BATON ROUGE—Gov. John Bel Edwards apologized Wednesday on behalf of the state to former Southern University protest leaders and the families of two Southern students who were killed by an unidentified sheriff’s deputy 50 years ago.
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At 12:35 p.m. on Nov. 17, 1972, the phone rang in the office of acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray in Washington.
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Shunda Wallace was 3 months old when her father, Leonard Brown, and another student, Denver Smith, were shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy on Southern University’s campus in Baton Rouge in November 1972.
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The knock on the door came at 4 a.m.
Rickey Hill and Herget Harris, two protest leaders at Southern University, peeked out and saw sheriff’s deputies outside their apartment.
Josephine and Denver Smith took different approaches to protests at Southern University in the fall of 1972. Josephine skipped class for meetings, while her older brother stayed away and warned her to be careful.
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ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Not a day has passed during the past 62 years that Willie Gibson hasn’t thought of Louisiana and the horrific shootings in Monroe that left four of his friends and co-workers dead and a fifth seriously wounded.
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For decades, Louisiana was one of the worst states for HIV transmission, and in 2015, healthcare leaders created a plan to try to end the epidemic.
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Leland and Sonny Boyd say some relatives and old friends wonder why they are speaking publicly about their father’s involvement in the Ku Klux Klan in 1960s Louisiana.
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When Leland Boyd woke up in the middle of the night as a child, he’d sometimes find his father Earcel in the bathroom, scrubbing his hands over and over.
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Though 57 years have passed, Leland Boyd still can’t forget the smell of burnt human flesh.
In December 1964, Leland, then 12, stood in the doorway of a hospital room, where Frank Morris, a 51-year-old Black man from Ferriday, Louisiana, lay in critical condition after two men had torched his shoe shop.
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Aditya Shah was a junior at Hightstown High School in New Jersey in 2015 when he and his AP Government and Politics classmates began studying cold cases involving Ku Klux Klan murders in the South.
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Six decades after a Louisiana man’s disappearance and presumed slaying, his family is still looking for answers and a body to bury.
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