Civil rights investigative journalist Stanley Nelson, 'the best of us,' died last week
Last edited Mon Jun 9, 2025, 05:43 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: Mississippi Today
Civil rights investigative journalist Stanley Nelson, ‘the best of us,’ died last week
by Jerry Mitchell June 9, 2025
America lost a gentle giant in journalism when Stanley Nelson, who investigated some of the nation’s most notorious racially motivated slayings in Mississippi and Louisiana, died unexpectedly last week. He was 69.
CBC reporter David Ridgen, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and podcast host, worked with the reporter for years. “Stanley Nelson is the best of us,” he said. “A doer. Not a reminiscer. A teller. Not someone to leave anyone behind. A brotherly guy who you’d trust anything to.”
In 2008, Ridgen and I joined forces with Nelson and fellow journalists John Fleming, Ben Greenberg, Pete Nicks, Robert Rosenthal, Hank Klibanoff, Ronnie Agnew, Melvin Claxton, Peter Klein and others to form the Civil Rights Cold Cases Project. Our dream was to create a documentary that would capture our continuing work on these cases.
The big picture documentary never happened, but many other projects emerged for radio, print and film. Nelson never missed a beat, writing hundreds of stories for the 5,000-circulation Concordia Sentinel, where he served as editor.
Read more: https://mississippitoday.org/2025/06/09/civil-rights-investigative-journalist-stanley-nelson-the-best-of-us-died-last-week/
One of the mighty has fallen.
RIP