Photo by David Ridgen, courtesy of Christopher Drew.
Stanley Nelson
Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, can’t say much about the first time he met Stanley Nelson.
He knows he must have been in the room with the unassuming editor of the Concordia Sentinel in 2008 during a select gathering of journalists who covered Civil Rights-era cold cases, brought together by the Center for Investigative Reporting—but he can’t remember much else.
“There were a lot of outsized personalities, brassy storytellers, healthy egos—all of whom had proved that they belonged in this pantheon,” Klibanoff recalled at an October memorial for Nelson. “I remember all of them, except for one.” Nelson, from his quiet perch at the weekly newspaper in Ferriday, Louisiana, was easy to miss, and put on no airs about his work. “He was the most inconspicuous person in the room,” Klibanoff added. “And he was about to become the most auspicious member of the group.”
At the time, Nelson was waist-deep in the reporting weeds, churning out story after story he had pushed to the front page of the Sentinel for the better part of a year. In those early days, few outside of the small, north Louisiana town where Nelson made his mark knew the contents of his coverage, which was marked by bold headlines about the long-forgotten, racially-motivated murder of 51-year-old Frank Morris in 1964.
“The thing that I remember most was how calm Stanley was, his coolheadedness.” —Joseph Shapiro, NPR News Investigations correspondent
Members of the Ku Klux Klan had targeted Morris, a Black businessman who owned a shoe repair shop in Ferriday; they doused his store with gasoline and set it ablaze while he was inside. Through Nelson’s reporting on Morris, which began in 2007, he was able to track down previously unreported details of the incident, even identifying a suspect based on accounts from the man’s family. Over the course of four years, Nelson would write 150 stories about Klan murders.
For his investigation into Morris’s death, Nelson—who died unexpectedly this past June at the age of 69—would be recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011. Over the years, after receiving this honor, Nelson continued to dredge up the brutal history of KKK murders in the Ferriday-Natchez corridor, bringing some small comfort to families who had all but given up hope of learning any details about how their loved ones perished. In cases long abandoned by the FBI, Nelson found his calling.
This past October, Klibanoff—accompanied by a slate of award-winning journalists, professors, and victims’ families—spoke at a memorial for Nelson hosted by the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications in the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge. There, they shared stories and memories of the “gentle giant” of an editor who confronted the dark past of his hometown with dogged determination and precise moral clarity—aiming to uncover the truth, no matter the cost. His life’s work has spoken for him in death: despite occupying an almost unknown place in the wider world—a part of the state relatively obscure even by Louisiana’s standards—Nelson merited obituaries in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on NPR.
“Most of us have a moment in life when something happens. And we could either step up, or we can ignore the call,” said Christopher Drew, a journalism professor at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication and the head of the program’s Cold Case project. “That was [Stanley’s] moment. And we’re all gathered here because of the inspiring way that he responded.”
Photo courtesy of the Concordia Sentinel and the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, 2010. coldcases.org.
Frank Morris, whose racially-motivated murder in 1964 was the subject of journalist Stanley Nelson's dedicated reportage, is pictured fourth from the left, wearing a visor. He is pictured standing in front of his shoe store in Ferriday, Louisiana.
Joseph Shapiro, today an NPR News Investigations correspondent, was in the Sentinel’s newsroom the day Nelson published his 2011 bombshell report citing a suspected Klansman’s family who had implicated him in Morris’s death.
“The thing that I remember most was how calm Stanley was, his coolheadedness,” Shapiro recalled at the memorial. “You know, the last minutes before you publish a story or a paper in a newsroom—those are chaotic moments. You're making last minute checks and fixes, changes. And at that point … it was chaos.” As it turns out, that day a newspaper staff member had been driving to work when she saw a house on fire; she grabbed her camera and captured the image of firemen carrying an elderly woman from the building. Suddenly, the Sentinel’s small staff was scrambling to write the story, ripping up the front page to move the fire above the fold. This was now the day’s lead.
Nelson’s investigative report, which had previously been splashed across the top with a big display, was pushed down the page. “And no journalist likes that,” Shapiro noted. “You’ve done a big story, you’ve done all this work. And this is a big story [in] a small paper that was going to get national attention. So, that hurts. But Stanley was totally fine. He was totally cool about all this, and in fact, he was the one that was calming everyone else.”
“Much of the land that we live on here in the South has been stained by racial massacres, assassinations, rapes, and senseless murders. And as Stanley put it, ‘The blood of our brothers and sisters cries out from the ground.’ And that's why he kept going.” —Jerry Mitchell, and founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
Besides navigating the last-minute restructuring of the paper that day, Nelson was also acting as a sounding board for his main sources for the story, including the accused Klansman’s ex-wife and his son. Nelson spent several hours on the phone with the son, who was terrified because he had named his father in such a damning report. According to Shapiro, Nelson comforted him by quoting Scripture, from the Book of Proverbs: “A man who was laden with the guilt of human blood will be a fugitive until death; let no one support him.”
To his colleagues, this was typical Nelson—an unflappable man who took great pains to prioritize the humanity of his sources and the victims he depicted. His investigation into Morris’s death not only unearthed horrific details of the murder, but also retold the lost story of a man beloved by his community.
Nelson portrayed Morris compassionately as a Ferriday fixture, a man who treated clientele of all races with respect and kindness. He worked to extend the lives of the community’s shoes during a time when families were cash-strapped. Morris was fond of children, who he allowed to come watch him behind the counter while he undertook his repairs. It was this sense of professionalism and dignity in his work that appears to have led, in part, to his death—along with the resentment of white community members regarding his business success. When a Concordia Parish sheriff’s deputy bullied Morris into shining his shoes and keeping them in good shape for free, Morris ultimately harnessed the courage to remind him he should be paid fairly for his labor. Soon after this interaction, his store was attacked.
[Read more about the LSU Cold Case Project, here.]
“Much of the land that we live on here in the South has been stained by racial massacres, assassinations, rapes, and senseless murders,” remarked Jerry Mitchell, a veteran reporter, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, at the October event. “And as Stanley put it, ‘The blood of our brothers and sisters cries out from the ground.’ And that's why he kept going.”
Last year, sixty years after Morris’s killing, the town of Ferriday acknowledged his death in a December ceremony. Nelson was there, along with Morris’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.
Photo by David Paperny, courtesy of Christopher Drew.
Stanley Nelson, when he was editor of "The Concordia Sentinel."
Over the course of his reporting career covering KKK cold cases, Nelson would also delve into the murder of NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson in Natchez, Mississippi, and the 1964 disappearance of Joseph Edwards, a 21-year-old Black man, whose Buick was found abandoned in Vidalia, Louisiana, among others. These killings were linked to the “Silver Dollar Group,” a particularly violent wing of the Klan.
Nelson would write two books about his investigations: Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s (2016), and Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff (2021). In every instance, Nelson uplifted the families impacted, providing, with a resolute gentleness, answers they had waited on for decades. According to Mitchell, Nelson actually listened to the families—a kindness many had not experienced during the original investigations into the murders.
Tiptoeing into such delicate, potentially incendiary subject matter did not deter Nelson from the hard job of hunting down sources and convincing them to speak with him. His colleagues described it as a “slow cook process” indicative of a master of source development. Rather than adopting a take-no-prisoners bulldog approach, he nurtured personal relationships, treating people with fairness and building a genuine reputation for honest and evenhanded reporting.
“He did it quietly, steadily, with total integrity. Even when going through a confrontational interview, Stanley approached people slowly, face-to-face, hands out of his pockets, and notebook closed,” Klibanoff said. “He was without guile, without pretense, or any thought of an ambush interview. His goal was to avoid a ‘one and done’ interview. He was always confident he could walk away with an invitation to return and continue that conversation with someone who had no reason in the world to talk with him, because it was just going to end up in the newspaper.”
“Stanley did this work, I know, in the face of death threats. He did this work in the face of criticism from people he met at the grocery store and encountered it in town. [They’d say], ‘Why are you digging up the past?’ And Stanley's favorite reply was, ‘What would you do if it was one of your loved ones? What would you want to do?’”— Jerry Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
In 2009, Nelson would bring this type of guidance to the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication. The school partnered with Nelson to investigate Civil Rights-era cold cases, which were part of an FBI initiative to re-examine more than one hundred unsolved crimes from the time period, most involving the killings or disappearance of African Americans. Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), students have, over the years, obtained the previously confidential files. Along with LSU Professor Emeritus Jay Shelledy and, more recently, Christopher Drew, Nelson guided class after class of eager young journalism students through the work of picking apart and reporting on these complex cases. Today, many of these former students populate newsrooms across the state and country, bringing with them a deeper understanding of what strong investigative reporting can actually produce.
At the October memorial, Nelson’s family announced they would donate the entirety of his cold case files to the Manship School—as he would have wanted.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Nelson’s career is that he remained in the Ferriday community, rather than jetting off to work at national outlets and pursue a different kind of journalistic fame—which would have certainly been accessible to him. He continued to write these potentially inflammatory stories while also managing the rather mundane responsibilities of a weekly local paper: covering the police jury, school board, and the rest of it. Through it all, he calmly faced the people who criticized him, the residents who wished he would stop digging up their collective skeletons.
“Stanley did this work, I know, in the face of death threats,” Mitchell said. “He did this work in the face of criticism from people he met at the grocery store and encountered it in town. [They’d say], ‘Why are you digging up the past?’ And Stanley's favorite reply was, ‘What would you do if it was one of your loved ones? What would you want to do?’ And that usually ended the discussion in terms of criticism.”
Nelson knew, perhaps better than anyone in Ferriday, that the truth had to be uncovered for justice to be served, and to prevent a shameful history from repeating itself. lsucoldcaseproject.com.
