When the FBI released a list of unsolved murders from the civil rights era, journalist Stanley Nelson said he read the names and felt shame. It was 2007, and Nelson was the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Ferriday, La. He even wrote the newspaper's history column. But he didn't know the names of the Black men murdered in his backyard.
Nelson, who died June 5 after surgery at the age of 69, spent the rest of his life reporting and writing about those cases.
On that list of unsolved murders, the name that bothered Nelson the most was Frank Morris. In darkness, on December 10, 1964, a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen showed up with guns and gasoline and burned Morris alive in his shoe repair store. Morris, hospitalized with severe burns, died four days later.
For white people, like Nelson, in Ferriday – a little Louisiana town across the Mississippi River from Natchez, Miss. – it was forgotten history.
Journalists writing about civil rights era cold cases often went to visit Nelson in Ferriday. He'd take them first to the spot where Morris' one-story shop had stood on the main road through town. Just the outline of the store's foundation in concrete and bricks remained.
"All my life, I ed by this shop – and didn't know it," Nelson said in a 2011 interview.
In January, 2011, after months of reporting, Nelson published a story in the Concordia Sentinel linking a man to Morris' death.
The man denied it, but Nelson had good sources – the man's ex-wife and a son. Some of Nelson's best sources on his many cold-case investigations turned out to be the spouses and children who'd been abused by those Klansmen, too.
Nelson explained why in a 2018 speech in Louisiana: "I always tell people about Klansmen, particularly the roughest ones: 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. And they weren't."
Nelson's reporting linked the Morris killing to the shoe repairman's dispute with a sheriff's deputy over the cost to repair the man's boots, and resentment by some white residents that Morris was a successful businessman and a role model for the town's Black community.
After Nelson's reporting, a grand jury was convened but the man he named was never charged and died two years later. Nelson grew frustrated with the U.S. Department of Justice, which put out the original list of unsolved murders and then, he felt, never seriously investigated.
Nelson was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011 for his "courageous and determined efforts" to tell the story of Morris' death.
Nelson wrote two books about his investigations. Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s revealed how a Klan group called the Silver Dollar Group used terror and killings to try to stop integration and the advance of civil rights. Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff detailed the Klan attack on two Black sheriff's deputies.
And Nelson was the model for a hero in another book – Natchez Burning, a novel by Mississippi writer Greg Iles.
"You grow up white in the South, and if you pay attention, sooner or later you realize you've been living with blinders on," Iles wrote this week in a tribute to Nelson, crediting his father and Nelson for helping him better understand racial inequities. "Stanley Nelson had the most finely calibrated sense of right and wrong of any man I have ever known.".
Sometimes, people confused Nelson with another distinguished Stanley Nelson, the Black documentary filmmaker who also covers civil rights history. A magazine once needed to run a correction when, over an interview of the newspaper editor, it ran a drawing of the prize-winning filmmaker, instead.
Nelson, who retired in 2023 as editor of the newspaper, continued to teach his reporting methods to journalism students at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication. The journalism school runs a cold case project built around Nelson's work to investigate unsolved murders from the civil rights era.
Christopher Drew, a long-time investigative journalist, runs the project.
"The students were always mesmerized" when Nelson talked to them about needing to track down former Klan and interview them, Drew said. "He'd say they all lived at a dead end of a dirt road with barbed wire fences and signs on the gate that said no tresing, tresers will be shot. And the students were on the edge of their seats listening to how he got these people to talk."
Nelson was low-key and talked easily to people who were his neighbors, coming back to sources for years to learn key details about past killings.
In an interview shortly before he died, Nelson said he was excited because he thought he'd found the spot where Joseph Edwards, the man in another unsolved murder, was buried. It was the result of years of reporting, a tip from someone who heard Nelson speak who stumbled across the burial site while hunting and then finding someone who heard the killer's confession at the end of his life.
"People always ask me: What do you do this for?" Nelson said.
"These type of incidents, unsolved murders, the lack of justice, last in communities forever. And if you don't address them, and if you don't figure out what happened, and if you don't figure out why it happened, these things will live on forever. And we will never really understand what your community was like."
There's a small group of journalists who do this work, which gets harder as time es, memories cloud and witnesses die.
Among them is Jerry Mitchell, whose reporting led to several convictions of Klansmen, including Bryan De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
Mitchell says he and Nelson reported on the old cases "because you've got to have the truth to have justice. And even if you can't have justice, you can still have truth."
It was hard at times for Nelson, Mitchell says, because he was also the editor of a small town newspaper. Nelson's publisher ed him but many subscribers didn't want that history told.
"The thing about Stanley, he didn't write one or two stories and then move on," says Mitchell. "He continued to write about it. It began to change, over time, hearts and minds. By the end of the day you have this city honoring Frank Morris."
Last December, on the 60th anniversary of the killing of Morris, the city of Ferriday acknowledged that difficult history and held a ceremony to honor him.
Among those in attendance with Nelson were the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Frank Morris.
NPR Investigations Correspondent Joseph Shapiro collaborated with Nelson on an investigation of one of the unsolved cases on the FBI's list, the death of John Queen in Fayette, Miss.
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