“Silence in Sikeston” is difficult to watch. The KFF Health News documentary shows body cam footage of a 2020 incident in which police killed Denzel Taylor, a young Black man who had allegedly shot his father and later confronted officers.
The documentary, produced in association with Retro Report, juxtaposes that more recent killing with the death of Cleo Wright, a Black man lynched by a mob after allegedly assaulting a white woman in 1942.
“I received a lot of questions, even some criticism from people in Sikeston that thought, ‘Oh, why would you tell these two stories side by side,’” explained Cara Anthony, Midwest correspondent for KFF Health News. “But one of our producers for KFF Health News, Zach Dyer, wrote a beautiful line that says that these were two Black men who were dealing with public health threats of their time,” she said.
Community members in Sikeston, which is just a two-hour drive south of St. Louis, held a reconciliation and remembrance event in 2022, 80 years after Wright was lynched.
“It was important for us to look at lynching and police killings because they are both deeply connected,” Anthony told St. Louis on the Air. “What Cleo Wright's daughter felt, we can imagine is what Denzel Taylor's daughters will feel. We are talking about two families who are deeply still in mourning and trying to unravel what happened to their loved ones.”
One of Anthony’s hopes for viewers of “Silence in Sikeston” and listeners of its accompanying podcast of the same name is to break the so-called silence around the traumatic killings of those two men and the effects of racism on justice and public health.
“We are giving people an opportunity, an outlet, and hopefully a template to have a conversation about these things. It's OK to say that, yes, this happened to me, that happened to my family, and hopefully that lets the powers that be [and] the old guard know that the people aren't just going to take things lying down,” Anthony said. “These conversations are absolutely necessary, because we have to think about the next generation and the world that we want them to live in.”
For more with Cara Anthony on the production of “Silence in Sikeston” including the conversations she and her colleagues had on showing body cam footage of Denzel Taylor’s killing and her family’s personal experience with police violence, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
