Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

FERRIDAY, La. — Longtime Concordia Sentinel editor, author and historian Stanley Nelson passed away on Thursday at the age of 69, the Sentinel reports.

Nelson is best known for his reports on criminal injustices and cold cases from the civil rights era. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting in 2011 to unravel a 1964 murder case in Ferriday and related unsolved murders.

Vidalia Mayor Buz Craft said Nelson was a well-read journalist and was respected by all who read his work.

“He knew a wealth of information about local history and I think a lot of people took that for granted for a long time. He has been missed from the pages of the Sentinel,” Craft said. “I’d met him years ago when I was in the banking business and he was a good guy and always a joy to be around. He’ll be missed.”

A Ferriday-native, Nelson graduated in 1977 from Louisiana Tech with a degree in Journalism and has been part of the Sentinel family until his retirement in December 2021.

He has dedicated the past two decades to telling stories of murder victims of the Ku Klux Klan and has written hundreds of accounts of those killings and published two books, “Devils Walking: Ku Klux Klan Murders Along the Mississippi River in the 1960s” (2016) and “Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff” (2021).

In the foreword of “Devils Walking,” New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles, an admirer of Nelson’s, described him as “a humble hero,” and dedicated his book, “Natchez Burning,” to Nelson.

“Stanley Nelson took up a group of civil rights cases so cold they could have chilled an industrial deep freeze and made them so hot that the FBI felt the burn,” Iles wrote. “That’s right – the chief law enforcement agency of the federal government had to scramble to play catch-up behind this one-man investigative juggernaut.”  Iles concluded: “Stanley Nelson raised his pen against the sword of hatred, and as a result, one bend of the Mississippi River looks a lot less dark than it once did. Stanley Nelson gives me hope for the South, and for America.”

Nelson’s work has been featured in national publications, online media outlets and documentaries. In February, he was featured in PBS Frontline’s “American Reckoning,” Season 2022 Episode 1, which aired Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. The documentary focused on the 1967 killing of Natchez NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson Sr.

Roscoe Barnes III, Cultural Heritage and Tourism Manager at Visit Natchez, said Nelson was a friend and mentor to him on the Civil Rights Movement in Natchez.

“Whenever I wrote about people and events in the Natchez movement, I looked to his writings and I consulted with him for his insight,” Barnes said. “He will be remembered not only for his many years as a reporter and editor at the Concordia Sentinel, but also for his groundbreaking investigative work on the cold cases of the civil rights era in the Mississippi-Louisiana region.”

He added, “Nelson was a man of conviction. He was bold, determined, and fearless in his reporting. I am personally convinced that his journalism, his books and his lectures have made an indelible mark on our area in such a profound way that his name will be remembered for generations to come.”

Denise Jackson Ford, daughter of Wharlest Jackson Sr., who was a civil rights activist and treasurer of the Natchez branch of the NAACP who was murdered by a car bomb, said Nelson was a good friend to her through his investigation of her father’s killing.

When she received letters stating that her father’s case would be closed a second time, still unsolved, Nelson did not give up, she said.

“If it weren’t for Stanley Nelson and his dedication and research on my father’s case, we still would not know who it was who set the bomb in his truck,” Ford said. “Even though it was not solved legally, it brought closure to us. With his passing, a piece of my heart has left. My condolences go out to his family. He was a true hero.”