Rosa and her brother Nathaniel, who was called Poncho, were Morris’s only grandchildren. Their mother was Clementine, his only child, born during a relationship he had in the 1930s with Rosie Hewing. He was married for a few years to Edna Brown, a seamstress. The couple had no children and divorced in the late 1940s. By the early 1960s, Clementine moved to Las Vegas. Rosa lived with Aunt Polly and Poncho with Morris.27
An usher in the Mercy Seat Baptist Church, Morris also hosted a gospel program on the Ferriday radio station from 6 to 7:30 a.m. on Sundays. He dedicated gospel songs to black and white listeners, male and female, and occasionally had a pastor as a guest. It cost him seventy-five dollars a month to air the show. White and black businessmen occasionally sent him donations for mentioning their establishments on air. On many occasions, Morris traveled to attend gospel music events.28
At his death, Morris had $1,800 in three bank accounts, assets of $33,933, and debt of $10,000. He owned the lot where the shop had stood.29 Many in the white business community remember him as an honest man who paid his bills on time. When a Jewish businessman in town died in 1963, Morris wrote a letter to the editor of the Concordia Sentinel praising the man, noting that even though in segregated Ferriday blacks were “unable to attend the funeral, we lined Fourth Street in an effort to show him honor and pay him tribute.” Morris wrote the letter on “behalf of the Colored Citizens of Concordia.”30 Those same citizens would turn to the federal government for justice in the Morris murder, the same government that had abandoned them during Reconstruction.
Morris’s banker considered him a good credit risk, and his attorney (since 1948) told the FBI that Morris was ethical and respected. Morris’s ex-wife had sued him once over back payment of a divorce settlement, but the suit was filed during the only period when Morris was known to have experienced financial troubles, a time in which the region was in an economic slump. In 1962, Morris settled with a Houston hotel over an injury he had suffered while a guest. Morris’s daughter Clementine was expected to receive almost $21,000 ($158,000 today) as the sole heir, while grandson Poncho was to collect on the small insurance policies.31
The day after the arson, a three-paragraph story appeared on the front page of the Concordia Sentinel with a top-of-the-page one-column headline: “Fire Destroys Frank’s Shoe Shop in Ferriday Thurs.” By that time, the FBI had interviewed Morris three times in Room 101 at the Concordia Parish Hospital in Ferriday. He consistently told authorities he didn’t know his attackers.
AT THE OUTSET, the FBI wanted to know if Morris’s killers had violated any federal civil rights laws. A preliminary investigation revealed that Morris had been secretary of the local NAACP, but the chapter had not been active for at least five years, nor had Morris been involved in voter registration drives or in civil rights activities. Father Thompson and Father John Gayer, the white priest at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, said whites continuously threatened blacks, harassed them on the telephone, and occasionally threw rocks at them, but both were shocked at Morris’s killing. Gayer said he had no faith in local police but had asked the mayor to enforce the law.32 Mayor Woodie Davis arrived at the scene of the fire before it was extinguished. Almost fifty years later, he told the Concordia Sentinel that he saw an FBI agent at the scene and turned the case over to him, advising the agent that Ferriday would provide the bureau any assistance it could.33 But the FBI at that moment had established no federal jurisdiction to take over the investigation.
In January 1965, U.S. senators Clifford Case and William Harrison of New Jersey expressed concern over the murder. Each notified FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that they had been contacted by Willie R. James, president of the Burlington County, New Jersey, branch of the NAACP. James, a cousin of Morris, had been called by another relative who told him that “white persons were responsible for the bombing and that he [Morris] was afraid to identify them.”34 There was no evidence of a bombing, however. Morris’s relatives, including his father and stepmother, and the many friends who visited him in the hospital told the bureau that Morris repeatedly said he didn’t know his attackers. He said the same thing to FBI agents twelve times in recorded interviews, but because of the onslaught of Klan violence in 1964, the FBI considered the arson a Klan attack. However, by mid-January, the bureau notified the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division that Father Thompson had talked to a woman, Della Mae Smith, who claimed that Deputy Frank DeLaughter had ordered the arson and that local police had set the blaze. With this news of a possible civil rights violation involving police officers, the bureau was authorized to launch a full federal investigation.35
A mother of seven, Smith had been friends with Morris since 1951. She said that Ferriday officers George Sewell and Timmy Loftin, who had transported Morris to the hospital, were the arsonists. Smith, who worked as a maid at the hospital, told the bureau that while changing the linen in Morris’s room she asked him who had set the fire and he named the police officers. According to Smith, Morris revealed that, while one man held the shotgun, the other threw gas on him and said, “I want you to see yourself die.” Morris confided that months earlier Lula DeLaughter, the deputy’s wife, had tickled the palm of his hand, a signal that meant she wanted to have sex with him. Morris told Lula he would call her later. When he didn’t, Lula, feeling scorned, told her husband that Morris had made a pass at her.36 DeLaughter confronted Morris at the shop with Lula’s allegations and also contended that Morris had made obscene phone calls to her. Morris denied the allegations, saying they were lies. The two men argued. DeLaughter warned Morris to leave Lula alone.37
Agents interviewed Sewell and Loftin separately on January 25. They related how they had picked up Morris from the burning shop after midnight and delivered him to the hospital. Both said they arrived at the scene in Ferriday’s lone police car from the other side of town. Two weeks later on February 4, however, both admitted they had lied about their location prior to the arson. Another witness had seen Sewell and Loftin, with a third man in the backseat, on the Ferriday-Vidalia highway and had followed the patrol car into town. The young officers acknowledged that they left town, with their friend as a passenger, to follow two pretty waitresses who were headed toward Vidalia. They had lied because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if Mayor Davis and Police Chief Bob Warren found out they had left their city jurisdiction on a non-emergency call in the patrol car and because of the liability involved in having a passenger in the cruiser.38
Eight FBI agents worked the case, including two from the bureau’s Alexandria, Louisiana, office, which considered Concordia Parish its territory. A Navy veteran, Paul Lancaster, had been named resident agent in Alexandria in 1964. He had recorded the Morris hospital interviews with an IBM dictaphone. Don McGorty, a former captain in the Marine Corps, had begun work in the Alexandria office that same year. He served as case agent in the investigation.39
Agents interviewed more than sixty people in the area around Morris’s shop and talked to his former employees, friends, and relatives. FBI forensic tests on soil and debris turned up nothing useful, while a determined search to find who left a five-gallon fuel can at the shop proved fruitless.40 A piece of a finger belonging to a black man was found in the shop rubble but was never matched to anyone, although Morris’s best friend, James White, said he looked at Morris’s hands during a hospital visit and observed that he was missing part of a finger.41 There was also some speculation that a black man may have been the third man seen by Morris at the arson and that he was either a participant or observer. In 2007, the son of Junious “Tee-Wee” Kelly told the Concordia Sentinel that his father had witnessed the arson from a distance. A short time after the fire, someone fired into the Kelly home with a shotgun, an incident the family believed was a message for Kelly to keep quiet. Afterward, DeLaughter and Bill Ogden came by, honked the horn, and called Kelly outside. They told him to leave town. Before leaving, Kelly saw Rosa Williams, Morris’s twelve-year-old granddaughter, on the street. “I know
what happened to your grandfather,” he told her, but he didn’t name names. On his deathbed in 2000 in Monroe, Louisiana, Kelly was asked by his son who killed Morris. “Son,” Kelly answered, “you don’t have to look no further than the police department.”42
AS THE PROBE INTENSIFIED, agents found that most people, white and black, thought highly of Morris. Blacks could think of only two possible means by which Morris might have upset white people. One was by dedicating songs on his radio show to white women. Others said that since white women didn’t go inside his shop, Morris would pick up their shoes for repair or deliver repaired shoes to their cars. Sometimes Morris would lean in to the driver’s window to discuss the work to be done, or sometimes he would open the passenger door and sit on the seat. Someone might have found this offensive. During this period, Klansmen in Concordia and Natchez had been warning business owners to fire black employees and to keep their workplaces segregated.43
A black schoolteacher said after the arson that there was a rumor Morris may have been setting up interracial liaisons. There also were stories in the black community that in 1947 Morris had been romantically involved with the wife of the white man who owned the Billups Service Station. Morris’s ex-wife said he allegedly insulted the woman in an unspecified manner. Several witnesses also claimed Morris had a close friendship with the service station owner. Whatever the story, the couple left town not long after Morris was arrested by Ferriday police on August 10, 1947, and charged with fighting and disturbing the peace. He paid a ninety-dollar fine and served fifteen days in the parish jail in Vidalia.44 His ex-wife said he was released on the condition that he not return to town until Ferriday police granted permission.45
Only two groups had bad things to say about Morris—his former girlfriends and ex-wife, and the police and firemen. Morris had a reputation in Ferriday’s black community for being a ladies’ man. The women in his life claimed he cheated on them. One woman said her five-year common-law marriage to Morris ended in the summer of 1964 when she caught him with his mistress in bed in the back room of the shop. She also claimed that Morris occasionally beat her up and that he liked “abnormal” sex, which wasn’t specifically described in FBI documents.46 A businessman from across the street said young black girls were afraid to go into Morris’s shop because he would hit on them.47
By the fall of 1964, after his relationships with his girlfriend and mistress had ended, Morris began dating a woman from Clayton, five miles north of Ferriday. She alleged no abuse from him. For a few weeks, Morris and his grandson Poncho spent their nights in Clayton with the new girlfriend. On November 2, 1964, the girlfriend went to Chicago to visit her daughter. For the next five weeks until the fire, Morris spent the night in the back room of the shoe shop, while Poncho slept behind the shop in the small shack where Johnny “Snoot” Griffing, Morris’s employee since 1959, lived.48
Once Della Mae Smith named DeLaughter, Sewell, and Loftin as the men responsible for the arson, the New Orleans FBI division sent to headquarters in Washington, D.C., a teletype identifying cases involving Concordia Parish police officers who had been the subject of preliminary FBI investigations.49 The oldest case involved the 1962 beating of two black males in the sheriff’s office, and another involved a complaint filed against DeLaughter and Sewell by Mildred Garner eight months prior to the arson. Garner, forty-two, at her office in Cario’s bar along the Ferriday-Vidalia highway, complained to agents that DeLaughter had threatened her with a blackjack while both officers had called her a “nigger lover” and indicated they might have her occupational license revoked.50 The dispute concerned a black male employed by Mildred’s husband, but the specifics of the conflict are unclear. The bureau didn’t know Mildred was DeLaughter’s sister until Sheriff Noah Cross told them that the siblings had been feuding for years, most recently because the deputy was running around on Lula. Ferriday police chief Bob Warren reported that Lula had initiated divorce proceedings against DeLaughter and was seeking $200-a-month alimony. Because of DeLaughter’s growing reputation as a brute, Mayor Davis had forbidden Ferriday police officers from associating with him, a rule the chief said Officer Sewell followed.51
ONE FERRIDAY POLICE officer seemed to know as much about Morris as the shopkeeper’s former girlfriends. William Howell Harp Jr., known as Junior Harp, had taken the job of jailer, fireman, and policeman when DeLaughter went to work for the sheriff’s office in 1962 after the mayor fired him. That same year, Harp had also been involved with DeLaughter, Ogden, and another deputy in the beating of two black prisoners in the parish courthouse. One prisoner confessed when Harp pointed a pistol at his head. Harp had nothing good to say about Morris.52
Interestingly, he alleged what Morris’s girlfriends and ex-wife alleged—that he liked “unnatural” sex with them. He also claimed Morris was a bootlegger and sold narcotics, although he acknowledged to agents that the police could never prove it. Harp, police officer Timmy Loftin, and fire chief Noland Moeulle, who thought Morris had accidentally started the fire because he was drunk, told the bureau a suitcase filled with bourbon was found in the back room of Morris’s shop after the fire. The suitcase was slightly scorched, but inside were fourteen half-pints of bourbon individually wrapped in newspaper, all unblemished.53 How did this suitcase survive the fire? Was it planted to throw the FBI off the scent and make agents believe bootlegging enemies started the fire? FBI agent John Pfeifer told the Concordia Sentinel in 2011 that when he arrived in Ferriday in 1966, the bootlegging story was still being told. But he soon determined that this rumor and others, all of which cast Morris in a bad light, came from a single source: Frank DeLaughter.54
Harp also described Morris as a drunk and admitted to having had two confrontations with him over the previous two years. Harp claimed that in 1962 Morris’s girlfriend had been arrested for theft. When Morris appeared at the jail after hours demanding to see her, Harp told Morris to go home. Instead, Morris began to force his way through, and Harp threatened him with a blackjack. At that point, Harp said, Morris left.55 Not long after, they had a second confrontation. This one had been the source of rumors in the black community, but when Morris’s friends asked him about it, he usually brushed it off as a simple disagreement. Mayor Davis explained to agents that in 1962 Morris came to his office and complained that Harp had come to the shoe shop and pulled a gun on him during an argument. The mayor said he talked to both Harp and his wife about the matter and learned that Morris had called the police department to talk with an officer. Harp’s wife said she had answered the phone, and when she told Morris that Harp wasn’t there, Morris “was a little abusive” in his language. Mrs. Harp “in turn got mad and said something she should not have said.” The mayor felt that both were at fault. The incident escalated when Mrs. Harp complained to her husband, “who got mad and went to Morris’ shop armed with his revolver.” Davis said all apologized, and he assumed that afterward they were all on good terms.56
THE MORE AGENTS DUG, the more doubt was cast on Della Mae Smith’s story about DeLaughter threatening Morris for coming on to his wife and Smith’s implication of Sewell and Loftin. It was Harp and Morris who had argued in 1962, not DeLaughter and Morris. And in a short time, Smith’s credibility was shattered. Everyone in the black community, even Father Thompson and Father Gayer, described her as an alcoholic who was prone to lie. And why would Morris identify the killers to her rather than his doctor, his father, his stepmother, close friends, and clergy? When confronted with inconsistencies in her stories, Smith said she personally didn’t think Sewell and Loftin were involved.57 More troubling, why would an argument between Morris and a policeman trigger an arson two years later?
After the fire was extinguished, Harp, Police Chief Mouelle, and Assistant District Attorney Roy Halcomb visited Morris in the hospital. It was at this point, Harp told agents, that Halcomb called the FBI.58 DeLaughter told the bureau that Sheriff Cross ordered him to go to the fire scene at 2:45 a.m. DeLaughter then claimed that, at 3 a.m., he went to
the hospital to talk to Morris, who told him the same story everyone in town knew.59 After Morris was transferred from the emergency room to private room 101, his first visitors were police officers and firemen. Was he warned to keep his mouth shut?
On the night of the fire, the lone attendant at the Billups Service Station, James Simolke, heard a blast that sounded similar to a pistol shot near Morris’s shop. Almost immediately, a black sedan sped out of an alley next to the shop and turned left in the direction of Vidalia. Simolke didn’t know if the car then turned on a side street to exit town in another direction. A short time later, he saw Morris running through a vacant lot between the shoe shop and the gas station. At the same time, the town’s Pontiac police cruiser pulled up. Morris left tracks of blood behind him, and the officers appeared “genuinely stunned” at his condition. One officer opened the back door, and Morris got in “of his own power,” displaying no fear of the officers. After they left, Simolke saw a bright light emitting from inside the shop and soon heard an explosion; some of the flammable liquid inside had apparently ignited.60
Before the policemen drove off, one gave Simolke the fire department number and told him to call. He did, but oddly, there was no answer. He then phoned the operator and asked her to make the call. Ten to fifteen minutes passed before the firetruck was in sight. Harp told the bureau his entry book revealed that a call came in about the fire at 1:15 a.m. and that he arrived at 1:25. His wife contacted the fire chief and the volunteers.61 Eighteen-year-old Johnny Blunschi, a future Louisiana state trooper, was a volunteer fireman and among the first to arrive at the scene. By then, the fire was blazing. Everyone kept waiting for the fire truck. When Harp finally arrived in the town’s 1953 Howe fire engine, he had to open the driver’s door, push in the clutch, and hold it down while reaching behind a side panel to shift it into park. Harp was so drunk that Blunschi thought he was going to fall out of the truck.62
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