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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 Louisiana. But he didn't know the names of the Black men who had been murdered in his backyard. Nelson spent the rest of his life reporting and writing obsessively about those cases. The journalist was 69 when he died on June 5 after surgery. NPR investigative correspondent Joseph Shapiro worked with Nelson. He has this appreciation.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: On that list of unsolved murders, the name that bothered Stanley Nelson the most was Frank Morris. For white people like Nelson in Ferriday, Louisiana, a little town across the Mississippi River from Natchez, it was forgotten history that in darkness on December 10, 1964, a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen showed up with guns and gasoline and murdered Morris - burned alive in his shoe repair store on the main road through town.
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STANLEY NELSON: All of my life, I passed by this shop and didn't know it.
SHAPIRO: In 2011, Nelson took me to what was left - just a faint outline in concrete and bricks. After months of reporting, Nelson had just published a story, naming the last living member of the gang that Nelson said killed Frank Morris. That man denied it, but Nelson had good sources, the man's ex-wife and a son.
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NELSON: 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.
SHAPIRO: 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 wrote two books and article after article. He taught his methods to students at LSU. In the days before he died, Nelson told me he was excited because he thought he'd found the spot where Joseph Edwards, the man in another unsolved murder, was buried.
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NELSON: People always ask me, what do you do this for?
SHAPIRO: In 2018, Nelson talked about his work at a Rotary Club meeting in Louisiana.
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NELSON: These type of instance - unsolved murders - the lack of justice lasts 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.
SHAPIRO: There's a small group of journalists who do this work, which gets harder as time passes, memories cloud, witnesses die. Jerry Mitchell's reporting led to several convictions, including the killer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Mitchell says it was hard at times for Nelson because he was also the editor of a small-town newspaper. Many subscribers didn't want that history told.
JERRY MITCHELL: The thing about Stanley, he didn't just write one or two stories and then move on. He continued to write about it. It began to change, over time, hearts and minds. By the end of the day, you have the city honoring Frank Morris.
SHAPIRO: Last December, on the 60th anniversary of the killing of Frank Morris, the city of Ferriday acknowledged that difficult history and held a ceremony to honor him. Morris' granddaughter and great-granddaughter attended with Stanley Nelson as witnesses to truth and to justice.
Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
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