COLUMBIA Mo. – Hundreds looked on as an angry mob dragged a Black University of Missouri janitor from his jail cell in April 1923, publicly lynching him before he could stand trial on charges of raping a White professor’s 14-year-old daughter.
Historians say the instigators included some of Columbia’s most prominent citizens. The crowd that watched James T. Scott hang was filled with laughing and cheering students from the first public university west of the Mississippi River.
Eighty-seven years later, civic leaders have come together to confront an ugly episode in Columbia and correct the record on the death of Scott, who insisted the rape allegation was a case of mistaken identity.
Local filmmaker Scott Wilson teamed up last month with the Boone County medical examiner’s office to successfully lobby state officials to change the cause of death on Scott’s death certificate.
The primary cause is now listed as “asphyxia due to hanging by lynching by assailants.” A secondary cause of “committed rape” was removed and now reads “never tried or convicted of rape.”
“This was done solely for one purpose,” Dr. Michael Panella, associate medical examiner, said of the original listing. “And that was to justify an unjustifiable and heinous act.”
Scott, a 35-year-old married janitor at the medical school, was arrested April 21, 1923, one day after the reported rape of Regina Almstedt, the teenage daughter of a German literature professor.
