One says because he was the only shoe repair shop in town and because families then could generally afford only a single pair of shoes, both blacks and whites patronized his shop. So why was Frank Morris killed? A couple of theories exist and both are plausible for the time. Only a few months earlier, the bodies of three civil rights workers had been discovered buried in a levee at Philadelphia, Mississippi (Neshoba County), and Attorney General Robert Kennedy directed the FBI’s efforts to solving those murders. The Justice Department, however, was too preoccupied with three earlier civil rights murders to actively pursue Morris’s killers. Morris lived long enough to talk to the FBI but told agents he didn’t know his attackers. By the time he exited the rear of the building, his feet were bleeding, his hair was on fire and the only remnants of clothing remaining were the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts and the shoulder straps of his undershirt. “He bolted to the front of the store and saw two men, one pouring gasoline on the outside of the building and the other holding a shotgun,” Mitchell wrote.Īs a lit match dropped into the gasoline instantly turned the little shop into an inferno, the man behind the shotgun ordered Morris back into the building. 10, 1964, exactly 50 years ago today, Frank Morris, a black shoe repair shopkeeper, was asleep on a cot in the back of his store when he heard glass breaking.

Jerry Mitchell, writing for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, wrote last April that shortly after midnight on Dec. In 1964, prodigal son Jerry lee, whose marriage to his 13-year-old cousin caused a scandal that temporarily derailed his promising rock and roll career, had begun an improbable comeback by re-branding himself as an equally adept country music artist with songs like How’s My Ex Treating You?, What Made Milwaukee Famous Has Made a Loser Out of Me and She Even Work Me up to Say Goodbye. now runs the family newspapers in Ferriday, West Monroe, and Winnsboro).īut make no mistake, Stanley Nelson has put his own indelible mark on the Sentinel. He could not have chosen a better mentor in the person of the late Sam Hanna, a legendary name in Louisiana newspaper lore (his son Sam Jr. Nelson began his newspaper career at the Hammond Daily Star before moving back home to work at the Sentinel, the quintessential hometown paper. That was just about the time the late John Hays, who would become a pretty fair investigative reporter in his own right, was getting cranked up with his controversial Morning Paper in Ruston. Nelson, a native of nearby Sicily Island, is a 1977 graduate of Wiley Hilburn’s journalism program at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. Claire Chennault-quite a résumé for a town of fewer than 3500 residents (3,453 to be precise).Ĭlayton is another small town in the mostly farming-reliant parish and is best known as the home of the family cemetery of Jerry Lee Lewis, who son is buried there. Vidalia (not the home of the onion by the same name-that’s Vidalia, Georgia) is the parish (county) seat and Ferriday sits a little more inland in the heart of the rich delta that provides a living for the area’s soybean and cotton farmers.įerriday is the home of Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart, Mickey Gilley, network television news anchor Howard K. įor those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Louisiana, Concordia Parish lies directly across the river from historic Natchez, Mississippi.

Every journalism student in America should be making a pilgrimage to Ferriday, Louisiana, on this date to sit at the feet of and learn from Stanley Nelson, 59-year-old Editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a small weekly newspaper (circulation about 5,000) that serves up mostly local news, wedding announcements, obituaries and sports to the residents of Concordia Parish.

Concordia sentinel newspaper