton, who still has a law practice in Sikeston, has read the chapter titled "The Blantons." He declined to characterize Capeci's portrayal of his father or himself other than to say the writer was "pretty rough" on his father.

But he also said his father was someone who "wouldn't have given a hoot" what Capeci wrote about him.

"It's history as far as I'm concerned," Blanton said.

He says all the witnesses to the lynching are dead as far as he knows. Capeci claims that "many people in Sikeston know who did what. No one told me. I had to piece it together from many sources."

He based his book on interviews with people who spoke to him both on the record and anonymously. Blanton talked to him at length, Capeci says.

Among those whose actions are questioned in the book are law enforcement officials who, with some notable exceptions, did little or nothing to prevent the lynching.

While characterizing Blanton and Highway Patrol Sgt. Melvin Dace as heroes, Capeci uses first names and last initials -- all pseudonyms -- to identify 20 lynchers. He does not literally identify them for a reason.

"I'm an historian. I'm not a judge, not a jury," Capeci says. "My job is not to moralize the past."

Blanton doesn't think Sikestonians were afraid to testify against each other in the grand jury proceedings. He says the lynching occurred because the war had just started. The town's young men were going off to protect their families, and those men left behind were going to make sure those families were kept safe. Both Sturgeon women's husbands were away in the military at the time of the attack.

Grace and night marshal Perrigan both survived, though both suffered lingering physical effects.

Ironically, it was the war that brought the federal government into the case because the Japanese and Germans were using it to portray America as racist. The U.S. government decided it could not allow this lynching -- one of 4,000 that had occurred in the American South since 1880 -- to go unnoticed.

Capeci concludes in the book's postmortem:

"Like untold numbers of black citizens, Cleo Wright was denied due process, mutilated, and murdered. The taking of his life and the political dimensions of his case symbolized the expendability of black society in the eyes of white lynchers and their government. Unlike his brethren, however, Wright did not die in vain. His death helped set in motion the federal power needed to secure for African-Americans the most basic of inalienable rights."

Capeci will read from his book and sign copies Nov. 21 at Barnes & Noble.