The Lynching of James T. Scott, April Ninth, Nineteen Twenty-Three

On the morning of April ninth, nineteen twenty-three, a mob estimated at several hundred people gathered outside the Boone County Jail in Columbia. Inside was James T. Scott, a thirty-five-year-old janitor employed by the University of Missouri's medical department.

Scott had been arrested days earlier and charged in connection with an assault. He had not been tried. He had not been convicted.

A grand jury had not yet determined whether the evidence against him was sufficient. The mob removed Scott from the jail. Witnesses present included university students.

Scott was taken to a bridge on Stewart Road, not far from campus, and killed. He was hanged from the bridge structure. The Boone County sheriff and his deputies did not prevent it.

No one was ever charged with a crime in connection with Scott's death. The local newspaper, the Columbia Missourian, condemned the lynching editorially. The journalism school's faculty called for prosecution.

None came. Scott was buried in Columbia Cemetery in an unmarked grave. For decades his name was largely absent from the university's public memory of its own history.

In two thousand fourteen, a university committee placed a permanent headstone on Scott's grave, acknowledging by name what had been done and who had been harmed. The university's board of curators formally recognized the lynching as part of the institution's history. Researchers with the State Historical Society of Missouri documented the case in detail.

The bridge is gone, replaced by a newer span. The jail building no longer stands. What remains is Scott's name on a grave marker that took ninety-one years to appear, a measure of how long it can take for a community to face what it permitted.

Note: some accounts of the original charge against Scott vary and remain contested in the historical record. This track reflects the documented facts of his arrest, removal from custody, and killing without trial.