What They Didn’t Get On The Selma To Montgomery March

I didn't have time to do any blogging last Sunday, when it was the fortieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Now we're in the lead-up to the fortieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March, so this post is still timely. When I wrote about the events surrounding the March earlier this year for the state of Hawaii, I noted that the marchers who set out to cross the Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 were not only marching for voting rights. The marchers wanted justice for Jimmy Lee Jackson, who was shot by an Alabama State Trooper during protests in Marion, Alabama on February 18, 1965. Al Turner was one of the leaders of the marchers who were attacked on the Pettus Bridge in Selma and was a participant in the protests in Marion the night Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered. Turner recalled:

[A]fter Jimmy was killed we was infuriated to the point that we wanted to carry Jimmy's body to George Wallace and dump it on the, on the steps of the capitol. We had got about like the white folk are. We had determined or decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free. And be frank about it. And all of us just about felt that way. So we had intended to do everything we could so we was mad, I guess you’d say, and we said that we would take Jimmy down and just put his casket on the doorsteps of the capitol. . . . Other people by that time had been killed I think. Reverend Reeves was dead at that time when the march really came off. But . . . Jimmy was the spark plug of the whole thing . . . 

(Albert Turner, filmed interview for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 [PDF 32KB], Blackside, Inc., 5-6)

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) James Bevel understood the potency of the protesters' grief and anger and encouraged them to channel it towards their broader goals.

you have to give people a honorable means and context in which to express and eliminate that grief and speak decisively and succinctly back to the issue. Otherwise your movement will break down in violence and chaos. . . . agreeing to go to Montgomery was that kind of tool that would absorb a tremendous amount of energy and effort and . . . keep the issue of disenfranchisement before the whole nation. 

(Reverend James Bevel, filmed interview for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 [PDF 48KB], Blackside, Inc., 10)

And the protesters succeeded in doing just what James Bevel had hoped, in no small part because of the violent reprisals of the State Troopers on the March 7 attempt to cross the Pettus Bridge. The SCLC's Andrew Young's recollection:

By an extraordinary coincidence, an extremely well-publicized documentary of the World War II war crimes trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, had been scheduled for broadcast on national television on March 7. The film was interrupted several times to interject updates and replays of the violence in Selma, and many viewers apparently mistook these clips for portions of the Nuremberg film. The violence in Selma was so similar to the violence in Nazi Germany that viewers could hardly miss the connection. The news film of the beatings on the Pettus Bridge produced such strong national and worldwide revulsion that prominent people from all over the country, both white and black, dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to Selma to join our demonstrations. Church groups also responded immediately; so did our friends in the labor unions. But most touchingly, many ordinary individuals, whose names we will never know, came down simply out of a personal sense of commitment. 

(Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, 358.)

The events in Alabama in March, 1965 provided the necessary momentum for one of the greatest victories in the Civil Rights Movement—passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

But what about Jimmy Lee Jackson? The trooper who shot him was James Bonard Fowler. He is alive and well in Geneva, Alabama. Fowler has never been questioned by the FBI about Jackson's death. Fowler has never been questioned by anyone. For the first time ever, he has agreed to be interviewed by a journalist, John Fleming, editor at large at the Anniston Star in Alabama. The interview appears in the latest Sojourners Magazine and in the Star.

That night at Mack’s Café, Fowler says, "I don’t remember how many times I pulled the trigger, but I think I just pulled it once. But I might have pulled it three times. I didn’t know his name at the time, but his name was Jimmy Lee Jackson. He weren’t dead. He didn’t die that night. But I heard about a month later that he died. . . ." 

For Fowler, the killing was simply self-defense.

"Jimmy Lee Jackson was not murdered," he says. "He was trying to kill me. I have no doubt in my mind that, under the emotional situation at the time, if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol, he would have killed me or shot me." This is the point he wants to make, the reason he wants to talk. Fowler does not fear indictment. "I don’t think legally I could get convicted for murder now no matter how much politics they got ’cause after 40 years they ain’t no telling how many people is dead," he says.

Al Turner's account of what happened the night of February 18, 1965 differs a bit from the witnesses quoted in Fleiming's article. But Turner's version of the story is more detailed and seems more rooted in the entire night's events and therefore seems the most believable. In Turner's telling, responsibility for Jackson's murder lies with more people than just James Fowler:

the whole town was surrounded that night by . . . auxiliary policy, State Troopers, Sheriffs and everybody who wanted to come in, really who felt like beating folk up. We went around the side of the church in an effort to get back into the church. Some of us tried to go back in the front door and some of us just went where we could, because as we moved they… they also moved. They was whipping us as we went. . . . Billy clubs was broken on people's head. And uh, I got in the back door of the church and quite a few of the people did, but Jimmy Jackson was not able to make it back in the church. He went down the hill below the church into a small cafe. And then immediately his grandfather was hit in the back of the head with a stick, a Billy club, and his skull was bust, his head was burst . . . . Mr. Cagey Lee we called him, and he went to have Jimmy to carry him to the hospital. . . . Jimmy was kind of disturbed at the condition he was in, and he kind of panicked . . . . [s]o he immediately tried to rush out forgetting about what was going on, and take his [grand]father to the hospital. And as he attempted to go out of the door of the small cafe that they were in . . . these troopers met him and forced him back into this building. And of course, Jimmy kind of insisted that he wanted to carry his daddy to the doctor, uh, his grandfather, and . . . they insisted that he did not go. . . . they uh, ganged him simply and physically . . . subdued him and put him on the floor of the cafe and there where they started to whip him up and beat him up pretty bad on the floor of the cafe there. And his mother was in the cafe also. She had come down with her daddy. And she just couldn't stand it no longer, so she took . . . a drink bottle and tried to knock the people up off of her son, because they were going to kill him right there on the floor it appeared. When she hit them, then they knocked her out, and . . . then they took Jimmy and pinned him against the walls of the building and uh, at close range they shot him in the side. Just took the pistol and put it in his side and shot him three times. . . . then they ran him out of the . . . front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers or some of the remaining troopers were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church . . . he had to run through a corridor of . . . policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell. And of course he was picked up at that point and carried to the hospital. [H]e was carried to the Marion Hospital here in town, and he stayed there about an hour or so before, and nobody would wait on him . . . then he later was taken to the hospital in Selma, where he did receive services. Probably if he had been waited on properly here, his condition would not have been this he may still have died, but it's only speculation. But they did not wait on him. And he… he was probably an hour or two or more probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning before he really received . . . medical services after he had been uh, shot and beaten to death. And he was, some people feel that maybe he… he was beaten to death moreso than shot to death. The severe head wounds were pretty bad. But he still died from uh, whatever happened. (Albert Turner, interview for Eyes, 2-3.) 

John Flemming thinks Fowler has

a bristling kind of confidence when you consider events of the last few years. In early January, Mississippi authorities arrested a 79-year-old preacher named Edgar Ray Killen who, investigators say, helped organize the June 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi. 

But Fowler knows that for every Edgar Ray Killen, Byron DeLaBeckwith, and Bobby Frank Cherry who gets prosecuted (after decades of living free), there are countless others will never be pursued in any way. In the the Mississippi Burning case, as I've already noted, Killen is only one of ten living suspects. There were originally twenty-one, nineteen of whom were charged in 1964 with conspiring to deprive the three civil rights workers of their constitutional rights (not with murder). In Al Turner's account, there is an unknown number of additional Alabama police (State Troopers? local officers?), as well as Marion Hospital staff, also implicated in the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. And we're still only talking about the murders in which the victims names have entered into the official histories and public tellings of Civil Rights Movement era atrocities. As bellatrys noted in her post about Bloody Sunday, more than 50 bombings took place in Birmingham, Alabama between 1947 and 1965, none of which were ever solved, earning that city its Bombingham nickname. Steve Schwerner, brother of slain COFO worker Michael Schwerner, is quick to remind us that

in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies [of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner], they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage. 

And then there's all of the violence against participants in struggles that received far less coverage in the press, or in popular retrospection—for example, in St. Agustine Florida, Bogalusa, Louisiana, and Orangeburg, South Carolina. I'd say that Fowler and others like him know the odds against murder charges are pretty good.
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In her post, belatrys took the Bloody Sunday anniversary as an occasion to meditate on how the Civil Rights Movement forced America to face, at least momentarily, its own problems with domestic terror. It just so happens that yesterday on The American Street David Neiwert posted "Our Little Osamas," discussing the US failure to address domestic terrorism. Neiwert focuses on right-wing extremist groups and "the ongoing ideological traffic between the mainstream right and its extremist counterpoint." I share Neiwert's concerns, but I also think it's worth amplifying the comment on Neiwert's post by Sparticus, who says:

The most current parallel of permissive/supportive law enforcement is also the oldest–usually described as police brutality, it is actually systematic racial and class warfare of terrifying dimensions. Rarely called terrorism, yet terrible to experience, institutionalized violence or malign neglect against minorities and poor is arguably so. 

I've written about some related matters, in The Southern Strategy of George W. Bush, a companion piece to my Selma to Montogomery/Voting Rights Act essay.

Other blogs on Bloody Sunday:
Pam talks about Bloody Sunday, the Voting Rights Act, George Bush's professed ignorance of it, racial profiling, and violence against gays and lesbians.

Sally Greene has an interesting post on the opinion by Judge Frank Johnson that set out the rules for the march from Selma to Montgomery.

bardcat was a high school senior in Alabama in March, 1965. His friend Ray was one of the marchers, while he, bardcat, did not march, though he has decided to participate in this year's re-enactment of the event.

Outside The Tent decodes Republican hypocrisies on civil rights, including pandering to homophobes, the Bush administration's abysmal record of civil rights enforcement, and its attempts to limit private right of action of voting rights violations.

I was glad I looked past the first couple of pages of Technorati hits on Bloody Sunday and found travel writer Fred Ferg's 2003 post, which begins with his drive along the route of the Selma to Montgomery march, but is mainly about his visit to an incarcerated friend in Yazoo City, MS.

Update:
Those quotations from Eyes On The Prize interview transcripts are via the Washington University in St. Louis Film And Media Archive, which houses them. A select number of the transcripts are available online as PDF files.