How Racial Propaganda was Used Against the United States in World War II | Retro Report

Cleo Wright, a Black resident of Sikeston, Missouri, was lynched by a mob on January 25, 1942. His death came less than two months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into World War II. Nazi Germany and Japan took advantage of racial violence in the United States as a way to point out its hypocrisy in fighting for human rights abroad but not at home. The Wright lynching led to the first attempt by the federal government to prosecute a lynch mob.