1923 Lynching

            Recently in Missouri a group of civic leaders came together to change the records on a 1923 lynching. In 1923 a man by the name of James T. Scott was dragged out of his jail cell in a college town in Missouri in front of a crowd of hundreds of people and publicly hung. Scott was janitor at the college where he was accused of raping a college professor’s 14 yr old daughter. Scott never made it to trial or was convicted of the rape, there was hardly even any evidence of the rape except for the girl said that the man who raped her was black so she assumed that Scott was the man who did it because he too was black.

Now 87 years later they changed the record from "asphyxia due to hanging by lynching by assailants." A secondary cause of "committed rape" was removed and now reads "never tried or convicted of rape." (Zageir para 5).

I think it is very good that we are now recognizing our wrongs and seeking to correct them. The only problem I see with this is that there are so many other cases just like this one and I think that there is a lot of work to be done on these cases. It also shows us how we were so quick to jump to conclusions back then based on race.

Zagier, Alan Scher. "Mo. Corrects Record on 1923 Lynching - U.S. News - Life - Msnbc.com." Breaking News, Weather, Business, Health, Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Travel, Science, Technology, Local, US & World News- Msnbc.com. Web. 09 Nov. 2010. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40077595/ns/us_news-life/?gt1=43001>.

Zagier