Published: Feb. 14, 2022
By: LSU Manship School News Service
The work of a longtime Louisiana newspaper editor will be included in a PBS “Frontline” documentary Tuesday on the 1967 Ku Klux Klan murder of Wharlest Jackson, a 37-year-old Black man in Natchez, Mississippi.
Jackson, who had five children, was treasurer of the Natchez NAACP. He was killed when a bomb planted beneath his truck exploded while he was riding home from work.
The editor, Stanley Nelson, researched the Jackson case and other Klan murders for many years before retiring from the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday in December.
Nelson was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his work on a similar case, and he has written two books on cold case murders from the civil rights era. He also helped found the LSU Cold Case Project at the Manship School of Mass Communication, where he works as an adjunct professor.
Entitled “American Reckoning,” the Frontline film also follows the work of Jackson’s wife, Exerlena, a civil rights activist who has since died.
In the film, the couple’s surviving children tell the story of their family and of their quest to find justice for their father.
Read more at Louisiana Illuminator
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 