Louisiana Voice

Every journalism student in America should be making a pilgrimage to Ferriday, Louisiana, on this date to sit at the feet of and learn from Stanley Nelson, 59-year-old Editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a small weekly newspaper (circulation about 5,000) that serves up mostly local news, wedding announcements, obituaries and sports to the residents of Concordia Parish. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87090135/

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Louisiana, Concordia Parish lies directly across the river from historic Natchez, Mississippi. Vidalia (not the home of the onion by the same name—that’s Vidalia, Georgia) is the parish (county) seat and Ferriday sits a little more inland in the heart of the rich delta that provides a living for the area’s soybean and cotton farmers.

Ferriday is the home of Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, Mickey Gilley, network television news anchor Howard K. Smith and Gen. Claire Chennault—quite a résumé for a town of fewer than 3500 residents (3,453 to be precise).

Clayton is another small town in the mostly farming-reliant parish and is best known as the home of the family cemetery of Jerry Lee Lewis, who son is buried there.

Nelson, a native of nearby Sicily Island, is a 1977 graduate of Wiley Hilburn’s journalism program at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. That was just about the time the late John Hays, who would become a pretty fair investigative reporter in his own right, was getting cranked up with his controversial Morning Paper in Ruston.

Nelson began his newspaper career at the Hammond Daily Star before moving back home to work at the Sentinel, the quintessential hometown paper. He could not have chosen a better mentor in the person of the late Sam Hanna, a legendary name in Louisiana newspaper lore (his son Sam Jr. now runs the family newspapers in Ferriday, West Monroe, and Winnsboro).

But make no mistake, Stanley Nelson has put his own indelible mark on the Sentinel.

In 1964, prodigal son Jerry lee, whose  marriage to his 13-year-old cousin caused a scandal that temporarily derailed his promising rock and roll career, had begun an improbable comeback by re-branding himself as an equally adept country music artist with songs like How’s My Ex Treating You?, What Made Milwaukee Famous Has Made a Loser Out of Me and She Even Work Me up to Say Goodbye. Nelson was eight years old at the time.

Jerry Mitchell, writing for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote last April that shortly after midnight on Dec. 10, 1964, exactly 50 years ago today, Frank Morris, a black shoe repair shopkeeper, was asleep on a cot in the back of his store when he heard glass breaking. http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/04/26/small-town-editor-compelled-solve-mystery/8235145/

“He bolted to the front of the store and saw two men, one pouring gasoline on the outside of the building and the other holding a shotgun,” Mitchell wrote.

As a lit match dropped into the gasoline instantly turned the little shop into an inferno, the man behind the shotgun ordered Morris back into the building. By the time he exited the rear of the building, his feet were bleeding, his hair was on fire and the only remnants of clothing remaining were the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts and the shoulder straps of his undershirt.

Morris lived long enough to talk to the FBI but told agents he didn’t know his attackers.

The Justice Department, however, was too preoccupied with three earlier civil rights murders to actively pursue Morris’s killers. Only a few months earlier, the bodies of three civil rights workers had been discovered buried in a levee at Philadelphia, Mississippi (Neshoba County), and Attorney General Robert Kennedy directed the FBI’s efforts to solving those murders.

So why was Frank Morris killed? A couple of theories exist and both are plausible for the time. One says because he was the only shoe repair shop in town and because families then could generally afford only a single pair of shoes, both blacks and whites patronized his shop. He waited on whites, particularly white women, outside, on the porch of his store. Still rumors started by local Ku Klux Klan members said he flirted with the white female customers. Another story has it that Morris refused to repair a deputy sheriff’s boots at no charge and in so doing, offended the white lawman.

In February of 2007, Nelson who by then was editor of the Sentinel, heard the name of Frank Morris for the first time when the Justice Department released a list of victims’ names from unsolved killings during the civil rights era.

He wrote what he believed at the time would be his only story about the killing. Two hundred stories later, he is still writing. http://coldcases.org/category/publication/concordia-sentinel

Along the way, Nelson in 2010 was named one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He was nominated by LSU in the category of Local Reporting. His own book deal is now in the works after a novel based on his dogged pursuit of the killers of Frank Morris as well as at least four other victims in Concordia Parish and in nearby Natchez hit the bookstores earlier this year. Dr. Charles Colvin, the physician who treated Morris, also died when the airplane in which he was a passenger collided in mid-air with another aircraft at the Concordia airport in 1970.

The 784-page book, Natchez Burning, was written by Natchez resident Greg Iles and is the first of what is scheduled to be a trilogy by the author.

Nelson, while flattered that Iles based his book’s character on him, says there is little in common between himself and the book’s protagonist Henry Sexton, editor of the fictional Concordia Beacon. “He has a much more adventurous life than me,” Nelson was quoted in the Clarion-Ledger article. “He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy—that’s something I don’t know a damn thing about.”

Frank Morris becomes Albert Norris in Natchez Burning and another murder victim, Joe-Ed Edwards, killed on July 12, 1964, is Joe Louis Lewis in the book. Similarly, the Silver Dollar Group, a real-life Klan offshoot, shows up in Iles’ book as the Double Eagles, from gold dollars known by that name.

“I thought that 2007 story would be my only one on the subject,” Nelson told LouisianaVoice. “But then the FBI reopened the case and the Southern Law Poverty Center got involved as did the Syracuse University College of Law, LSU journalism students, the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, and civil rights attorney Janis McDonald.”

Nelson said “scores of people,” including Jay Shelley of the Manship School of Mass Communications at LSU, have helped him in his pursuit of the killers, most of whom died as suspects before charges could be brought against them. One exception is Silver Dollar Group member James Ford Seale who, in 2007, was finally convicted in connection with the deaths of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Seale was the only member of the Silver Dollar Group to spend a day in prison.

“All of the sheriffs and district attorneys have had these as cold cases all this time and did nothing,” Nelson said. “It’s their responsibility to investigate cold cases. One could also blame the FBI for not being more diligent, but thank God for the FBI or nothing would have ever been done. We tend to blame others but we all are to blame for this,” he said.

But when all is said and done, everything done in these cases comes back to a single person: Stanley Nelson. http://www.hannapub.com/concordiasentinel/frank_morris_murder/

Some local residents were not pleased with his digging up old bones—literally and figuratively—but Nelson said the Hanna family stood behind him all the way. “Yes, I’ve been threatened,” he said, “but that goes with the territory. I’ve been cursed and called more creative things than I thought were possible. But the vast majority have been either silent or supportive.”

Iles said the inspiration for his Henry Sexton character was the idea of a lone journalist, covering all the local news that a small-town editor must cover and at the same time outpacing the FBI with his own investigations. “Stanley Nelson picked up the torch that was dropped all those years ago and continued the search for justice,” he said. “That’s true heroism.”

Robert Rosenthal, head of the Center for Investigative Journalism, calls Nelson “one of my heroes. He combines tenacity, courage and a special level of integrity that makes me proud to be associated with him.”

Wiley Hilburn and John Hays, were they still with us, would be pretty proud themselves.