Racism Can Make You Sick
SIKESTON, Mo. — In 1942, Mable Cook was a teenager. She was standing on her front porch when she witnessed the lynching of Cleo Wright.
In the aftermath, Cook received advice from her father that was intended to keep her safe.
“He didn’t want us talking about it,” Cook said. “He told us to forget it.”
More than 80 years later, residents of Sikeston still find it difficult to talk about the lynching.
Conversations with Cook, one of the few remaining witnesses of the lynching, launch a discussion of the health consequences of racism and violence in the United States. Host Cara Anthony speaks with historian Eddie R. Cole and racial equity scholar Keisha Bentley-Edwards about the physical, mental, and emotional burdens on Sikeston residents and Black Americans in general.
“Oftentimes, people who experience racial trauma are forced to not acknowledge it,” Bentley-Edwards said. “They’re forced to question whether or not it happened in the first place.”
Host
Cara Anthony
Midwest correspondent, KFF Health News
Cara is an Edward R. Murrow and National Association of Black Journalists award-winning reporter from East St. Louis, Illinois. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Time magazine, NPR, and other outlets nationwide. Her reporting trip to the Missouri Bootheel in August 2020 launched the “Silence in Sikeston” project. She is a producer on the documentary and the podcast’s host.
In Conversation With …
Eddie R. Cole
Professor of education and history, UCLA
Keisha Bentley-Edwards
Associate professor of medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine at Duke University
Carol Anderson
Professor of African American studies, Emory University
click to open the transcript
Transcript: Racism Can Make You Sick
“Silence in Sikeston,” Episode 1: “Racism Can Make You Sick” Transcript
Editor’s note: If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio of “Silence in Sikeston,” which includes emotion and emphasis not found in the transcript. This transcript, generated using transcription software, has been edited for style and clarity. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Cara Anthony: Sikeston sits in the Missouri Bootheel. That’s the lower corner of the state, with the Mississippi River on one side, Arkansas on the other. Lots of people say it’s where the South meets the Midwest.
Picture cotton, soybeans, rice. It’s hot, green, and flat. If you’ve ever heard of Sikeston before, it’s probably because of this:
Ryan Skinner: Hot rolls!
Cara Anthony: Lambert’s Café. Home of the “Throwed Rolls.”
Server: Yeah, they’ll say, uh, “Hot rolls!” And people will hold their hands up and they’ll toss it to you.
Cara Anthony: The servers walk around with carts and throw these big dinner rolls at diners.
Ryan Skinner: Oh, it’s fun. You get to nail people in the head and not get in trouble for it.
Cara Anthony: There’s the rodeo. The cotton carnival.
But I came to see Rhonda Council.
Rhonda Council: My name is Rhonda Council. I was born and raised here in Sikeston.
Cara Anthony: Rhonda is the town’s first Black city clerk.
She became my guide. I met her when I came here to make a film about the little-known history of racial violence in Sikeston.
I’m Cara Anthony. I’m a health reporter. I cover the ways racism — including violence — affects health.
Rhonda grew up in the shadow of that violence — in a part of town where nearly everyone was Black. It’s called Sunset.
Rhonda Council: Sunset was a happy place. I remember just being, as a kid, we could walk down to the store, we could just go get candy.
Cara Anthony: There were churches and a school there.
Rhonda Council: We knew everybody in the community. If we did something wrong, you can best believe your parents was going to find out about it before you got home.
Cara Anthony: Back in the day, these were dirt roads.
Cara Anthony: OK, so we’re getting ready to go on a tour of Sunset, which used to be known as the Sunset Addition, right?
Rhonda Council: Mm-hmm, yes. Mm-hmm.
Cara Anthony: We got into her car, along with Rhonda’s mother and her grandmother, Mable Cook.
Rhonda Council: This street was known as The Bottom. Everything Black-owned. They had clubs, they had stores, they even had houses that people stayed in. I think it was shotgun houses back then?
Mable Cook: Uh-huh.
Cara Anthony: That’s Rhonda’s grandmother, Ms. Mable, right there. She was a teenager here in the 1940s. Her memory of the place seems to get stronger with each uh-huh and mm-hmm.
Rhonda Council: And this was just the place where people went on the weekend to, you know, have a good time and party. … And this area was kind of known as “the corner” because they used to have a club here. And they would … they would gamble a lot down here. They would throw dice. Everything down here on the corner.
Mable Cook: That’s right. Sure did. Mm-hmm.
Rhonda Council: You remember this street, Grandma?
Mable Cook: Yeah, I’m trying to see where the store used to be.
Rhonda Council: OK.
Mable Cook: I think it was close to Smith Chapel.
Rhonda Council: OK.
Cara Anthony: Rhonda’s grandmother, Ms. Mable, was 97 then.
Rhonda Council: She is a petite lady, to me, thin-framed. I describe her eyes as like a grayish-color eyes. And I don’t know if it’s because of old age, but I think they’re so beautiful. And she just has a pretty smile, and she’s just a fantastic lady.
Cara Anthony: Ms. Mable was born in Indianola, Mississippi. When she was 14, her father moved to Sikeston looking for work.
Rhonda Council: And so she came up here to, um, to be with her father. But she said when she came to Sikeston, she said it was an unusual experience because they were not allowed to go to stores. They were not allowed to, basically, be with the white people. And that’s not what she knew down in Mississippi. And in her mind, she couldn’t understand why Missouri, why Sikeston was like that in treating Black people that way.
And not too long after that, the lynching of Cleo Wright occurred.
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: It was 1942. While the United States was at war marching to stop fascism, a white mob here went unchecked and lynched a man named Cleo Wright.
The lynching of a Black man in America was not uncommon. And often barely documented.
But in the case of Cleo Wright — perhaps because the death challenged what the nation said it was fighting for — the killing in this small town made national news.
The case generated enough attention that the FBI conducted the first federal investigation into a lynching. That investigation ultimately amounted to nothing.
Meanwhile — here in Sikeston — the response to the brutal death was mostly silence.
Eight decades later, another Black man was killed in Sikeston. This time by police.
Local media outlets, like KFVS, covered it as a crime story:
KFVS report: The Missouri State Highway Patrol says troopers must piece together exactly what led to the shooting death of 22-year-old Denzel Marshall Taylor.
Cara Anthony: I think the killings of Denzel Taylor and Cleo Wright are a public health story.
Our film “Silence in Sikeston” is grounded in my reporting about Cleo and Denzel. Part of the record of the community’s trauma and silence is captured in the film. This podcast extends that conversation.
We’re exploring what it means to live with that stress — of racism, of violence. And we’re going to talk about the toll that it takes on our health as Black Americans, especially as we try to stay safe.
In each episode, we’ll hear a story from my reporting. Then, a guest and I will talk about it.
The history …
Carol Anderson: The power of lynching is to terrorize the Black community, and one of the ways the community deals with that terror is the silence of it. […] And when you don’t deal with the wound, it creates all kinds of damage.
Cara Anthony: And health …
Aiesha Lee: It’s almost like every time we’re silent, it’s like a little pinprick. […] And after so long, those little pinpricks turn up as heart disease, as cancer, as all these other ailments.
Cara Anthony: I’m hoping this journalism, and these stories, will spark a conversation that you’ve been meaning to have.
This is an invitation.
From WORLD Channel and KFF Health News and distributed by PRX, this is “Silence in Sikeston,” the podcast.
Episode 1: “Racism Can Make You Sick”
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: Ms. Mable was a witness to the lynching of Cleo Wright. The 25-year-old was about to become a father.
Rhonda’s uncle says Cleo was …
Harry Howard: Young, handsome, an athlete, and very well known in the community.
Cara Anthony: That’s Harry Howard. He didn’t know Cleo. Harry wasn’t even born yet. But his uncle knew Cleo.
Harry Howard: They were friends. They would shoot pool together and were known to be at the little corner store, the Scott’s Grocery.
Cara Anthony: Harry’s family passed down the story of what happened.
Harry Howard: So everything I’m reporting is the way it was told by people I trust.
Cara Anthony: Black families mostly talked about it in whispers.
Eddie R. Cole: And that sounds like this is one of those situations where that community would rather just leave this alone and try to move on with the life that you do have instead of losing more life.
Cara Anthony: That’s my friend Eddie Cole. He’s a professor of history and education at UCLA.
We were in college together at Tennessee State and worked on the school newspaper.
I called up Eddie because I wanted to get his take as a historian. What happens when we keep quiet about a story like Cleo’s?
Eddie R. Cole: Yeah, I’m Eddie Cole. … So here we go.
Cara Anthony: Thousands of Black people were lynched before Cleo Wright was. But this was the first time the feds said, “Hey, we should go to Sikeston and investigate lynching as a federal crime.”
This story though, seriously, like it just disappeared off the face of the map. Like, it’s, it’s scary to me. So many of the witnesses that I interviewed, they’ve passed away, Eddie, since we started this journey. And it’s frightening to me to think that their stories … that these stories can literally just go away.
[BEAT]
Eddie R. Cole: Lynching stories disappear but don’t disappear, right? So, the people who committed the crime, they committed it and went on with their day, which is twisted within itself, even to think about that.
But on the other side, when you think about Black Americans, there was no need to talk a lot about it, right? Because you talk too much about some things and that same sort of militia justice might come to your front door in the middle of the night, right? Stories like this are known but not recorded.
Cara Anthony: The hush that surrounded Cleo’s story back then was for Black people’s safety. But I’m conflicted. Should Cleo’s story be off the table? Or … could we be missing an opportunity for healing?
On the phone with Eddie, I could feel this anxiety building up in me. I was almost afraid to bring it up, even though it was the reason why I called.
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: And I will be honest with you, I think of you the same way I think of my brother, my father, like, I’ve almost wanted to protect the Black men in my life from that story because I know how hard it is to hear.
Cara Anthony: It was January 1942. Cleo was accused of assaulting a white woman. A police officer arrested him; there was a fight. Cleo was beaten and shot. Covered in blood, he was eventually taken to jail. White residents of Sikeston mobbed the jail to get to Cleo.
Cara Anthony: I do want to play a clip for you, just so you can hear a little bit, if you are up for that, because it’s a lot. How are you feeling about that today?
Eddie R. Cole: No, I want to hear. I mean, I gotta know more now. You just told me there’s a story that just disappeared, but now you’re bringing it back to life. So let’s play the clip.
Cara Anthony: All right. Let’s do it.
Harry Howard: They took him out of the jail and drug him from downtown on Center Street through the Black area of Sunset.
Obviously, it was a big commotion, and they were saying, “What’s going on?” And the man driving the station wagon told them, “Get out of the street,” and, of course, used the N-word. “There’s a lynching coming.”
Cara Anthony: Historian Carol Anderson is a professor of African American studies at Emory University. She takes it from there.
Carol Anderson: They hook him to the bumper of the car and decide to make an example of him in the Black community.
The mob douses his body with five gallons of gasoline and set it on fire. People are going, “Oh my God, they are burning a Black man. They are burning a Black man. They have lynched a Black man.”
Cara Anthony: I always need to take a deep breath after hearing that story. So, I check in with Eddie.
Cara Anthony: OK. How you doing? You OK?
Eddie R. Cole: Yeah, yeah, um, that was tough.
Cara Anthony: I’ve grappled a lot with the question of why, like, why now? Why this story? Am I crazy for doing this?
Eddie R. Cole: Yeah, I mean, this story is really an entry point to talk about society at large. Imagine the people who like the world that we’re in. A world where Black people are oppressed. Right? And so not telling stories like what happens in Sikeston is an easier way to just keep the status quo. And what you’re doing is pushing back on it and saying, ah, we must remember, because the remnants of this period still shape this town today.
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: On the tour of Sikeston with Rhonda, I see that.
Rhonda Council: We’re going to go in front of the church where Cleo Wright was burned.
When we get down here to the right, you’ll see Smith Chapel Church. And wasn’t it over here in this way where he got burnt, Grandma?
Mable Cook: Uh-huh, yep.
Rhonda Council: OK. From what I hear, it happened right along in this area right here.
Cara Anthony: It’s a small brick church with a steeple on top. The road is paved now, not gravel as before. It all looks so … normal.
You’d think that kind of violence, so much hate, would leave a mark on the Earth. But on the day we visited, there was nothing to see. Just the church and the road.
Ms. Mable is quiet. I wonder what she’s thinking.
Mable Cook: I just remember them dragging him. They drove him from, uh, the police station out to Sunset Addition. But they took him around all the streets so everybody could see.
Cara Anthony: Back at Rhonda’s home, we talked more about what Ms. Mable remembered.
Rhonda Council: Did that affect you in any way when you saw that happening?
Mable Cook: Yeah, it hurt because I never had seen anything like that. Mm-hmm. And it kind of got me. I was just surprised or something. I don’t know. Mm-hmm.
Cara Anthony: Remember Ms. Mable had been a child in Mississippi in the ’30s — and it wasn’t until she moved north to Sikeston that she came face to face with a lynching.
Rhonda Council: Did it stick in your mind after that for a long time?
Mable Cook: Yeah, it did. It did stick because I just wondered why they wanted to do that to him. You know, they could have just taken him and put him in jail or something and not do all that to him.
I just never had seen anything like it. I had heard people talking about it, but I had never seen anything like that.
Cara Anthony: When it happened, a lot of Black families in Sikeston scattered, fled town to places that felt safer. Mable’s family returned to Mississippi for a week.
But when they got back, she says, Sikeston went on like nothing had ever happened.
Here’s Rhonda with Ms. Mable again.
Rhonda Council: After you all saw the lynching that happened, did you and your friends talk about that?
Mable Cook: No, we didn’t have none … we didn’t talk about it. My daddy told us not to have nothing be said about it, uh-uh.
Rhonda Council: Oh, because your dad said that.
Mable Cook: That’s right. He told us not to worry about it, not talk about it. Uh-huh. And he said it’ll go away if you not talk about it, you know, uh-huh.
Rhonda Council: So over the years, did you ever want to get it out? Did you ever want to talk about it?
Mable Cook: Yeah, I did want to. Uh-huh. I wanted to. Uh-huh.
Rhonda Council: But you just couldn’t do it.
Mable Cook: No. No. Uh-uh. No, he didn’t want us talking about it. He told us to forget it.
Cara Anthony: Forget it. Don’t talk about it. It’ll go away.
And, in a way, it did.
No one was charged. No one went to prison. Cleo’s name faded from the news.
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: But decades later, Ms. Mable, the witness; Rhonda, her granddaughter; and me, the journalist, we talked about it a lot.
We turned the story over and over, and as I listened to Ms. Mable, there was a distance between the almost matter-of-fact way she described the lynching and what I expected her feelings would be.
I asked her if she was ever depressed … or if she had sleepless nights, anxiety. As a health reporter, I was on the lookout for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Ms. Mable said no.
That surprised me. And Rhonda, too.
Cara Anthony: If we were to roll back the clock, go in a time machine, it’s 1942. All of a sudden, you see Cleo Wright’s body on the back of a car. How do you, can you even imagine that?
Rhonda Council: I could not imagine. And even when talking to her about it, and she had such a vivid memory of it. And you ask her, did it haunt her, and she said no, she, it didn’t bother her, but I know deep down inside it had to because there’s no way that you could see something like that — someone dragged through the streets, basically naked going over rocks and the body just being dragged.
I, I don’t know how I could have handled it because that’s just very, you just can’t treat a human being like that.
Cara Anthony: That’s what’s so hard about these stories. And the research shows that seeing that kind of brutal, racial violence has health effects. But how do we recognize them? And what happens if we don’t?
Those are some of the questions I asked Keisha Bentley-Edwards.
Keisha Bentley-Edwards: Oftentimes, people who experience racial trauma are forced to not acknowledge it as such, or they’re forced to question whether or not it happened in the first place.
Cara Anthony: Keisha is an associate professor in medicine at Duke University. She studies structural racism and chronic health conditions and knows a lot about what happens after a lynching.
Keisha Bentley-Edwards: It’s difficult to talk about racism. And part of it is that you’re talking about power, who has it, who doesn’t have it.
It’s not fun to talk about constantly being in a state where someone else can control your life with little recourse.
Cara Anthony: That’s even more complicated in a place like Sikeston.
Keisha Bentley-Edwards: When you’re in a smaller city, there is no way to turn away from the people who were the perpetrators of a race-based crime. And that, in and of itself, is a trauma. To know that someone has victimized your family member and you still have to say hello, you still have to say, “Good morning, ma’am.” And you have to just swallow your trauma in order to make the person who committed that trauma comfortable so that you don’t put your own family members at risk.
Cara Anthony: Keisha says part of the stress comes from being Black and always being aware — alert — that the everyday ways you move through the world can be perceived as a threat to other people.
Keisha Bentley-Edwards: Your life as a Black person is precarious. And I think that is what’s so hard about lynchings and these types of racist incidents is that so much of it is about, “I turned left when I could have turned right.”
You know, “If I had just turned right or if I had stayed at home for another 10 minutes, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Cara Anthony: That’s as true today as it was when Cleo Wright was alive.
Keisha Bentley-Edwards: So, you don’t have to know the history of lynching to be affected by it. And so if you want to dismantle the legacy of the histories, you actually have to know it. So that you can address it and actually have some type of reconciliation and to move forward.
Cara Anthony: I don’t know how you move on from something like the lynching of Cleo Wright. But breaking the silence is a step.
And at 97, Ms. Mable did just that.
She spoke to me. She trusted me enough to talk about it. Afterward, she said she felt lighter.
Mable Cook: That’s right. Mm-hmm. So, it makes me feel much better after getting it out.
[BEAT]
Cara Anthony: A couple of years after we took the tour of Sikeston together, Ms. Mable died.
When they lowered her casket into the ground, Ms. Mable’s family played a hymn she loved.
It was a song she had sung for me … the day she invited me to visit her church. We sat in the pews. It was the middle of the week, but she was in her Sunday best.
As we talked about Cleo Wright and Ms. Mable’s life in Sikeston, she told me she came back to that hymn over and over.
Mable Cook: “Glory, Glory.” That’s what it was. [SINGING] Glory, glory, hallelujah. Since I laid my burden down. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Since I laid my burdens down […]
Cara Anthony: I grew up singing that song. But before that moment, it was just another hymn in church. When Ms. Mable sang, it became something else. It sounded more like … an anthem. A call to acknowledge what we’ve been carrying with us in our bodies and minds. And to know it’s possible to talk about it … and maybe feel lighter.
Mable Cook: [SINGING] … Every route go high and higher since I laid my burden down. Every route go high and higher since I laid my burden down […]
Cara Anthony: Racism is heavy and it’s making Black people sick. Hives, high blood pressure, heart disease, inflammation, and struggles with mental health.
To lay those burdens down, we have to name them first.
That’s what I want this series to be: a podcast about finding the words to say the things that go unsaid.
Across four episodes, we’re exploring the silence around violence and racism. And, maybe, we’ll get some redemption, too.
I’m glad you’re here. There’s a lot more to talk about.
Next time on “Silence in Sikeston,” the podcast …
Meet my Aunt B and hear about our family’s hidden history.
Cara Anthony: I told you what the three R’s of history are, right?
Aunt B: No, tell me.
Cara Anthony: So the three R’s of history are, you have to recognize something in order to repair it, in order to have days of redemption. So, Recognize, Repair, Redeem. And that’s what we’re doing.
Aunt B: Man, how deep is that?
Cara Anthony: That’s what we’re doing.
Aunt B: Wow.
CREDITS
Cara Anthony: Thanks for listening to “Silence in Sikeston.”
Next, go watch the documentary — it’s a joint production from Retro Report and KFF Health News, presented in partnership with WORLD.
Subscribe to WORLD Channel on YouTube. That’s where you can find the film “Silence in Sikeston,” a Local, USA special.
This podcast is a co-production of WORLD Channel and KFF Health News and distributed by PRX.
It was produced with support from PRX and made possible in part by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The audio series was reported and hosted by me, Cara Anthony.
Zach Dyer and Taylor Cook are the producers.
Editing by Simone Popperl.
Taunya English is managing editor of the podcast.
Sound design, mixing, and original music by Lonnie Ro.
Podcast art design by Colin Mahoney and Tania Castro-Daunais.
Oona Zenda was the lead on the landing page design.
Julio Ricardo Varela consulted on the script.
Sending a shoutout to my vocal coach, Viki Merrick, for helping me tap into my voice.
Music in this episode is from BlueDot Sessions and Epidemic Sound.
Additional audio from KFVS News in Sikeston, Missouri.
Some of the audio you’ll hear across the podcast is also in the film.
For that, special thanks to Adam Zletz, Matt Gettemeier, Roger Herr, and Philip Geyelin, who worked with us and colleagues from Retro Report.
Kyra Darnton is executive producer at Retro Report.
I was a producer on the film.
Jill Rosenbaum directed the documentary.
Kytja Weir is national editor at KFF Health News.
WORLD Channel’s editor-in-chief and executive producer is Chris Hastings.
If “Silence in Sikeston” has been meaningful to you, help us get the word out!
Write a review or give us a quick rating on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart, or wherever you listen to this podcast. It shows the powers that be that this is the kind of journalism you want.
Thank you. It makes a difference.
Oh yeah … and tell your friends in real life, too!
Credits
Taunya English
Managing editor
Taunya is deputy managing editor for broadcast at KFF Health News, where she leads enterprise audio projects.
Simone Popperl
Line editor
Simone is broadcast editor at KFF Health News, where she shapes and edits stories that air on Marketplace and NPR, manages a reporting collaborative with local NPR member stations across the country, and edits the KFF Health News Minute.
Zach Dyer
Senior producer
Zach is senior producer for audio with KFF Health News, where he supervises all levels of podcast production.
Taylor Cook
Associate producer
Taylor is an independent producer who does research, books guests, contributes writing, and fact-checks episodes for several KFF Health News podcasts.
Additional Newsroom Support
Lynne Shallcross, photo editorOona Zenda, illustrator and web producerLydia Zuraw, web producerTarena Lofton, audience engagement producer Hannah Norman, visual producer and visual reporter Chaseedaw Giles, audience engagement editor and digital strategistKytja Weir, national editor Mary Agnes Carey, managing editor Alex Wayne, executive editorDavid Rousseau, publisher Terry Byrne, copy chief Gabe Brison-Trezise, deputy copy chief Tammie Smith, communications officer
The “Silence in Sikeston” podcast is a production of KFF Health News and WORLD. Distributed by PRX. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Watch the accompanying documentary from WORLD, Retro Report, and KFF starting Sept. 16, here.
To hear other KFF Health News podcasts, click here.
