Frank Morris

Frank Morris, 51, repaired shoes in Ferriday for Black and white customers for about twenty-five years. After midnight on December 10, 1964, Klansmen set his shop on fire while he slept in a back room. Two men stood outside, one with a shotgun and the other with an empty gas can, and the armed man ordered him to stay inside. He escaped by a back door and was taken to the hospital. He died four days later. The FBI investigated then and again from 2007, and reporting reopened the case in 2010 and 2011. No one was ever arrested.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 7.1 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.
• Vidalia Landing Riverfront — 8.9 mi
  A riverwalk on the Mississippi at Vidalia, built on the site of the old town that moved west in 1938 when the river was cut off.
• Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge — 27 mi
  A 25,000-acre bottomland refuge beside Catahoula Lake, a Ramsar wetland that is a major early-season stop for ducks on the Mississippi Flyway.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 31 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.

More markers nearby

• Haney's Big House — steps away
• Jerry Lee Lewis — steps away
• Don José Vidal — 7.7 mi
• Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 — 9.0 mi