One-hour film and four-episode podcast series examine the deaths of two Black men in one small Missouri community, 78 years apart, and the resulting reckoning.
On Monday, September 16, WORLD will premiere "Silence in Sikeston," a co-production of KFF Health News and Retro Report, as part of Local, USA. Stemming from reporting by KFF journalists at KFF Health News, the documentary tells the story of the 1942 lynching of Cleo Wright and the ensuing failure of the first federal attempt to prosecute a lynching. The lynching continues to haunt the rural Missouri community as it struggles to cope with the fatal 2020 police shooting of a young Black father, Denzel Taylor.
Silence in Sikeston airs September 16 at 8pm ET/5p PT on WORLD stations nationwide and will be available to stream on WORLD’s YouTube channel, WORLDchannel.org and the PBS app.
The joint production from Retro Report and KFF Health News, presented in partnership with WORLD, draws on personal accounts from Sikeston, Missouri, including those impacted by Wright’s lynching, from the eyewitnesses to the great-grandson of Cleo Wright. Taylor’s story is explored through the eyes of his grieving family and accounts from the local police chief. Silence in Sikeston draws on archival footage and a rich score to put this story and the small community into the context of our nation’s fraught history with racial violence.
"We wanted to create a portrait of how these events and the silence surrounding them impacted a small, rural community, exploring how people are affected by the past, even after efforts to bury it," said the film’s director, Jill Rosenbaum of Retro Report.
To accompany the documentary, the limited-series podcast, also called Silence in Sikeston, taps historians, legal scholars, and health experts to chart the public health reverberations of generational trauma, silence, and fear, revealing how history’s unhealed wounds can impact community and family. The podcast will premiere September 10 on all major streaming platforms.
"The research is clear: Racism — and the violence that can come with it — can make you sick," said KFF Health News correspondent Cara Anthony, the podcast’s host and lead reporter. "Being silent was something our grandparents did to stay alive. But staying silent about racial violence can hurt us. That's one of the key issues we explore in the film and then tease out in the podcast."
Watch, listen and learn more in our watch guide and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #SilenceInSikeston.
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