Frank Morris, the owner of Frank’s Shoe Service in Ferriday, Louisiana, was badly burned when Klansmen set fire to his shop and home on December 10, 1964. When he heard breaking glass and tried to get out the front door, he was ordered back inside by a white man with a shotgun, and the shop was set alight. Fifty-one-year-old Morris died four days later from third-degree burns.

No one has been convicted of this crime, though several suspects were identified at the time. In 2007, the FBI reopened the case, closing it in 2014. Morris is believed to have been murdered by Klansmen, including suspects Arthur Leonard Spencer, Silver Dollar Group member Coonie Poissot, and Deputy Sheriff Frank DeLaughter, a suspect in the disappearance of local man Joseph Edwards, also in 1964.

Concordia Sentinel editor (retired) Stanley Nelson has thoroughly investigated Frank Morris’s life and murder and has written extensively on civil rights–era cold cases from the 1960s in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and Adams, Wilkinson, and Franklin Counties in Mississippi.

In this photo, Frank Morris is leaning on the counter in his shoe shop.