Stanley Nelson, editor who probed cold cases of Jim Crow era, dies at 69

Boston Globe

a day ago

No one was charged and, as the decades passed, the case gradually faded from the town's collective memory. Even the editor of the local weekly - who sometimes wrote columns on the area's history - was unaware of what happened that night in 1964; at the time, he was a child in a white community up the road from Ferriday.
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Then in 2007, the FBI released a list of cold cases from the civil rights era. The editor, Stanley Nelson, began to dig. First came old police reports and forensic files on the Morris case, including redacted FBI documents obtained from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group.
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Mr. Nelson moved on to interviews, including with former KKK members, as he tried to piece together what happened.
As his articles began to appear in the Concordia Sentinel, some in
Ferriday applauded his efforts to reopen the past. Others, it seemed, wanted to keep the lid tightly sealed. He received threats and, at least twice, was run off the road as he drove to the newsroom he shared with two colleagues at the 5,000-circulation weekly.
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'If you don't figure out what happened, and if you don't figure out why it happened, these things will live on forever,' said Mr. Nelson, who died June 5 in DeRidder, La., at 69.
In January 2011, Mr. Nelson wrote about what he believed was the key piece of the puzzle - linking Morris's death to a former KKK henchman with a faction called the Silver Dollar Group. The man denied the allegations and was not charged. He died in 2013.
But Mr. Nelson's investigation - and the reporting on why the KKK targeted Morris - was among the Pulitzer Prize finalists for local news in 2011 and reoriented the journalist's career to unearth other stories from the area's Jim Crow past.
Mr. Nelson's work began to resonate far from the Mississippi Delta. The PBS news show 'Frontline' featured the documentary 'American Reckoning' in 2022 largely based on Mr. Nelson's probe into the 1967 killing of Wharlest Jackson Sr., a civil rights leader in Natchez, Miss., about 10 miles from Ferriday. A bomb planted in Jackson's car exploded when he flicked on his turn signal on his way home.
Best-selling author Greg Iles also said Mr. Nelson's work inspired some of the historical overlays in his novels, including 'Natchez Burning' (2014), about attempts to revisit a murder case in the 1960s and the dark legacy of KKK violence and corruption. A character in the book, journalist Henry Sexton, was loosely based on Mr. Nelson.
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'Stanley Nelson raised his pen against the sword of hatred, and as a result, one bend of the Mississippi River looks a lot less dark than it once did. Stanley Nelson gives me hope for the South, and for America,' Iles wrote in the foreword to Mr. Nelson's 2016 book 'Devils Walking: Ku Klux Klan Murders Along the Mississippi River in the 1960s,' about the hate group's suspected links to the Morris murder and other unresolved cases.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Morris's death, officials in Ferriday held a memorial in December in his memory. Mr. Nelson stood alongside Morris's granddaughter and great-granddaughter.
In his articles, Mr. Nelson built an extensive argument on why the KKK unleashed its fury on Morris. He interviewed people recounting how the success of Morris's businesses angered local racists. Others speculated that Morris may have been targeted for refusing demands by a corrupt sheriff's deputy seeking free shoe repairs.
A wreath was laid at the former site of Morris's one-story shop, now just the outline of a foundation. Mr. Nelson often remarked how he had no idea of what happened there until the FBI cold case report reached his desk.
'All my life, I passed by this shop,' he told an NPR correspondent in 2011, 'and didn't know it.'
Frank Morris, fourth from left and wearing a tie and visor, in front of his shoe repair shop in Ferriday, La., circa 1964.
Photo Courtesy Concordia Sentinel and the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, 2010
Stanley Skylar Nelson was born in Ferriday on Sept. 18, 1955, and raised in Cash Bayou near the village of Sicily Island. His father was a plumber and tended a family farm, and his mother was a nurse.
He received a bachelor's degree in journalism from Louisiana Tech University in 1977 and soon joined the Concordia Sentinel, named for the surrounding Concordia Parish. He edited stories and covered local government and agencies overseeing issues such as Mississippi River water management.
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As he turned to the civil-rights-era files, Mr. Nelson was adept at trying to minimize risks as he confronted people for information on long-dormant cases.
Many former Klansmen, he noted, lived in rural areas, and they were rarely happy to see a journalist at their door. Mr. Nelson sent handwritten letters specifying the date and time he planned to show up in hopes of lessening the chance of violence. 'I just wanted to find out who did it,' he told The New York Times.
He also found that family members of former KKK members were willing to spill private details. Children, he said, would sometimes see an opportunity to get back at abusive fathers. 'If your daddy was going out at night, burning buildings down, kidnapping and torturing people, doing everything bad that you can think of, they probably weren't too nice at home, either,' Mr. Nelson said in a 2018 speech. 'And they weren't.'
Mr. Nelson's second book, 'Klan of Devils' (2021), detailed the Klan attack on two Black sheriff's deputies in Louisiana in 1965. The suspect, a World War II veteran, was detained, and the FBI was called in. The case collapsed when witnesses refused to give statements.
Those killings - as well as the deadly attacks on Morris and Jackson - remain unresolved. Mr. Nelson retired in 2023 as editor of the
Concordia Sentinel. He also taught classes at Louisiana State University's school of communications, which started a cold case project inspired by Mr. Nelson's investigations.
His marriage to Nancy Burnham ended in divorce, but they later reunited as live-in companions. Mr. Nelson died at their home in DeRidder, she said, but no cause was given. Survivors include two children and four grandchildren.
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In 'Devils Walking,' Mr. Nelson said his motivation to begin reopening the bloodshed of the civil rights era was partly as penance for his failure to know the full sweep of local history when he was younger.
'Every community and every citizen bear the ultimate responsibility of justice, including me and including you,' he wrote. 'After half a century, who is to blame for the future of justice in cases like this? We all are.'