Stories
Four and a half years after the FBI announced it would reopen and investigate more than 100 cases of unsolved civil rights-era killings in the South, the bureau has yet to initiate charges in any of the cases. It has instead closed all but 39 of those cases without recommending prosecution.
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A portion of a finger found in the charred rubble of Frank Morris' Ferriday shoe shop in 1964 appears to have belonged to Morris, according to newly-obtained FBI documents.
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Recy Taylor was abducted and raped at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville, Ala., on Sept. 3, 1944. Her attack, one of uncounted numbers on black women throughout the Jim Crow era in the South, sparked a national movement for justice and an international outcry, but justice never came. Now, decades later, there may finally be some solace for Taylor, 91, as Alabama state Rep. Dexter...
Forty-six years after a white gang beat to death Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb in Selma, Ala., the FBI is investigating the case.
In Concordia Parish, La., a grand jury has begun hearing testimony about an unsolved murder from the civil rights era. That comes less than one month after Stanley Nelson, the editor of the weekly Concordia Sentinel, first named a suspect in the death of Frank Morris, a respected shoe repair owner. And it was Nelson who first reported the grand jury had begun calling witnesses in the 46-year-...
The Concordia Parish Grand Jury began hearing testimony Tuesday concerning the 1964 murder of Ferriday shoe shop owner Frank Morris.
Witnesses were seen entering the courthouse to appear before the panel which is looking into the 46-year-old murder.
Neither federal nor local authorities would comment on the Grand Jury.
The U.S. Attorney's office in Louisiana's Western...
But there were other victims, like Frank Morris, who were targeted for reasons that are less overtly political, and perhaps even more insidious. These are stories in which there seem to be an accumulation of hostilities towards a black male that reach an unpredictable breaking point. Three main things animate the hostilities towards this different class of victim, often occurring in...
In December 1964, Frank Morris' shoe shop was set ablaze. He died four days later. Like many Southern crimes against blacks in the 1960s, the incident went unsolved. Now, 46 years later, Stanley Nelson, the editor of the Concordia Sentinel newspaper, says he has found information that may implicate a man as a member of a Ku Klux Klan "wrecking crew," which is said by sources Nelson has...
In 1964, Frank Morris suffered fatal burns from an arson.The FBI launched two investigations into Morris's death in the 1960s, but the case was never solved. In 2007, newspaper editor Stanley Nelson picked up the case. His reporting led him to suspect Arthur Leonard Spencer, a Richland Parish truck driver and former member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Beatrice Hamilton told Detective Oscar Coley the pickup truck was green, the license plate was yellow and the man who took her son away the night he was killed was white. Coley did not believe her.
