![]() How could one human hate another so much that he set him on fire? The nightmare he witnessed began to recur in his mind as he dug deeper into the Morris killing. Workers tried desperately to rescue her and her parents, but the flames had proved too intense. Fire had engulfed the family inside.Ī little girl had stood on the back seat, trying to escape. Nelson could hear her pain and thought of the time in high school when he was riding on a school bus back from a football game and saw smoke pouring from a smashed Volkswagen Beetle. She thanked him for his articles and told him she had learned more from him than anything before about her grandfather's death. She shared the story of how she had been 12 when he died. Within two hours, he had written his first story, believing that would be his last.īut more information came his way and so did a telephone call from Morris' granddaughter, Rosa Williams. The Justice Department had released it on a list of victims' names from unpunished killings during the civil rights era. 28, 2007, Nelson heard Morris' name for the first time. Morris survived long enough to speak to the FBI, telling agents he didn't know his attackers, but friends wondered if he had been afraid to say. Morris tried to escape out the front door - only to run into the shotgun and the man behind it yelling, "Get back in there, n-!"īy the time Morris made it out the back, his feet were bleeding, his hair was on fire, and all that remained of his clothing were the waistband of his boxer shorts and the shoulder straps of his undershirt. Watch Video: Real-Life KKK Killing That Inspired Greg Iles' New NovelĪ flaming match fell into the gasoline, and the building exploded into an inferno. 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. The shoe shop man was asleep on a cot in the back of his store when he heard glass breaking just after midnight on Dec. "The rumor that he was flirting with white women simply wasn't true. The 51-year-old Morris brought the repaired shoes outside to his white, female customers, Nelson said. ![]() "Frank Morris was the one who fixed them." "A lot of families could only afford a single pair of shoes for their kids," Nelson said. People from both sides of Louisiana Avenue, the dividing line between the black and white communities here, came to Morris' shoe shop. The town was still reeling from the Depression when Morris opened a shoe shop in the late 1930s. Nelson was born in this town of 3,500 with its notorious past and struggling present.īy the time the Civil War began in 1861, Concordia Parish had 13,000 slaves and 1,000 white residents, most of them overseers and their families at plantations.Ī half-century later, Ferriday looked to sawmills and railroads for economic salvation. "He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy - that's something I don't know a damn thing about." "He has had a much more adventurous life than me," he said. ![]() Nelson is flattered Iles would base a character on him, but confesses he shares little in common with his alter ego, journalist Henry Sexton. ![]() More than 200 stories later, the 58-year-old editor of The Concordia Sentinel has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is depicted fictionally in Greg Iles' new novel, "Natchez Burning." – Stanley Nelson had no intention of writing more than one story about the 1964 killing of Frank Morris when he first learned of it in 2007.īut the past has a way of invading the present, and Nelson found himself drawn into a mystery he felt compelled to solve. ![]()
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