SIKESTON, MO. — I wasn’t sure if visiting a cotton field was a good idea. Almost everyone in my family was antsy when we pulled up to the sea of white.
The cotton was beautiful but soggy. An autumn rain had drenched the dirt before we arrived, our shoes sinking into the ground with each step. I felt like a stranger to the soil.
My daughter, Lily, then five, happily touched a cotton boll for the first time. She said it looked like mashed potatoes. My dad posed for a few photos while I tried to take it all in. We were standing there—three generations strong—on the edge of a cotton field 150 miles away from home and decades removed from our past. I hoped this was an opportunity for us to understand our story.
As a journalist, I cover the ways racism—including the violence that can come with it—can impact our health. For the past few years, I’ve been working on a documentary film and podcast called “Silence in Sikeston.”
The project is about two killings that happened decades apart in this Missouri city: a lynching in 1942 of a young Black man named Cleo Wright and a 2020 police shooting of another young Black man, Denzel Taylor. My reporting explored the trauma that festered in the silence around their killings.
While I interviewed Black families to learn more about the effect of these violent acts on this rural community of 16,000, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own family. Yet I didn’t know how much of our story and the silence surrounding it echoed Sikeston’s trauma. My father revealed our family’s secret only after I delved into this reporting.
My daughter was too young to understand our family’s past. I was still trying to understand it, too. Instead of trying to explain it right away, I took everyone to a cotton field.
Cotton is complicated. White people got rich off cotton, while my ancestors received nothing for their enslaved labor. My grandparents then worked hard in those fields for little money so we wouldn’t have to do the same.
But my dad still smiled when he posed for a picture that day in the field. “I see a lot of memories,” he said.
I’m the first generation to never live on a farm. Many Black Americans share that experience, having fled the South during the Great Migration of the last century. Our family left rural Tennessee for cities in the Midwest, but we rarely talked about it. Most of my cousins had seen cotton fields only in movies, never in real life. Our parents worked hard to keep things that way.
As a child, I overheard adults in my family as they discussed racism and the art of holding their tongues when a white person mistreated them. On my mother’s side of the family, aunts, and uncles discussed cross-burnings in the South and the Midwest when we’d gather for the holidays.
On my father’s side of the family, I heard stories about a relative who died young, my great-uncle Leemon Anthony. For most of my dad’s life, people had said my great-uncle died in a wagon-and-mule accident.
“There was a hint there was something to do with it about the police,” my dad told me recently. “But it wasn’t much.” So, years ago, my dad decided to investigate.
He called family members, dug through online newspaper archives, and searched ancestry websites. Eventually, he found Leemon’s death certificate. But for more than a decade, he kept what he found to himself—until I started telling him about the stories from Sikeston.
“It says ‘shot by police,’ ‘resisting arrest,’” my dad explained to me in his home office as we looked at the death certificate. “I never heard this in my whole life. I thought he died in an accident.”
Leemon’s death in 1946 was listed as a homicide, and the officers involved weren’t charged with any crime. Every detail mirrored modern-day police shootings and lynchings from the past.
This young Black man — whom my family remembered as fun-loving, outgoing and handsome—was killed without any court trial, as Taylor was when police shot him, and Wright was when a mob lynched him in Sikeston. Even if the men were guilty of the crimes that prompted the confrontations, those allegations would not have triggered the death penalty.
At a hearing in 1946, a police officer said that he shot my uncle in self-defense after Leemon took the officer’s gun away from him three times during a fight, according to a Jackson Sun newspaper article my dad found. In the article, my great-grandfather said that Leemon had been “restless,” “absent-minded,” and “all out of shape” since he returned home from serving overseas in the Army during World War II.
Before I could ask any questions, my dad’s phone rang. I tried to gather my thoughts while he looked to see who was calling. I was overwhelmed by the details. My dad later gently reminded me that Leemon’s story wasn’t unique. “Many of us have had these incidents in our families,” he said.
We should have discussed it as a family. I wondered how it shaped his view of the world and whether he saw himself in Leemon. I felt a sense of grief that was hard to process. So, as part of my reporting on Sikeston, I spoke to Aiesha Lee, a licensed counselor and Penn State University assistant professor who studies intergenerational trauma.
“This pain has compounded over generations,” Lee said. “We’re going to have to deconstruct it or heal it over generations.”
Lee said that when Black families like mine and those in Sikeston talk about our wounds, it represents the first step toward healing. Not doing so, she said, can lead to mental and physical health problems.
In my family, breaking our silence feels scary. As a society, we’re still learning how to talk about the anxiety, stress, shame and fear that comes from the heavy burden of systemic racism. We all have a responsibility to confront it — not just Black families. I wish we didn’t have to deal with racism, but in the meantime, my family has decided not to suffer in silence.
The “Silence in Sikeston” podcast from KFF Health News and GBH’s WORLD is available on all major streaming platforms. Cara Anthony, Midwest correspondent, writes for KFF Health Network.