In December 1964, Frank Morris’s shoe shop was set ablaze in the middle of the night. Still inside at the time, Morris was severely injured and died four days later at a nearby hospital in Ferriday, La. Like many southern crimes against blacks in the 1960s -- an era of racial strife dominated by criminal activities by the Ku Klux Klan -- the incident went unsolved, despite an FBI investigation in the 1960s.
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 Klan “wrecking crew,” that is said by sources Nelson has interviewed to be responsible for burning down the shop.
Nelson is a member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, a group of journalists, filmmakers, law schools and other organizations created in 2008 by Paperny Films in Canada and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif. With the help of FBI documents Nelson received through Freedom of Information requests and from the Syracuse College of Law Cold Case Justice Initiative, and extensive interviews with those who knew Morris or about the case, he was able to piece together the story, ultimately naming a person suspected of being involved: Arthur Leonard Spencer, 71, of Rayville, La.
Nelson published the story this morning outlining the the allegations against Spencer. In an interview with Nelson, Spencer denies those allegations. So far no charges have been filed. The Department of Justice and the FBI say they are conducting ongoing investigations into the Morris case.
“We are actively, as we speak... involved in this investigation... our effort here, as it is everywhere, is to try and uncover the truth. We know that [Morris] was the victim of a brutal murder and we want to figure out who did it and we want to figure out why they did it,” Tom Perez, assistant attorney general who runs civil rights division of the Department of Justice, said in an interview last week.
Cynthia Deitle, the chief of the FBI’s civil rights unit sent the Concordia Sentinel newspaper an email with this response:
“I am convinced that there are individuals alive today who know who killed Mr. Morris. If they can summon the moral fortitude and courage to contact the FBI and tell us what they know, they will be heroes who will change history.” Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
