Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By Greg Iles

Special to the Democrat

The South lost a quiet crusader last Thursday. Not a fictional super-hero from the cineplex, but a genuine hero, a knight-errant for truth and justice. And I did not sleep well.

I’ve spent my recent years fighting cancer, and I’ve had occasion to reflect on my own work. On Thursday, I realized that the most important writing I’ve ever done, and may ever do, would not exist without the inspiration and selfless collaboration of journalist Stanley Nelson.

You grow up white in the South, and if you pay attention, sooner or later you realize you’ve been living with blinders on. That you live on land stained by brutal beatings, rapes, and senseless murders—most unsolved, many never even the subject of real investigations. In the worst cases, the perpetrators were themselves members of law enforcement.

Those blinders come off—if ever—in different ways.

The first part of that process for me came at the hands of my father, Dr. Jerry Iles, who as a physician treated civil rights victims, and became the basis for Dr. Tom Cage in my Natchez Burning novels.

But my broader education came under the patient tutelage of reporter Stanley Nelson, himself just discovering the scope and depth of evil involved in the activities of the murderous Silver Dollar Group in Concordia Parish. It was Stanley’s brave and tireless work that led me to use him as the model for Henry Sexton, the heroic journalist of my trilogy.

There’s never been a dearth of high-profile civil rights assassinations during mid-20th-century America, but those weren’t the cases Stanley Nelson focused on. Stanley became a tireless advocate for the common victim with the unknown name, for the corpse no one else was working. Stanley chose those cases because those victims had been murdered in his parish, his piece of Louisiana, his bend in the river. And as it turned out, Concordia Parish was one of the most corrupt and violent parishes in the state.

What made Stanley different from other journalists is that, once he discovered this, he did not simply slide the files into a crowded drawer, or turn away to some less dangerous or more popular story. He simply began working the facts, just as he would had the victim been Miss Louisiana or the governor in Baton Rouge. And laboring virtually alone from his tiny office near the Concordia levee, he would one day nearly win the Pulitzer Prize over a Boston team larger than the staff off his entire newspaper.

The question is, why?

At one level, the answer seems simple. Stanley Nelson had the most finely calibrated sense of right and wrong of any man I have ever known. His judgment on these matters was sharp as a sword’s edge. Stanley understood human frailty and moral ambiguity, but in the end, wrong was wrong and had to be made right. In all my years, I’ve never known another man who always did the right thing regardless of fear or favor, not motivated by hope for profit or fame. In the deep uncertain soil around the Mississippi River, Stanley’s sense of fairness and justice was bedrock. As someone close to him put it, Stanley was “raised right” by his parents. His convictions went bone deep, and when fate or circumstance demanded, he did what most of us never do—he acted on them.

In his quest for truth, Stanley led me through the secret pasts of our home states–Mississippi and Louisiana—among men who lived in the shadow of crimes that had no statute of limitations. We went into crackerbox churches late and night across the river and spoke to men—some over 100 years old—who as Deacons of Defense had lain in ditches with rifles and shotguns to defend their families and houses of worship. We drove down sandy river roads and plotted angles of fire on curves where gutless backshooters once lay in wait for black men they envied or hated and riddled their cars with bullets. But most of all we roamed that long levee across from Natchez, trying to work out exactly what had happened to young Jo Ed Edwards on the night he was murdered by a monstrous sociopath with a badge. It was Stanley’s hope to prove his theory of that case by locating Jo Ed’s corpse with ground-penetrating radar—something he only got to try once that I know of.

But Stanley’s gift for people was his most powerful tool. A natural investigator, with his empathetic face, his slow, melodic voice, and his near-tangible integrity, he would sit across from some former Klansman and draw out secrets a killer had never intended to tell a priest, much less a journalist. Stanley believed that some of these perpetrators dwelt with a profound guilt over the violence they’d committed when younger. More than a few revealed being victims of physical and sexual abuse as children, and Stanley believed there was a tie between this history and susceptibility to racial violence later in life. Many confided harrowing details of their crimes, describing homemade weapons of nails and boards, and their horrific effects on victims. Others spoke of a Klan torture house where one young victim had been “skinned alive.”

Stanley was struck by the fact that all Klan chapters  (and many “wrecking crews”) had a preacher or other “man of the cloth” among them, and how often that man had been the chief instigator of violence—using it to punish whites as well as to terrorize blacks.

It particularly galled Stanley whenever he discovered that perpetrators of violence had been law enforcement officers, as in the case of shoeshop owner Frank Morris, a victim for whom Stanley felt deep empathy. Stanley believed this to be the most profound betrayal of the American compact. That men paid to protect the public would be used as soldiers against certain citizens because of skin color deeply angered him. Stanley knew that made solving any of these crimes far more difficult than they should have been.

One of the most unpleasant parts of Stanley’s life was when he would be harangued in restaurants or grocery stores about his work: “Why you dragging up all them old killings?” somebody would yell. “You just making things worse!”

But Stanley knew different. He had spent hours with the families. We live in an age of self-proclaimed victims, but here is a truth real victims know: grief does not fade over one generation. The fallout of murder ripples down decades, and it affects us all. The full answer to the challenge of “dragging up the past” lies in Stanley’s writing, but I can give the answer he gave me when we worked together. Each of those terrible murders carried a dual cost: first, the human loss to the victim’s family, which is no different than your own; but second, to the community as a whole. For justice in those cases represents the only real hope that we will all, sooner or later, get along. If we do not have equal treatment before the bar of justice, we have nothing. And in the glacier-cold cases Stanley Nelson worked, justice had often barely been attempted, much less achieved. So Stanley took up the gauntlet, and no drunk or loudmouth at a gas station was going to stop him.

This past year, Stanley had relocated to DeRidder, Louisiana to be near his family, and to focus on his grandchildren. But he still rose each day at five to brew his coffee and work patiently at his files, thousands of documents that formed a vast, priceless resource to writers like me, and to award-winning Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen, who of Stanley told me yesterday: “…[Stanley was] one of the only Southern reporters I know walking the talk.  . . [his] generous work is required reading and viewing not only by the people of the United States, but the rest of the world as well. And he liked his glass of Old Charter at the end of the day. I wish we could go again to the site Stanley had found where he believed Jo Ed Edwards was buried by members of the White Knights.”

When Stanley died, sitting with his morning coffee, he was writing a feature on Haney’s Big House, the vibrant Ferriday juke joint from the mid-1940s until 1966, where young Jerry Lee Lewis first heard Ray Charles and Little Richard plant the roots of rock ‘n roll. But Stanley’s true calling was never “local color.” He was still working some of the darkest cold cases from “back in the day.” Today we lay him to rest, with the honor he deserved, his name known far beyond the parish where he lived.

 

So when you drive out to Lake Concordia or St. John this summer to ski, picture Stanley down among the cypress knees with his notebook, patiently searching for the body of a murdered young black man who spent too much time at Vidalia’s Shamrock Motel, the center of Ku Klux Klan operations for a time. In my quest to plumb the deepest truths about the South, I can no longer pick up the phone late at night and call my friend who knows more about race murder than Google or Siri or any library ever will. He has moved on to join Frank Morris and those other casualties for whom he worked so hard in life. But Lord I wish I could. I’d sleep better at night knowing Stanley Nelson was on the case.

 

Greg Iles is a New York Times best-selling novelist from Natchez