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On the night of December 10, 1964, in Ferriday, Louisiana, Klansmen set fire to Frank’s Shoe Service.

Frank Morris, a Black businessman and the owner of Frank’s Shoe Service, lived and worked along the Ferriday–Vidalia Highway. For years he repaired soles and broken heels— a vital service in rural Louisiana in the 1940s and 1950s. His shop was more than a business; it served as a community hub where Morris mentored young Black men. It was also one of the most successful Black-owned businesses in the area.

That night, when Morris heard the sound of breaking glass and tried to escape through the front door, a white man with a shotgun forced him back inside. The shop—and Morris’s adjacent home— burned with him trapped inside. Four days later, at the age of fifty-one, Frank Morris died from third-degree burns.

Today, the foundation of his store still rests beside the highway in Concordia Parish, a quiet reminder of what once stood there.

No one has ever been convicted of the crime. Investigators identified several suspects at the time. In 2007, the FBI reopened the case, closing it again in 2014 without charges. Morris is believed to have been murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan, including Arthur Leonard Spencer and Coonie Poissot of the Silver Dollar Klan. Also implicated was Deputy Sheriff Frank DeLaughter, who was suspected in the disappearance of Joseph Edwards, a young Black man who vanished earlier that year from the same highway.

For twenty years, Frank Morris placed a small advertisement for Frank’s Shoe Service in the weekly newspaper, The Concordia Sentinel. Week after week, the notice appeared among local announcements and headlines—evidence of his steady presence in the town’s life.

The week Morris was murdered, the advertisements disappeared.

In December 2024, artist Jessica Ingram began placing the advertisements again in The Concordia Sentinel, reprinting them each week for a year. The ads returned to the paper from December 2024 through December 2025, appearing once more within the shifting context of national headlines and debates over civil rights.

Working with the local NAACP, Ingram also helped plan a memorial for Frank Morris in Ferriday. She also connected a website to the project and began collecting oral histories from community elders who remember Morris and who lived in Ferriday and nearby Vidalia during that time.

Their memories—like the foundation beside the highway—remain. And the advertisements, re-placed in the local paper, bring Frank Morris’s story back into the present, and carried forward into the archive for the future.