The William Moore, Frank Morris and Wharlest Jackson murders are among more than 100 civil rights-era ''cold cases'' being probed by the FBI in an exercise as much about exorcising the demons of failed justice - and of corrupt and complicit local authorities in several southern states - as it is about unearthing fresh evidence against suspects.
Stories
Frank Morris Case
May 06, 2010
James Buford Goss was calm by the time he talked to Vidalia's police chief at the old Concordia Parish Courthouse on the morning of Friday, July 10, 1964. He had been furious the night before. Goss told the chief that Joseph "Joe-Ed" Edwards, a black porter at the Shamrock Motel, had assaulted his close friend Iona Perry, a 22-year-old white woman who worked as a registration clerk at the...
April 24, 2010
Some 60 family members of people who lost their lives during the civil rights movement are in Atlanta this weekend in the first gathering of its kind to explore what organizers say are the “legal, historical and societal impact” of the killings.
Frank Morris Case
April 22, 2010
J.D. Richardson found himself in the crossfire of Klansmen and the Mafia over the operation of the Morville Lounge in 1965 and 1966. By late 1966 he felt he had lost control of his own property, was being pressured by the FBI for information on lounge operations, complained that his life had been threatened on several occasions and reported that arsonists may have been responsible for the...
Frank Morris Case
April 01, 2010
Two daughters of a man who was a Concordia Parish Klansman in the mid-1960s have different views of their father, one of the FBI's top informants in the 1964 murder of Ferriday shoe shop owner Frank Morris and other Klan violence.
Frank Morris Case
March 25, 2010
Frank Morris and James White Sr. were best friends, so close that some folks believed the two were related though they were not. White, now dead, had experienced confrontations with Klansmen during the months preceding Morris' murder, his children recall. Once, when a Klansman opened fire on White in his own front yard, his children say White fired back and felt certain that he wounded one of...
March 19, 2010
Charles Moore was a news photographer who became a photojournalist and died a visual journalist — not because he changed, but because the technology, nomenclature and just about everything else involving his profession did.
Frank Morris Case
March 11, 2010
The night of the arson of Frank Morris' shoe shop in 1964 was a busy one for 17-year-old Delbert Matthews, who recalls working alone at the Coast Service Station near the outskirts of Ferriday. The station was just two blocks south of the shoe shop along U.S. Hwy. 84. Matthews remembers several specific things about the night -- a young black man hiding under the desk at the service station,...
Frank Morris Case
March 04, 2010
A short time after Frank Morris died as a result of the arson of his shoe shop, two black men were run out of Ferriday because the Klan and sheriff's deputies feared they could identify the men who killed Morris.
March 01, 2010
Convicted Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen says there wasn't enough legal evidence to imprison him for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers and that God is going to get whoever helped put him away. Reporter Admin co-reported this story.