Stanley Nelson, a crusading small-town journalist with a passion for probing unsolved Ku Klux Klan murders, died on June 5 at his home in DeRidder, La. He was 69.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Tessa Nelson Granger. She did not specify a cause but said he had recently had surgery.
Mr. Nelson’s efforts to solve a particularly vicious Klan murder — the arson death of the Black owner of a shoe-repair shop in Ferriday, La., in 1964 — made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011; earned him the esteem of the small but ardent band of journalists dedicated to civil-rights-era cold cases; and were the inspiration for a central figure in the Mississippi writer Greg Iles’s best-selling novel “Natchez Burning” (2014).
“In his quest for truth, Stanley led me through the secret pasts of our home states — Mississippi and Louisiana — among men who lived in the shadow of crimes that had no statute of limitations,” Mr. Iles wrote in The Natchez Democrat last week.
Natchez, Miss., is just across the river from Ferriday, where Mr. Nelson was the editor of The Concordia Sentinel, a weekly with a three-person newsroom and a circulation of 5,000. The Louisiana town, around 200 miles northwest of New Orleans with a population of about 3,000, is best known as the hometown of the rock ’n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis and his preacher cousin, Jimmy Swaggart.
During the 1960s, Ferriday was also known for its virulent Klan presence and for being a rough sawmill town — “the meanest” in Louisiana, the New Orleans civil rights attorney Jack Martzell once said. It was a place civil rights workers feared.
On the night of Dec. 10, 1964, Frank Morris was inside his shoe repair shop in Ferriday when Klansmen, angry that he had refused to work for no fee on the boots of a racist sheriff’s deputy, doused the store with gasoline and set it alight. Mr. Morris died of his burns four days later.
A New York Times reporter, John Herbers, who was there two weeks later, wrote, “Frank Morris’s sewing machines are exposed to the sky and remain upright in the blackened ruins of the building, a stark reminder of the man who repaired the shoes of everyone in town, white and Negro.”
Nobody was ever charged. The outline of the foundations of Mr. Morris’s store on Ferriday’s main street was one of the few reminders of what had happened.
In 2007, the F.B.I. published a list of unsolved civil rights cases. Mr. Nelson saw Mr. Morris’s name on it and decided to pursue the story. The cold-case list “was like a spark,” his daughter recalled in an interview.
After he published his first article on the case — the first time in years that it had been written about — Mr. Morris’s granddaughter Rosa Williams called him.
“It meant a lot to me,” Ms. Williams recalled in an interview on Monday. “He was a person that really cared to try to find out what had happened.”
Some 150 articles, innumerable threats, a burglary of his office and many subscription cancellations later, Mr. Nelson published the most significant article of his career: He wrote that Arthur Leonard Spencer, a 71-year-old truck driver who lived an hour north of Ferriday, had been one of the Klansmen involved in the murder of Mr. Morris.
He had worked nights and weekends on the story. All the while he attended to the duties of a small-town reporter — covering school boards, town and parish councils, and Rotary clubs.
“When it came time to talk with the trucker, I wanted to do it the way I always do: walk up to the door with my notebook in my back pocket and my pen in my shirt pocket, and just explain who I am and try to talk with them,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview with the journalist Hank Klibanoff for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Mr. Spencer denied involvement in the murder, but his son and other relatives said they had heard him discuss it. When Mr. Nelson and his colleagues found him at his farm, he maintained his denial: “Absolutely not. Never heard of the man. Didn’t even know about that,” he said.
Mr. Nelson later wrote: “Thinking about Morris, I wondered how in God’s name one human could purposely set another on fire. What was going through Morris’s mind when he faced his attackers? What led those men to Morris’s shop?” When Mr. Morris tried to escape, one of the Klansmen had forced him back into the burning store at gunpoint.
A grand jury was convened in 2011, but Mr. Spencer was never charged. He died two years later.
Mr. Nelson had found his life’s work, though, and would go on to look into other notorious murders of the civil rights era, including those of JoEd Edwards in Concordia Parish, La., in 1964; Oneal Moore in Washington Parish, La., in 1965; Wharlest Jackson in Natchez in 1967; and others.
He wrote two books on the subject: “Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s” (2016) and “Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff” (2021).
“Stanley’s gift for people was his most powerful tool,” Mr. Iles wrote last week. “A natural investigator, with his empathetic face, his slow, melodic voice, and his near-tangible integrity, he would sit across from some former Klansman and draw out secrets a killer had never intended to tell a priest, much less a journalist.”
Stanley Skylar Nelson was born on Sept. 18, 1955, in Ferriday, the son of Jesse Nelson Jr., a farmer and plumber, and Emma Sanson Nelson, a nurse. He grew up partly in the rural community of Cash Bayou, in Catahoula Parish, and went to high school in the village of Sicily Island.
He had an early curiosity about the environment he was growing up in. “As a kid I would watch on TV, and I would see how many people were being killed by the Klan, and that was of interest to me, and I wanted to know why they were doing that,” he told a local Rotary Club in 2020.
He attended Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, where he was editor of the school newspaper, and graduated in 1977 with a degree in journalism.
He worked at weekly papers in Hammond and Jonesville and became editor of The Concordia Sentinel in 2006. He retired in 2023.
Beginning in 2019, he taught at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication as a part of its Cold Case Project, where he was an important mentor for the students, according to the former New York Times reporter Christopher Drew, a professor there.
Along with his daughter, Mr. Nelson is survived by a son, Nick; a brother, Mark; four grandchildren; and his companion, Nancy Burnham, to whom he had previously been married. His three marriages ended in divorce.
Patiently, methodically, spurred on by his quiet outrage at the fate of Mr. Morris, Mr. Nelson had pursued his work.
“I didn’t know if this thing would ever have a conclusion, or if I’d find anybody alive who knew anything, so I kind of educated readers as I educated myself,” Mr. Nelson told Mr. Klibanoff. “I took it week by week and reported what I learned that week, so that it would open people’s eyes as it did mine and help jar memories and maybe compel people to come forward.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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