In 1942, in Sikeston Missouri, Cleo Wright was lynched in front of a church. Nearly eight decades later, in 2020, Denzel Taylor was killed in a police shooting in the same small town.

Journalist Cara Anthony is a podcaster who explores the health impact of racial violence. She wanted to explore the connection between these two events - one from the past and one from the present - and to examine how these tragic moments in America’s history might be faced head on. Not erased.

Cara Anthony: Every town has secrets. America has its secrets. America has issues that we need to face head on. But a lot of times - I've heard plenty of professors and people that study this for a living - when we talk about race, we are oftentimes we're talking about power, and that's a really difficult conversation. It's such a big question. I hope I'm answering it right. Yeah, it's just really hard to talk about race in America. We thought it was an absolutely necessary conversation.

Cara Anthony: I'll tell you this film and the podcast took me on a real journey, and especially as a Black journalist. I had to take a look at my own family's history. At about a year into reporting this, maybe less, it just felt weird that I was extracting all of these stories from the community, but I really didn't know my own story. And so I decided to have a conversation with my father. And he says, like, 'Do you realize that someone in our family was killed by a police officer in the 1940s during this period that you're looking at, do you know your own history?' And the answer was no. And ... after every interview that we collected, especially when we interviewed the witnesses - you know, two of them died not long after we recorded their stories - there was such a sense of like relief. Like, finally, like I'm able to say what I saw without being afraid. ... They had lived in Sikeston for the better part of 80 years and kept this story to themselves for the most part.

Cara Anthony: Right now, I think you know, it's important for people to continue to honor each other in their communities, to share stories, to keep the conversation going as much as they can, to heal in ways that they find comforting, whether that be with their own family members or with a in a big maybe it's a big, bigger setting, whatever that is. But I really encourage people also to take care [each other], because people have been fighting for a really long time.

Cara Anthony: I think that's part of the work as journalists. You know, we're tasked - and I'm a public health journalist as well. So we're tasked with looking at what makes a community sick, and sometimes that is police violence and police killings. But I just want to also acknowledge that I'm a person. I'm a Black woman. I told this story through the lens of a Black woman in America who's raising a child. And so yeah, it does hurt when I see people that look like me that are gunned down by the police and treated unfairly. And so for me, justice looks like health equity. It looks like a fair chance, a fair shake. To live, to be happy and to thrive.