America lost a gentle giant in journalism when Stanley Nelson, who investigated some of the nation’s most notorious racially motivated slayings in Mississippi and Louisiana, died unexpectedly last week. He was 69.
CBC reporter David Ridgen, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and podcast host, worked with the reporter for years. “Stanley Nelson is the best of us,” he said. “A doer. Not a reminiscer. A teller. Not someone to leave anyone behind. A brotherly guy who you’d trust anything to.”
In 2008, Ridgen and I joined forces with Nelson and fellow journalists John Fleming, Ben Greenberg, Pete Nicks, Robert Rosenthal, Hank Klibanoff, Ronnie Agnew, Melvin Claxton, Peter Klein and others to form the Civil Rights Cold Cases Project. Our dream was to create a documentary that would capture our continuing work on these cases.
The big picture documentary never happened, but many other projects emerged for radio, print and film. Nelson never missed a beat, writing hundreds of stories for the 5,000-circulation Concordia Sentinel, where he served as editor.
In 2012, he became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his stories on the 1964 killing of Frank Morris in Ferriday, Louisiana, by Klansmen who belonged to the violent wing, the “Silver Dollar Group.”
Best-selling author Greg Iles depicted the journalist as the character Henry Sexton in his novel, “Natchez Burning.” Nelson chuckled to me about the portrayal, saying his alter ego lived a much more adventurous life: “He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy — that’s something I don’t know a damn thing about.”
Iles said the most important writing he’s ever done “would not exist were it not for the inspiration and selfless collaboration of Stanley Nelson. I never knew another man who always did the right thing regardless of fear or favor, not motivated by hope for profit or fame. Stanley eventually gained a wide reputation for excellence, but not because he sought it. Because he earned it. And God knows the world is a better place because he lived and worked in it.”
First case: Frank Morris
On the last day of February in 2007, Nelson heard the name of Frank Morris for the first time. He learned that the Justice Department would be taking a second look at the 1964 killing of Morris.
That surprised Nelson because he thought he knew almost everything about this small town and had never heard the name.
He reached out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which shared about 150 pages of redacted FBI reports on the Morris case, and he wrote his first article.
He didn’t see how he could advance the story anymore until he received a call from Morris’ granddaughter, Rosa Williams, and began to learn more about the man and the killing.
On a cold December morning in 1964, the 51-year-old Morris was asleep in the back of his shoe repair store when he heard glass breaking. He bolted to the front of the store and saw one man pouring gasoline and another holding a shotgun, who yelled, “Get back in there, n—–!”
By the time Morris escaped, his feet were bleeding, and nearly all his clothing had been burned from his body. He survived long enough to tell FBI agents that he didn’t know his attackers, but friends wondered if he had been afraid to say.
Stanley Nelson is seen here near the spot where Klansmen killed farmworker Ben Chester White in an effort to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to Mississippi. Credit: Courtesy of David Rigden‘His curiosity never waned’
In 2011, Nelson reported that family members of Arthur Leonard Spencer said he had confessed to them years earlier, but Spencer denied that claim to Nelson. A federal grand jury met on the matter, but no one was ever arrested.
Klibanoff, who works with Emory University students on civil rights cold cases and hosts the Peabody-winning podcast “Buried Truths,” helped Nelson edit those stories. “We were going over them till 9, 10 or 11 at night, because we both had full-time jobs,” he recalled. “Stanley was busy covering police juries, the city council and other things during the day.”
Nelson remained rock solid in his reporting, Klibanoff said. “I admired him immensely, and his curiosity never waned.”
The journalist moved beyond the Morris killing to document other violence by the Silver Dollar Group, depicted as the “Double Eagles” in “Natchez Burning.” The group, which included some law enforcement officers, was suspected of planting bombs in the vehicles of two NAACP leaders in Natchez, George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. Metcalfe was injured in the blast, and Jackson was killed.
Nelson also reported on possible involvement of the Silver Dollar Group in the 1964 disappearance of a 21-year-old Black man, Joseph Edwards. His white and green Buick was found abandoned near a local bowling alley in Vidalia, Louisiana.
Ridgen said Nelson has been telling him for years that he believed he had found where Edwards’ body was buried.
When Ridgen worked with Nelson, he would stay with him on his Cash Bayou farm near the Tensas River. At night, they would drink together, Nelson sipping a glass of Old Charter.
“I shared and pored over thousands of pages of FBI files with him over the years. Confronted Klansmen, and visited the families so awfully affected by them,” he said. “Stanley’s passion was writing and local reporting but also investigation and uncovering the history that surrounded him and that he grew up with.”
He collected old investigative documents, FBI interviews and local police reports. “Saw them as treasures that contained just the beginnings of the actual story,” Ridgen said. “He reported all the ends of the story, all the shades of gray. Always with an eye for the restorative power of the work.”
Ridgen believes that Nelson’s work, which includes two books on the Klan, should be required reading for Americans and the rest of the world. He “will be missed dearly by the state and country,” Ridgen said. “I wish we could travel those roads together forever.”
In 2009, the Louisiana State University Cold Case Project began helping Nelson with his research, and a decade later, Nelson began sharing tips and techniques with students on how he worked on these civil rights cases.
Christopher Drew leads LSU’s Manship School’s experiential journalism curriculum, which includes the project. Under Nelson’s tutelage, “our students proved that Robert Fuller, a businessman who later became a top Klan leader, killed four of his Black workers in 1960, not in self-defense, as the local authorities had allowed him to claim, but in an ambush following a dispute over back pay,” Drew said.
In 2022, a series by LSU students on the 1972 killings of two students at Southern University in Baton Rouge won a national award from Investigative Reporters and Editors as the best investigative series by students at a large university.
“Stanley was always low-key, humble and determined to hear people out –– the model of what a reporter should be,” Drew said. “But the students were always leaning forward in their seats when he talked about how he got old Klan leaders to talk. ‘Most of them (Klansmen) lived on dirt roads at dead ends,’ he’d say, ‘with barbed wire fences and signs on the gate saying, ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot.’ Sometimes he’d send them letters saying he’d be coming at a certain date and time to mitigate those odds.
“But his heroism did not just come at those moments. It was his courage, the students could see, to dig up the dark facts in these communities for the sake of justice–and to take personal risks to hear what the suspects and perpetrators had to say–that make him such an exceptional journalist.”
LSU students plan to continue Nelson’s work on the Edwards’ case with a forensics team, Drew said. “We know where Stanley thinks the body might be, and we will continue to pursue that story.”Many of the stories written by Nelson and LSU students can be found at lsucoldcaseproject.com.
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