![]() ![]() Nelson came face to face with uncomfortable issues, such as how communities bury their inconvenient history and why many African Americans have such a deep-seated mistrust of law enforcement. The real reason Morris was killed? He had stood up to notorious Concordia Parish Sheriff's deputy Frank DeLaughter, refusing to keep repairing DeLaughter's shoes for free.ĭeLaughter was a member of the Silver Dollar Group who was convicted in the 1970s of beating a prisoner and helping to run a brothel and gambling house. Those, Nelson said, were typical of the cover stories Klan members circulated to justify their violence. Rumors had it Morris was targeted because he flirted with white women who patronized his shop, or he allowed white women to have sex with black men in the back. Nelson kept pressing, helped by students and staff at the Syracuse College of Law and LSU's Manship School of Mass Communications. He didn't know what the editor of a small, weekly paper could do that the FBI couldn't, but he promised not to let the story die. Whether that meant killing someone, burning their home, torture - it didn't matter."Īfter Nelson's initial story, Morris' granddaughter contacted him. "They strictly believed themselves to be acting on behalf of the South and the world they loved, and they would do anything to protect it. "They believed the traditional Klans were not doing enough to stop integration and the Civil Rights movement," Nelson said. He found it was the work of the Silver Dollar Group, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, who believed the Klan had become ineffective. Nelson wrote more than 200 stories on the Morris case alone. "Just because something happened 50 years ago doesn't mean it isn't affecting someone today, because I can tell you it is. "Justice is important every day," Nelson said. He shared his experiences with members of the Alexandria Rotary Club Tuesday. He's written a book, been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and inspired a best-selling fiction trilogy. His reporting helped to identify the men behind the attack and the secret history of one of the most violent white supremacist groups in the South. In the years since then, Nelson has spent countless hours researching Morris and other cold cases from that time. Little did he know where it would lead him. Nelson first heard Morris' name when it showed up on a Justice Department list of victims from unsolved cases in the Civil Rights era in 2007. "I started thinking, why have people in the community like me never heard of Frank Morris? Why didn't we care? And how many more like him were there?" "I had never heard of Frank Morris, even though I was born in Ferriday and grew up in Concordia Parish," said Stanley Nelson, editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a weekly newspaper based in Ferriday. Maybe just as bad, it was all but ignored around Ferriday. He died a few days later, after telling FBI agents the details of the attack, but never identifying his assailants.įor decades, the horrific crime went unsolved. "Get back in that shop, n-," he was threatened.īy the time Morris made it out the back of the shop, the few scraps of clothes remaining on him were smoldering and his body was covered in third-degree burns. Morris tried to escape through the front door, but found the shotgun pointed at his face. MORE: Who owns Alexandria's Confederate monument? | From the archives: desegregation in Rapides Parish The gasoline, and the chemicals Morris used in shoe repair, turned the small building into an inferno. He tried to tell them to stop what they were doing, when one of the men threw a lit match. ![]() When he investigated, he found two white men standing outside. Morris, a black man who had owned the business for nearly three decades, was sleeping in a room at the back of the shop when the front window was broken. 10, 1964, Frank Morris awoke to the sound of breaking glass in his shoe shop in Ferriday. Watch Video: Lynching In The South To Be Memorialized In Alabama ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |