COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMOX) - A plaque marking the spot of the 1923 lynching of a Black University of Missouri employee has vanished.
It disappeared a week after community members, organizations and governmental leaders collected soil at the site of the James T. Scott memorial to be displayed in museums in Columbia, Kansas City and Montgomery, Ala.
Scott was hanged by a mob of more than 1,000 people, including a Columbia City Council member, who dragged him out of the old Boone County Jail and hung him at a bridge that is no longer there. The plaque in remembrance of the vile event sat nearby the site of Scott's death. He had been accused of assaulting a 14-year-old white girl, but there was no investigation of the crime.
The Community Remembrance Project of Boone County contacted police Friday morning after it was discovered the marker had been "decapitated" and vanished. The Columbia Police Department is investigating, according to The Columbia Tribune.
A member of the Community Remembrance Project says it would have taken heavy equipment to remove the thick, metal marker. He told the Tribune that it had been "clean cut across the pedestal."
The marker has been there since 2016 and was purchased and donated to the city by the MU Association of Black Graduate and Professional Students.
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