Devils Walking

by Stanley Nelson

  One by one they came: black friends, white acquaintances, and relatives. Morris’s father, Sullivan, who had taught his son the shoe repair business, could not for the life of him understand the cruelty. Many believed Morris was so traumatized that he failed to fully understand the severity of his injuries.28 Morris had been given a grain of morphine the first day and a half grain the next before being wheeled to the operating room for a tracheotomy. A smoky-smelling mucous was regularly sucked from his throat.

  Father Thompson arrived for his second visit shortly after Morris’s surgery. With him was Father John Gayer, who ministered to Ferriday’s white Catholic congregation at St. Patrick’s and had previously headed up the now-inactive local NAACP. Thompson sensed Morris was near death. His eyes darted around the room, but he seemed unable to focus. Like everyone else, the priests wanted to know who had attacked him. Thompson asked Morris to move his hand or a finger if the priests correctly named the persons responsible. Gayer tried to reassure him, and each time a name was called out, the two priests studied Morris’s hands, but they never moved. A short time after the priests left, Morris lapsed into a coma.29

  Inside his topcoat, Thompson was carrying a Kodak thirty-five-millimeter camera. He snapped four shots of Morris to preserve a record for the world of what hate had done to a decent man. Thompson was inspired by the power of the 1955 photograph of the tortured body of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who had been killed by two white men in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at one of the men’s wives. Unlike Emmett Till, however, Frank Morris was still alive.30 And unlike in the Till case, the pictures of Morris were not published. Thompson kept them secret for fifty years.

  Morris’s face appears childlike, swollen and charred, almost as if it’s covered with a mask. He is on his back, and his body is swollen, too, though much of it is hidden by a chrome frame onto which a sheet is laid to conceal his wounds from visitors. A black woman in a white dress rests her forearms on the chrome bed railing. (Her face is not in the picture; possibly it is Morris’s stepmother.31) He is hairless from head to toe, and his lips appear bleached. A Ferriday woman whose husband saw Morris after the fire reported that the Klan had “burned him white.”32

  Dr. Colvin could do nothing to save Morris and told him that he was going to die. Before Morris went into a coma, he urged Morris to tell someone, anyone, who had attacked him. “Just tell at least one person.” Repeatedly, Morris said he didn’t know the men. When Colvin arrived at the hospital a few minutes after Morris, he had observed bloody footprints leading from the parking lot to the emergency room. He never got over it.33

  Six years later, Colvin was one of five passengers to perish after a twin-engine Bonanza collided with a Cessna. The Cessna’s pilot, the lone survivor of the crash, was the notorious Klansman James Ford Seale of Franklin County, Mississippi, who was convicted in 2007 for the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Moore. Seale died in federal prison in 2011. Had he been convicted in 1964 following the murders, Dr. Colvin and those who died with him would have lived longer lives. Rumors followed in the wake of the crash. Did the Klan fear Morris had identified his killers in the presence of the doctor? Such is the trail of carnage when justice lags.34

  On the same day that Morris was attacked, Dr. Martin Luther King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. With the South on his mind, Dr. King told an international audience, “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.” Four days later, at 7:30 p.m., on Monday, December 14, 1964, Frank Morris died. Not once had he identified his attackers by name, even though every friend or acquaintance who visited him in the hospital walked away convinced that he knew his assailants. Agent Lancaster had pleaded with Morris to make an identification. “If he had told me, we would have gone after those sons of bitches,” Lancaster lamented in 2009.35

  ALMOST A HALF CENTURY LATER, King’s faith seemed renewed when new probes were launched into the murder of Frank Morris and others. In 2007, the Concordia Sentinel became part of that investigation, as would many others in the days to follow. The newspaper’s search would widen to include related murder cases across the river, as it flushed out old Klansmen from the flatlands of Louisiana and the hills and hollows of Mississippi. Aging and battle-scarred FBI agents—ignored by today’s bureau—shared their experiences and offered advice on how to finish the job they had begun so many years earlier. Elderly widows, black and white, voiced thoughts they couldn’t say out loud during segregation.

  It did not take long to figure out that the epicenter of Klan violence in the 1960s had been an area that stretched from Concordia Parish sixty miles eastward to Brookhaven and McComb, Mississippi. Concordia’s shoreline along the Mississippi River is seventy-five miles, the second longest in the state. Between the river and Interstate 55 are seven southwest Mississippi counties, including Jefferson, Adams, and Wilkinson, which border the river opposite Concordia. To their east are the counties of Franklin, Lincoln, Amite, and Pike. John Doar, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, had branded Ferriday an “outlaw country” in 1965 and urged civil rights workers to get out. This region of the nation, Doar advised, was still “part of the American frontier, riddled with bewildering rural patterns of secrecy and silence, almost designed to make the work of any investigative agency difficult, if not impossible.”36 After announcing its cold-case initiative to reinvestigate civil rights–era murders, no case drew more attention from the FBI than Morris’s. Cynthia Deitle, head of the bureau’s Civil Rights Cold Case Unit in 2011, called the arson murder “one of the most horrific and troubling” of all. She vowed, “We will solve this crime. The FBI will not rest until we uncover the truth.”37

  No one has prayed more for that truth than Father Thompson. The Concordia Sentinel in 2007 quoted a question that had lived in Thompson’s head since 1964. His two words became the theme of the newspaper’s multiyear investigation into the murder of Ferriday’s beloved shoe repairman: “Why Frank?”38

  2

  THE KINGPIN, BIG FRANK DELAW, AND THE KLAN

  IN 1964, WHEN THE Ku Klux Klan was at the peak of its power, the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office was the organization’s best friend. Noah Webster Cross had been sheriff for more than two decades. Some local people knew him as a man who told funny stories, cried at weddings and funerals, drove sick people to the hospital, and would give the shirt off his back to those in need. Yet the criminal underground thrived during his tenure. Cross let crime against poor people, especially African Americans, rage uncontrollably. For years, he watched without empathy or outrage as the vice interests beat and stole from the underclass that spent money in their lounges and roadhouses. He displayed no compassion for the women who worked as prostitutes in the underbelly of the parish’s long nights.

  While his supporters faithfully went to the polls every four years to vote for Cross, others felt fear and shame. Preachers tried to defeat him and failed. Trained law enforcement officers opposed him and lost. So disreputable was he that a federal judge in 1971 labeled Cross “an unfit man to hold office as Sheriff of any parish in this state, or any other public office for that matter.”1 When a federal prosecutor asked the sheriff why he didn’t enforce the laws against gambling and prostitution, Cross replied, “If you are in politics, you have got to overlook a lot if you are figuring on staying there a long time.”2 The unwritten custom, he said, was that if “you don’t get any kick about it you let it go.”3

  Even as a child, Cross lived for politics. The son of a railroad worker and farmer in the community of Monterey, located at the toe of a big bend in the Black River, Cross was born on October 3, 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Like most boys growing up in a rural backwoods community, he loved to hunt and fish. Concordia’s long history of lawlessness suited him fine—he was known as one of the biggest outlaws around. Everyone knew he killed deer out of season and fished illegally.
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  After graduating from Ferriday High School in 1925, Cross briefly attended Louisiana Tech in Ruston until he was suspended following a hazing incident. Standing an inch over six feet, he liked to drink whiskey and was not averse to fighting. Back at home, he was working as a truck driver when he threw his hat into the political ring in 1939, taking on Sheriff Eugene Campbell, who had held the office since Cross was born. Although Campbell pulled out a narrow victory, Cross believed the election was stolen. Rather than protest, though, the political novice counted the experience as a lesson learned. When Campbell died the next year, his widow was appointed to complete his term. Upon her death, Cross won the next election in 1940 and took office the following year.4 (Although he held the office for a long time, he would not realize his goal of serving longer than Campbell’s thirty-two years, the longest in Concordia’s history.)

  Enforcing the law was never a priority for Cross, but he was sometimes forced to act. He was shot in the foot when trying to stop a brawl at a bar known as the Bloody Bucket on the outskirts of Ferriday. When Cross was reelected in 1944, gambling and prostitution remained firmly entrenched. Four years later, as World War II veterans returned home, married, and looked toward building a family life, Cross lost his bid for a third term to James Hartwell Love, a teetotaler, former railroad worker, and wildlife and fisheries agent who campaigned on a platform of law and order. Love pointed out in his political ads that he was the “sober” candidate.5 One of Love’s first acts as sheriff was to put an end to a horrific ordeal involving four black youths who had been jailed for the murder of a black child in 1945. Studying the circumstances, Love learned that the boys had been accused of being in a gang of Ferriday hoodlums. Yet there appeared to be no evidence that such a gang existed or that the boys were involved in the child’s death. The four were released from the parish jail in 1949, and their cases dropped. At the time of their arrests, the oldest boy was thirteen. The youngest, age ten when arrested, was fourteen on his release; he had spent almost one-third of his life in jail. (A year later, Cross faced legal problems himself. He was indicted for the alleged misuse of public funds during his previous term of office, but the charges were never brought to trial.)6

  Sheriff Love also went after the vice interests, and by April 1951 the parish grand jury convened to investigate illegal gambling. The courtroom in Vidalia was packed when the grand jury reported that it was “evident that slot machines and other gambling devices are openly operated and run throughout” the parish and had been for a long time. The panel requested the devices be removed. Despite threats of political reprisal, Love dutifully gave notice to all gambling operators to shut down their operations. Gambling promoters complained that the parish couldn’t survive without the gambling industry. But the preachers disagreed. They said gambling offered the parish “a false premise that citizens . . . are not willing to pay just and fair taxes for essential governmental services, and that the present set-up gives gambling interests a disproportionate voice in the affairs of the government.” Concordia, they claimed, had “built up an undesirable reputation” as a community of “immoral and lawless people.”7

  CONCORDIA’S GAMBLING addiction, and the prostitution that came with it, was as old as the parish. These vices had traveled across the Mississippi from Natchez, the first settlement on the big river and the hub of European civilization in the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The city was born below the bluffs at a place known as under-the-hill. There, flatboatmen delivering goods from the Ohio River Valley drank, fought, and bought sex at the taverns and brothels that sprang up to meet the demand. Natchez under-the-hill was at times a violent, dangerous place to visit. When the Orleans Territory was established following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, gambling and prostitution jumped the river into the new parish of Concordia, whose name came from the word concord, meaning amity. The parish seat, Vidalia, was founded in 1798 by Captain José Vidal, who served the Spanish military administration in Natchez and later Concordia for three decades until the region became American. Ferriday was founded in 1903 as a terminal for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and local sawmills employed hundreds of men and manufactured lumber for sales across the country. Located on an old plantation that bordered Lake Concordia, the rough-and-tumble town was known for the vices that made Natchez under-the-hill famous.8

  Slot machines arrived during Gov. Huey Long’s administration in the 1930s and were everywhere—in grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants. Ferriday was said to be the only town in the United States with a slot machine in the post office. There were fights most every weekday and throughout the weekend. Doctors took turns patching up the survivors. A black woman, Rosie Hester, the town’s most successful madam, kept her black and white ladies so busy that she operated from more than one location. “With its bad name,” longtime grocer Guy Serio recalled, “a lot of people came to Ferriday just to tear the place up . . . They’d fight over being drunk, over women or over something personal like their wives, things like that.” They even fought over dogs. Kick a man’s favorite deerhound, and “you might just as well kick him.”9

  Profiting from the violent madness, Cross began to fill his pockets with protection money in the years after his first election. Following his defeat in 1948, he was determined to regain the sheriff’s office during a decade in which the Louisiana State Police launched an aggressive and somewhat successful campaign to eradicate gambling and prostitution. Borrowing lines from two gospel hymns, Cross reminded voters that although “Love lifted me” in 1948, it was time in 1952 to return “to the old rugged Cross.” He addressed the vice issue by pointing out he was a firm believer that every person deserved the right “to enjoy certain personal pleasures.”10

  As Sheriff Love and the churches learned, fighting gambling interests meant fighting not only Cross but also the political leadership of state, including the organization formed by the late governor Huey Long and his younger brother, Earl. Before his assassination in 1935, Huey Long had made friends with New York mobster Frank Costello, who soon took over the slot machine racket in New Orleans and eventually vice operations throughout the state. The mob helped the Longs by financing their political campaigns. In the late 1930s, Costello tapped Tunisian-born Sicilian Calogero Minacore, better known as Carlos Marcello, to run Louisiana operations. By the 1950s, Marcello controlled casinos and brothels in the Crescent City and throughout southern Louisiana. His empire included strip clubs, bookies, restaurants, bars, jukebox companies, and a coin-operated vending and pinball machine company that also provided slot machines.11

  According to a memo from the FBI’s division office to Director J. Edgar Hoover, the mob had learned by 1939 that “the sheriff of the parish is generally conceded to be the political leader and in control of the political situation,” while “gambling and other vice is controlled . . . by local interests.”12 The mob used this knowledge to expand beyond New Orleans, and many Louisiana politicians welcomed Marcello with open arms. A member of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission told Life magazine in 1967 that “in Chicago, people were generally on one side of the fence or the other—honest or crooked. But in Louisiana, there is no fence.”13

  During the 1952 campaign, Cross learned that gambling operators were upset that they couldn’t open on Sundays because of the “blue laws,” common in the country, that prohibited businesses from operating on the Sabbath. Quietly, in the dark back rooms of the bars and roadhouses, Cross confided to the local representatives of the underworld—even as the parish grand jury was taking a stance against gambling—that if they wanted to operate 24-7, they better get behind “the old rugged Cross.” He also advised them to register their transient employees and customers to vote.14

  In the runoff, Cross beat Love by 230 votes. He vowed to himself never to suffer defeat at the polls again, a pledge he never broke. For insurance, he brought in a man who would become his closest confidant and friend—Judsen Lee “Blackie” Drane—a tall, dark-haired, wir
y gambler who dressed in expensive jeans and cowboy boots and, like Cross, occasionally displayed a violent temper. A lounge owner who was also a pinball and slot machine distributor well connected to the Marcello mob, Drane provided two important services for the sheriff. First, the con men and gamblers he employed were quickly registered to vote. Because so many of these transients didn’t live in the parish, they almost always used absentee ballots that Cross or his deputies filled out. Secondly, when Louisiana paper ballots were phased out at the polls, Drane (through Cross’s political dickering) secured the state contract to maintain the mechanized voting machines, using that power to intimidate voters, who thought he could tell whether they supported Cross.15 Drane believed a man’s personal and professional business should always remain secret. He once told his son, “A fish would never get caught if it didn’t open its mouth.”16

  In 1956, Cross was reelected in the runoff by 336 votes. That same year, Earl Long, who had lost to Robert Kennon in 1952, was returned to the governor’s office. Although state police raids had “practically wiped out organized gambling,” according to the FBI (an overstatement), Long’s reelection in 1956 benefited gamblers statewide. As that industry flourished, the white Ferriday High School football team captured the state championship four consecutive years from 1953–56, a source of pride for the region. The parish’s population increased by 42 percent—the greatest jump in its history—from 14,398 in 1950 to 20,467 in 1960. The opening of the Natchez-Vidalia Mississippi River Bridge in 1940, ending two centuries of ferry service, connected the southwestern Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana regions as one. This provided a labor link for thousands of men—white and black—at three Natchez mills: the International Paper Company, Armstrong Tire, and Johns Manville. Car dealerships opened, the oil and timber industries boomed, telephone service stretched into the rural areas, and subdivisions were built from Ferriday to Vidalia.17 Prosperity reigned—for some.