MCIR LIVE ‘Hate: What America Faces’. A novelist, a journalist and a lawyer examine the forms hate can take in America
For the last MCIR LIVE event of 2021, MCIR founder and host Jerry Mitchell talked to three guests who have made exploring experiences of hate in the Deep South the centerpiece of their work in new and surprising ways.
MCIR LIVE heard from best-selling novelist Greg Iles in his home recording studio: he is a longtime rock musician who plays with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a charity rock band that formed in 1992. The band’s members have always been well-known writers. Along with Iles, current members include novelists Amy Tan, Stephen King and Scott Turow. A long list of genuine rock stars like Bruce Springsteen have sat in with the band. The band has recorded an album, Hard Listening, a phrase band member Roy Blount Jr. coined to describe their musical style.
Iles extended an invitation to the Remainders’ next live gig in Nantucket next summer. Meanwhile, watch their hilarious video, co-produced by Iles in his personal recording studio, on his home page.
Natchez Burning, one of Iles’ novels, is part of a trilogy set in his hometown of Natchez. It includes a character based on MCIR LIVE’s second guest, Stanley Nelson, editor and investigative reporter for the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, Louisiana. Iles based his novel in part on Nelson’s investigations of the Silver Dollar Group.
On MCIR LIVE, Nelson defined the Silver Dollar Group as “a Klan within a Klan,” a particularly violent subset of the Ku Klux Klan. Members, Nelson said, were “super racist” and dedicated to stopping the civil rights movement, especially school integration. The name came from the founder’s habit of giving each new recruit a silver dollar minted in their birth year. Although Iles’ character based on Nelson in Natchez Burning is killed, Nelson himself is flourishing, working with students from the LSU Cold Case Project.
Nelson began working on cold cases in 2007, when the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was releasing FBI files from crimes of the civil rights era and a list of unsolved cases. He is the author of a new nonfiction book, Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy, about the only known instance in which the Ku Klux Klan went after two Black law enforcement officers in 1965. In Bogalusa, the Klan had tried to have a member elected sheriff in order to oust civil rights workers. After failing, they murdered a Black deputy and wounded his partner.
While researching the Klan, Nelson came across the case of Frank Morris, a Black shoe store owner in Ferriday. His business had existed since the late 1930s, and had served a Black and White clientele. In late 1964, Morris’ store was set on fire; he was trapped inside and killed, probably for standing up to a White deputy who tried to leave without paying for two pairs of shoes. At that time, “a Black man can’t talk to a White man that way,” Nelson explained.
Nelson said he grew up near Morris’ shop but had never heard of him or his death before. In 2011, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series of about 150 articles on Morris and his murder. Over four years, Nelson conducted more than 300 interviews with witnesses, law enforcement, and Morris’ friends, family and employees, and reviewed thousands of pages of police reports and FBI documents. Once Nelson named a suspect, a grand jury convened less than a month later to reopen the case.
Iles said he read Nelson’s reporting and got to know him. Iles said he found Nelson’s work “incredibly inspiring” because, unlike cases like Medgar Evers and other public figures in civil rights who were assassinated, Nelson wrote about “ordinary Black folk caught up, brutalized, murdered in the course of their daily lives.” They died for “the crime of being Black.” Like Nelson, Iles was stunned that “I grew up in the midst of all this, but I never knew any of these people,” even though his physician father treated Black patients. Iles rephrased “race-based hatred” as “White fear.”
While researching Natchez history, Iles said he learned about a massacre of more than 40 Black enslaved men that took place at Second Creek, just outside the city, in 1861, the first year of the Civil War. Outnumbered by Black residents, Whites feared a slave rebellion. “The judiciary was the arm of White fear,” Iles explained, as it was in the 1960s when law enforcement could be Klan members or turned a blind eye to Klan crimes.
The cold case from 1861 probably never will be reopened, except in the pages of Iles’ new novel, coming out this year. “It’s strange to me,” Iles said, “in these days of questioning whose story is told and by whom, when I first learned about these stories [of cold cases], they were being told by middle-aged White guys like Jerry and Stanley. Perhaps that’s changing now.”
Jill Collen Jefferson will change that. A young Black lawyer based in Laurel, Jefferson said she has found at least eight modern-day lynchings in Mississippi, dating from 2000. She suspects there are “hundreds more.” Indeed, at an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society early in 2019, speaker Sherrilyn Ifill, former executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talked about modern-day lynchings of young Black men taking place not just in Mississippi, but all over in the U.S. In particular, Ifill referred to a 2014 North Carolina case parallel to Jefferson’s, a 17-year old Black man with a White girlfriend. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, which describes how lynching affected entire communities, Blacks and Whites.
Jefferson is working to reopen the case of 21-year-old Willie Andrew Jones Jr.. In 2018, he was found hanging from a tree about 50 feet from the Scott County home of the parents of his White girlfriend, Alexis Rankin, 19, mother of his 3-month-old baby.
“Within 40 minutes of arriving on the scene,” Jefferson said, “police told Jones’ mother that it had been suicide.” Cases like Jones’ usually are called suicides, even though Jefferson said his feet were on the ground. Iles asked if district attorneys could be helpful, but Jefferson said they usually resist anything except suicide. “These cases have to be investigated independently” of law enforcement, she said.
The family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, alleging Rankin’s stepfather, Harold O’Bryant Jr. killed Jones or failed to keep Jones from taking his own life. O’Bryant didn’t respond to the lawsuit. In April 2021, a judge awarded Jones’ family approximately $11.4 million.
The panel closed with Jefferson’s conclusion that “investigative reporters are important partners for attorneys investigating these cases.” Nelson remarked about “how fragile” the stories of cold cases are: His students interviewed a 95-year old Black woman about her two brothers, who were killed in 1960 by their White employer in Louisiana. The next day, she was admitted to the hospital and died. Nelson, Iles and Mitchell all bemoaned the court records mouldering away in courthouse basements. They are in danger of “turning to dust” unless more civil rights lawyers, investigative reporters or journalism students take time to search through them.
Ann Marie Cunningham is MCIR's Reporter in Residence. She holds a 2021 grant from the Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund at the Center for Health Journalism at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.