Muckraker's Progress

The fact that J. Edgar Hoover addressed his complaints about The Orangeburg Massacre only to Jack Bass is no mere coincidence. The FBI stopped talking to Jack Nelson last year--an acknowledgment of his more than 20 years of extraordinary muckraking in the South.

Nelson began the practice as soon as he got out of high school in Biloxi, Miss., in 1947. As a reporter for the Biloxi Daily Herald, he probed the city's gambling so effectively that it was finally investigated by Senator Estes Kefauver's peripatetic investigating committee. In 1953, at the Atlanta Constitution, he wrote a devastating expose of vice and corruption in Hinesville, Ga. Directly or indirectly, his story resulted in so many grand jury indictments (44) of Hinesville's citizens that when Nelson turned up to cover the proceedings, he was mobbed by the townspeople. Spread-eagled across the hood of a car by a deputy sheriff while the locals yelled for his blood, Nelson appealed to a passing judge to arrest his attacker. "What's the name of your assailant?" asked the judge. When Nelson confessed he didn't know, the judge said, "Sorry. I can't write out an arrest warrant without a name." A Hinesville policeman finally saved him from lynching, though not from eventual arrest by vengeful deputies, who charged him with, among other things, raping B-girls.

Operating Nurses. After Hinesville, Nelson zeroed in on lottery rings, voting frauds, gambling, prostitution and governmental corruption. Once, when his sleuthing turned up a long-missing road scraper that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had been unable to find, the Constitution published a map showing tne GBl where it could find its machine. Next day the GBl sheepishly picked it up and charged a guilty contractor several thousand dollars for "renting" state property.

In 1959 Nelson wrote a series of articles charging Milledgeville (Ga.) Central State Hospital with using experimental drugs on mental patients without the permission or knowledge of relatives, hiring doctors who used alcohol and drugs on duty, even letting nurses perform major surgery when doctors were absent. The resulting furor ended with the resignation of Milledgeville's chief surgeon and seven other doctors. The hospital superintendent retired, and the hospital was removed from the jurisdiction of the graft-ridden public welfare department and transferred to the public health department. Nelson's Milledgeville expose won him a Pulitzer Prize "for distinguished local reporting under deadline pressure."

Sour Relations. In 1965, after a series of pieces on Georgia marriage mills, Nelson was hired by the Los Angeles Times. He opened a Times bureau in Atlanta where he concentrated on civil rights. During the 1960s he had admired the FBI. Says he, "If the threat of the FBI hadn't been around, it could have been a lot worse for civil rights workers." But last February the relationship soured. Nelson had learned that the FBI had given two Ku Klux Klansmen $36,500 to persuade Kathy Ainsworth, a fellow Kluxer, to dynamite the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Miss. When Mrs. Ainsworth appeared with her dynamite, a gun battle ensued during which she was shot to death by Meridian policemen. Nelson's story of entrapment and the use of agents provocateurs raised more moral and legal questions than the FBI was prepared to answer. Ever since, Nelson has been on the FBI's list of untouchable people.

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