Archive | January, 2011

Save the Blacks

This is brilliant coverage of the fight of Turkey Creek, Mississippi African Americans to save their community. Turkey Creek was founded by freed slaves in 1866. Their descendants have been fighting dispossession by developers and environmental racism for years. I interviewed Wyatt Cenac’s guide, Derrick Evans, in January 2006, 6 months after Hurricane Katrina devastated his community with [...]

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Charter Schools: What Would Dr. King Say?

As we mark another day of commemoration for the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we may wonder what Dr. King would make of our current state of educational affairs, wherein education is declared by reformers, with no apparent irony, as the civil rights issue for a generation of children whose schools are more [...]

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Frank Morris Murder Suspect Confronted by Local Reporter and Cold Case Film Crew

On Wednesday, after Stanley Nelson published information implicating Rayville, La. truck driver Leonard Spencer in the 1964 murder of Black shoe shop owner Frank Morris in Ferriday, La., local reporter Samantha Boatman from KNOE News confronted Spencer at a Rayville machine shop where he works. With her was a Civil Rights Cold Case Project film [...]

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Investigations Force Feds to Revisit Murders of Civil Rights Era

I’m covering the developments in the Stanley Nelson’s Frank Morris murder investigation at Colorlines today: On Dec. 10, 1964, a 51-year-old, black shoe-shop owner named Frank Morris was burned alive inside his store in Ferriday, La. Morris miraculously survived severe burns to all of the skin on his body, was hospitalized and lived four more [...]

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Living Suspect Identified in 1964 Murder of Frank Morris

Today my colleague Stanley Nelson has published a remarkable article implicating a truck driver living in Rayville, Louisiana in the 1964 arson murder of Frank Morris, a Black shoe shop owner in Ferriday, Louisiana. Two people say a Richland Parish truck driver who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan told them he participated [...]

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