| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Lynching of Cleo Wright. By Dominic J. Capeci Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xiv, 274 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8131-2048-9.)

In his meticulous and dynamic examination of a pivotal incident during the age of lynching, Dominic J. Capeci Jr. contends that the 1942 lynching of Cleo Wright so disturbed national sensibilities that the Justice Department was moved to seek indictments against mob members for violation of Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. The absence (and dubious constitutionality) of federal antilynching legislation meant that the Ku Klux Klan acts, as amended over the years, would become the vehicle for federal prosecution. 1

Twenty-five-year-old Cleo Wright had taken a knife to a white woman in her own home. Upon his arrest he drove a second knife through a police officer's jaw. The wounded officer managed to put four rounds into Wright during the scuffle in the backseat of a patrol car. With Wright hovering near death in the local jail, a mob extracted him, tied him to the back of a car, and dragged him through the streets to the "colored section," where they doused him with gasoline and torched him off. . . .

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