Paper names ex-Klansman in 1964 civil rights murder
Early on the morning of December 10, 1964, Frank Morris ran out of his shoe store, his clothes and skin on fire.
People who saw him in the hospital afterward said the African-American businessman was so badly burned they didn't recognize him.
"Only the bottom of his feet weren't burned. He was horrible to look at," said the Rev. Robert Lee Jr., now 96.
Morris survived for four days before dying -- long enough to tell the FBI that two men had broken into his store while he slept, smashed windows, doused the place in gasoline and told him: "Get back in there, nigger."
Locals in Ferriday, the small Louisiana town where Morris lived and died, remember him as having both white and black customers, which was rare for black businesses in the segregated South in the days before civil rights. He would come out of his store onto the sidewalk so white women customers wouldn't have to go inside alone.
No one has ever been charged with killing him. But Wednesday, more than 46 years after his death at age 51, a local newspaper has named two men it believes were part of a Ku Klux Klan "wrecking crew" that torched his store and murdered him....
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People who saw him in the hospital afterward said the African-American businessman was so badly burned they didn't recognize him.
"Only the bottom of his feet weren't burned. He was horrible to look at," said the Rev. Robert Lee Jr., now 96.
Morris survived for four days before dying -- long enough to tell the FBI that two men had broken into his store while he slept, smashed windows, doused the place in gasoline and told him: "Get back in there, nigger."
Locals in Ferriday, the small Louisiana town where Morris lived and died, remember him as having both white and black customers, which was rare for black businesses in the segregated South in the days before civil rights. He would come out of his store onto the sidewalk so white women customers wouldn't have to go inside alone.
No one has ever been charged with killing him. But Wednesday, more than 46 years after his death at age 51, a local newspaper has named two men it believes were part of a Ku Klux Klan "wrecking crew" that torched his store and murdered him....