“He was just a product of his times.”
On a cold December night in 1924 in Charleston, Missouri, Frank Hequembourg told his 6 year old son, it’s time to “learn how we treat n****s.” He threw him into the back seat of the family car and together they drove into town to join a mob that would brutally lynch 20 year old Roosevelt Grigsby. Today, the town of Charleston has a pond named after my great grandfather.
There are no memorials to victims of lynchings in SouthEast Missouri.
Drive north on Main Street
in Charleston, Missouri and you’ll find a pond whose waters are sourced from the underground channels of the Mississippi River 6 miles away. The pond sits in a park named after my great grandfather, Frank Hequembourg. Frank was a town hero, the county game warden, a lion wrangler, was featured in Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and, according to his youngest son, took part in the lynching of Roosevelt Grigsby in 1924.
My father’s parents both hail from the Ozarks of Missouri, but I was raised in Southern California. I spent many summers on family road trips through the south, fishing, hunting, swinging from vines and swimming in those muddy waters. The background of every trip was filled with tall tales of long lost family members and their great accomplishments. My Uncle Steve was the colorful historian and storyteller weaving the yarn that captured my imagination. It’s through him that I learned that my family might have relation to Davy Crocket, Ma Barker and the Barker Gang, and even Smokey The Bear himself. But the larger than life character that ended up at the center of most stories was my Great Grandfather Frank Hequembourg and his pond in Mississippi County, Missouri.
When he read in a St. Louis newspaper that someone had been bitten by an indigenous snake and died from the venom, he demanded that the reporter visit him at his pond so he could prove that that type of snake wasn’t poisonous. Before the witness of the whole town and the big city reporter, Frank let the snake bite him on the wrist and survived with nothing but a couple fang marks.
In the 1950s, Frank adopted a couple of “no good bird dogs” from a hunter who couldn’t get the pups trained properly. Frank in all his stubbornness not only trained those dogs to hunt, but taught them to dive 30 feet from a board he erected over the pond. Ripley’s Believe It or Not was called in to print a story about Gick the High Diving Bird Dog cementing Frank’s local fame as a gifted naturalist.
During the depression years
kids from all over the county would come to Frank's pond to see the variety of wildlife he had collected. The pond was stocked full of fish, turtles, ducks and geese and even boasted baby alligators he collected from America’s mighty river. After Mrs. Hequembourg demanded that “the gators had to go”, the pond was opened as the official town swimming hole, but Frank's love of local wildlife never left him.
In 1928 Frank and members of his gentleman’s club gathered together for a scheme that would enthrall the tabloids from Kansass to Illinois for years to come. With the help of his well connected friend, Mr. Devin Write from St. Louis, Frank procured two lion cubs from a traveling circus, set them loose on nearby Wolf Island and ventured out to hunt them for sport.
It wasn’t until recently that my Uncle Steve confided in me that he learned of a darker side to ol’ Frank ‘Heque’ not many in the family were keen to share. Frank was erratic, abusive, and may have suffered from an undiagnosed brain injury. Grandma always said he was “never the same after the accident”, referring to a collision with a bus while delivering mail for the USPS in 1942, but according to my Great Uncle Doug, he was always that way.
Terror in Charleston
One December night in 1924, when Uncle Doug Hequembourg was only 8 years old, he woke from his bed to his father’s hushed voice, “Come on boy, we’re going to a hang’n”. They rode together in silence a mile down the road to the Charleston town square. Surrounding the doors of the police station was a mob of about 200 or more men, torches lit. Little Doug watched from behind his father as the men ripped 20 year old Roosevelt Grigsby from his jail cell and dragged him to the street. They kicked him, beat him, and tied a noose around his neck. The little boy that became my Great Uncle Doug ran back to the car and hid under the back seat, crying. Shortly after he was pulled from the car by his father who said, “you’re going to learn how we treat n****s.” Uncle Doug never acknowledged if he did in fact see what the mob did to Mr. Grigsby that night, but federal agents later documented the gruesome event.
Roosevelt Grigsby
was accused of assaulting a 16 year old white girl on her way home from school. He was soon rounded up, booked, and locked into a cell. Word spread around town and a crowd formed at the doors of the Court House. According to the police, Roosevelt later wrote his confession out on a piece of paper. At about 8:30pm that confession was dropped out of the second story window of the police station into the thirsty hands of the crowd that now included citizens from neighboring Sikeston.
Soon the doors of the police station were smashed down, the officers were pushed aside and Roosevelt Grigsby was dragged out to the street where he was beaten unconscious and hoisted by the neck to the top of an old oak tree. As the young man swung on the limb a member of the crowd fired a shot into his body. They waited 30 minutes before cutting him down. The men dropped his corpse to the ground, tied it to the back of a truck and dragged him through “the black part of town” before returning what was left of Roosevelt to a bonfire for all to see. Two days later when the federal investigators arrived, they asked the police if they could name any of the men involved in the lynching. The cops, who knew everyone in the town, named no names.
Today no monument stands in Charleston to Roosevelt Grisby and no marker acknowledging victims of lynching exists in South East Missouri. But my great grandfather, Frank Hequembourg has a town park named after him.
The Documentary
The family narrative around Frank still lives in the mind of my father and uncle who see his flaws as “a product of his time.” If that’s true then it seems that Roosevelt Grigsby was a product of his times, too. A time when a man would be accused and killed without a trial. A time when the whole town would use the brutal execution of an innocent person as entertainment. A time when the government would cover it up. A time when a people would carry on, to this day, without acknowledging the lasting damage.
The familiar take on history paints my great grandfather as an eccentric pillar of his community. An upstanding citizen who fought to protect wild places in an expanding America. This, in part, is what white privilege is. The sharing of exciting family stories about proud generational talents and the momentos passed down to grandchildren while conveniently omitting memories or actively burying our flawed relative’s actions. This creates an unbalanced scale in history. White families like mine hand down pride, while the family of Roosevelt Grigsby is silenced.
A search through the newspaper archives of America yields literally hundreds of results for my great grandfather Frank Hequembourg and his exploits, yet the same search for Roosevelt Grigsby only concludes that he was a lynching victim.
This documentary’s main purpose would be to return a little bit of balance to history by the writing of two lines.
First, that Frank Hequemborg was one of the unnamed men responsible for Roosevelt’s death. And second, that Roosevelt Grigsby deserves the same privilege my Great Grandfather received - to be something more than a member of a lynching story.
The story will only be fully told when we can share more about Roosevelt Grigsby, the time and environment that lead to his death. To reframe history with more details and more angles from the past.
The extensive archive films, photos, newspaper clippings, local access to Charleston, MO come from the research I’ve already completed into my grandfather. At this point I’m looking for help researching Roosevelt. In the early 1920s he was arrested and spent time at the state reformatory where there would be records that could help expand his story. Family roots to connect and context of black families in SouthEast Missouri at the time that can help round out the story of Roosevelt Grigsby .
Thank you
Weather it’s help with historical research, tracking down reletives of Roosevelt Grigsby, or material support, please feel free to send an introductory email.