Prohibition Begins in Missouri

   In my book Wicked Joplin, I wrote about how the last day before Prohibition was celebrated in Joplin, and I got to wondering how other Missouri localities observed the day. Although the period we know today as Prohibition did not begin until January 1920, the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act banned the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75 percent alcohol as of July 1, 1919. So, for all practical purposes, June 30, 1919, marked the last day that people could legally purchase booze.
   Known as a hell-raising town from its earliest days as a boisterous mining camp, "wet" Joplin was a frenzy of activity in the days leading up to the prohibition deadline. People from miles around who lived in “dry” territories trekked to Joplin to stock up on John Barleycorn, and record sales were reported. (The initial provisions of the prohibition act outlawed the sale but not the possession of alcoholic drinks.) On the eve of the law’s taking effect, Joplinites marked the occasion with wild revelry. All the saloons were jammed throughout the evening, as were all the cafes that served alcohol. “No New Year’s party in the history of Joplin...could be compared with it,” said the Joplin Globe the next day. “When midnight approached the merrymakers were well along toward that state where every one is a ‘jolly good fellow.’” When the fateful hour arrived, women jumped onto tables and starting singing “How Dry I Am” and similar ditties, while out in the streets “the revelry was nearly as bad. Men and boys paraded Main street shouting and yelling,” and both men and women in automobiles drove up and down the street screaming and shouting out the open windows. The Joplin police, reported the Globe on July 1, arrested seventy-eight people for drunkenness, even though they limited their arrests to those “who had become so intoxicated they will not realize until late today they were guests of the city....”
   Other towns and cities throughout Missouri marked the occasion with revelry as well, although their celebrations were more subdued in most cases.
   In Kansas City, "Last-chance parties abounded in hotels and cabarets," according to the July 1 Kansas City Times, "and the saloons did (a) heavy business." The celebration centered on Twelfth Street, where the merrymakers "made a noisy demonstration to the close." It was a "joyous and happy crowd," some woozy with liquor, but "not offensive." Some of the revelers were strangers to John Barleycorn but "made his acquaintance last night." One such newcomer to liquor was a woman who sat in an automobile outside the Hotel Muehlebach looking somewhat disheveled. "What do you think my Sunday school class would think of me now?" she asked as a reporter passed by.
   In St. Joseph, "The celebrators, or mourners, as the city's News-Press called them the next morning, "did everything they could to get rid of the liquor last night." Since the new law would still allow for light or "kickless" beer and wine, it was mostly "whiskey straight" that the St. Joseph partiers imbibed.
   For the most part, St. Louis, according to the July 1 Post-Dispatch, "permitted liquor to pass out last night with indifference. The expectation that the 'last night' would have aspects of drunkenness and revelry not uncommon to New Year's Eve was not realized." A fairly large number of people did take to the streets in the early evening, but when the crowds "realized that nothing to stir their risibility was going to happen, they dispersed to their homes." The St. Louis Star & Times largely agreed, noting that there were some large crowds throughout the city but that the celebration was "by no means of the New Year variety." Most of the celebrating occurred at "family parties, and revelry was the exception."
   In Springfield, "The ringing of church bells and the celebration at downtown cafes marked the passing of John Barleycorn and his stepbrothers," according to the Springfield Missouri Republican. Although some of the downtown cafes and saloons had more business than usual, there were no real parties like those normally held on New Year's Eve. When the clocks reached midnight, some of the churches in town, happy to see the death of John Barleycorn, rang their bells in dirge-like peals usually reserved for funerals.
   Many of the "thirst-parlors" in Joplin and elsewhere throughout the state closed after Wartime Prohibition took effect, even though the law initially allowed the sale of drinks with a small amount of alcohol. The saloonkeepers said that, with whiskey barred, they could not make enough money to pay expenses.

The Murder of Violet Brewer

   About seven a.m. on the morning of August 27, 1970, fifty-year-old Violet Brewer, clerk at a Quick Shop at 3328 N. Glenstone in Springfield, was shot to death during a holdup as she was opening the store for business. Twenty-two-year old Donald Joe Hall was arrested as a suspect in the case in mid-September on a tip from Warren Martin, who told police that Hall had given him a .32 caliber pistol to dispose of shortly after the Brewer murder. Martin, who was under arrest on suspicion of armed robbery, said he’d thrown the weapon into Lake Springfield, and it was recovered a few days after Martin’s confession. Hall had a criminal record dating back to 1965 when he was a seventeen-year-old kid, and, at the time of his arrest as a suspect in the Brewer case, he'd been out on probation for the past ten months after pleading guilty to a charge of displaying a dangerous weapon because he'd pointed a gun at a policeman who was trying to question him for careless driving.

                                            Violet Brewer from Springfield Leader & Press

   Hall’s probation was now revoked, and he was charged with first-degree murder. At Hall's trial, Martin, a former cellmate of Hall’s at the state prison, testified that Hall told him, after he gave him the pistol to dispose of, that he’d “had to shoot a gal” with it during a holdup when the woman reached for a phone to call police and that Hall admitted it was the murder and holdup that had been in the news so much lately. Forensic experts linked the weapon taken from Lake Springfield to the bullet removed from Mrs. Brewer’s head. However, Hall took the stand in his own defense to deny killing Brewer. He admitted giving the pistol to Martin but said he’d done so before the murder. Although one is left to wonder why Martin would point police toward a murder weapon if he’d committed the murder himself, Hall planted enough doubt in the minds of jurors to win an acquittal.
   Hall still faced five years in the penitentiary, though, on the charge of displaying a deadly weapon, and when he got out of prison in 1973 after serving only about half of the sentence, he promptly resumed his criminal career, culminating in the murder of Springfield jeweler William Roscoe White in December 1992, a crime for which Hall was convicted and sentenced to death (later changed to life imprisonment).
   This story is condensed from my book Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

The Last Lynching in Missouri: The Murder of Cleo Wright

   In the wee hours of Sunday morning, January 25, 1942, 29-year-old Grace Sturgeon and her sister-in-law, LaVerne Sturgeon, were awakened from their sleep when they heard someone crawling through a window in the house where they were staying in Sikeston, Missouri, while their husbands were away in military service. Grace's 8-year-old son was asleep in another room. The intruder, a black man, confronted the women, lunging at them with a knife. LaVerne made her escape and ran from the house screaming for help, but the man grabbed Grace and cut her across the abdomen. He also slashed her hand when she tried to grab the knife. About this time, Grace's son was aroused from his sleep by the commotion, and the intruder took off. When LaVerne returned with help, Grace was lying in the floor with severe wounds.
   Law officers immediately went looking for the assailant. About a half mile from the Sturgeon home, Sikeston policeman Hess Perrigan and a citizen who was driving Perrigan's vehicle spotted a black man walking along the street with blood on his clothes. Perrigan arrested the man, took a knife away from him, and got into the back seat with his captive.
   Although Perrigan had his revolver trained on the prisoner, the man, later identified as 26-year-old Cleo Wright, whipped out another knife that he had hidden on his person and attacked Perrigan with it, severing an artery. Despite the severe wound, the officer managed to get off four shots, all of them striking Wright.
   Mrs. Sturgeon and Officer Perrigan were both taken to the Sikeston hospital with serious wounds, while the gravely wounded Wright was taken at first to the city hall, where the city jail was located. Walking under his own power, the prisoner, however, collapsed as he was led into the building. He, too, was then taken to the hospital and placed in the emergency room in the basement. Sometime after 5 a.m., however, he was moved back to the city hall and placed in a temporary detention room rather than the steel-barred jail in the basement. Here he reportedly admitted that he had attacked Grace Sturgeon.
   By about ten o'clock Sunday morning, a crowd had gathered at the city hall and were attempting the break down the ordinary wooden door of the detention room. A highway patrolman succeeded in temporarily dispersing the small group. The patrolman called for backup, and two other highway patrolmen and the city police chief arrived to help guard the prisoner.
   Over the next couple of hours, however, both the size and the determination of the crowd grew. About noon, prosecuting attorney David Blanton arrived and tried to reason with the growing mob, but his remarks only "seemed to inflame the crowd," according to the local newspaper, the Sikeston Herald. With shouts of "What are we waiting for?" the crowd surged into the city hall, shoved past the officers, and easily broke down the door to the detention room. Wright, already unconscious from his wounds, was dragged from the building. One report said he was immediately tied by his feet to the bumper of a car and dragged through the street toward the black section of town, while a conflicting report said he was crammed into the trunk of the car, taken to the edge of the black section, and then tied to the bumper. In either case, he was dragged back and forth through Sikeston's black neighborhood on the west side of town. After a few minutes, Wright's lifeless and nearly naked body was cut loose, gasoline was poured on it, and it was set ablaze "in front of the Negro school." The mob then gradually dispersed.
   The charred body lay unclaimed for several hours, before it was finally taken late that afternoon to a local cemetery and buried in the "Potter's Field." Grace Sturgeon and Hess Perrigan, on the other hand, gradually recovered from their wounds.
   As was generally true in cases of lynching, law enforcement made at least a superficial effort to identify and prosecute the ringleaders of the mob that dragged Wright from the city hall but to little avail. A grand jury early the next year failed to return a true bill against any of the perpetrators. Citing a lack of cooperation from potential witnesses, the jury said none of the guilty parties could be positively identified.
   The murder of Cleo Wright is generally considered the last lynching in Missouri, although the shooting death of town bully Ken McElroy in Skidmore in 1981 by an unidentified member of a crowd of townspeople who were confronting the hated McElroy has occasionally been characterized as a lynching as well. For a thorough account of the Wright lynching, I recommend The Lynching of Cleo Wright by Dominic J. Capeci, Jr.

 

The Lynching of Roosevelt Grigsby

   Unlike some of the states of the Deep South, Missouri saw about as many white men as black men lynched during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This is not to say that blacks and whites were treated equally. No way! In the first place, even though the total number of whites lynched equaled or perhaps even exceeded the number of blacks lynched in Missouri, the proportion of blacks lynched as a ratio of the population was much greater. Also, black men were lynched more indiscriminately. Usually, when white men were lynched, there was pretty strong evidence against them and the offense of which they were accused was very serious. This wasn't necessarily the case with black men. They were often lynched on scant evidence and/or for relatively minor offenses, especially if the alleged offense involved a sexual advance toward a white woman. The lynching of Roosevelt Grigsby of Charleston, Missouri, is a case in point.
   About 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 18, 1924, Kathryn McFadden, a sixteen-year-old high school girl, started on foot with her younger sister from the confectionary store where Kathryn worked in Charleston to the girls' home a few blocks away. The girls were on North Elm Street just a couple of blocks from their house when a young black man jumped out from behind a fence and accosted them. He grabbed Kathryn and started dragging her across the street, but her and her sister's screams aroused the neighborhood and scared the attacker off.
   Kathryn had her dress torn and was in a "hysterical condition," according to the Charleston Times, when she was interviewed by law officers. However, she said she recognized her assailant because he had previously worked briefly at the confectionary where she was employed part-time. She identified the young man as Roosevelt Grigsby, who was about 21 years of age.
   Grigsby, who had previously served a stint in the state reformatory for an attempted assault on another young white woman in Charleston, was located at his home and brought to the Mississippi County sheriff's office in Charleston. Several other young black men were also rounded up for questioning. Grigsby admitted being in the vicinity of where the attempted assault had occurred, but he described two other young black men he claimed to have seen running from the area.
   Under questioning, Grigsby soon broke down and confessed, according to the local newspaper. About 8:30 p.m., after word of the alleged confession had spread throughout town, a mob, numbering at least 200, surrounded the sheriff's office. About half that number made a rush on the office and forcibly took Grigsby from the officers who were guarding him. The officers "attempted to interfere," according to the sheriff, "but were pushed aside."
   Grigsby maintained his composure and made no attempt to escape until after he was dragged from the room and into the street, where he began to scream and resist. Outside, he was attacked by several members of the mob as he was dragged to a tree on the east side of the sheriff's office. Someone produced a rope, and as the mob attempted to place the noose around Grigsby's neck, someone else struck him with the butt of a revolver, rendering him unconscious. One end of the rope was placed around his neck, and the other was thrown over a limb about fourteen feet off the ground. The victim did not appear to be conscious as he was drawn up.
   As the body swung back and forth, someone from the crowd fired a shot into it. After the body had hung for about thirty minutes, it was cut down, attached to the rear of an automobile, and dragged through the streets. With the mob traipsing along behind, the procession wound through the black district of Charleston, or the "bad lands," as local residents called the area. Several black families fled in fear after the lynching and the gruesome parade through their neighborhood.
   As the final act in the mob's cruel demonstration, Grigsby's body was tossed on a bonfire built near the intersection of Marshall and Elm and allowed to burn for some considerable time, with many in the mob hanging around until near midnight.
   Declaring that he planned to call a special grand jury, prosecuting attorney J. C. McDowell promptly launched an investigation into the lynching, but he got no cooperation. The mob was unmasked when they stormed the sheriff's office, and the sheriff and his deputies followed them outside when they dragged Grigsby from the office. However, the sheriff said it was too dark for him or his deputies to get a good look at any of the vigilantes and that he wasn't sure of the identify of any of them. A coroner's jury concluded the next day, December 19, that Grigsby had come to his death by lynching at the hands of a mob unknown to the jurors. McDowell enlisted the aid of the Missouri attorney general's office but to no avail. McDowell's successor, due to take office in January, announced that, on the advice of the circuit judge, he would not call a special grand jury but would, instead, wait for the next regular grand jury during the February term of court to take up the matter, since potential witnesses who refused to testify could not be punished while court was not in session. When the regular grand jury convened in February, it called at least twenty witnesses, but the jury announced after ten days that it had not obtained enough evidence to return a true bill against any of the lynchers. Thus, another lynch mob went unpunished.