40 years later, an investigation

Anniston Star
Editorial
In our opinion
03-31-2005

Earlier this month, The Star’s John Fleming wrote about the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson. He tracked down the former Alabama State Trooper who says he shot the 26-year-old. Geneva’s James Bonard Fowler, speaking for the first time to a reporter about the incident, claimed he shot Jackson in self-defense.

An official probe to either reinforce or rebut that claim is overdue. Without an investigation, we can’t fully reach closure.

This week, Alabama’s Legislative Black Caucus called for an investigation. “It is past time for Fowler to be brought to justice,” state Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, wrote to his Black Caucus colleagues last week.

The Alabama Attorney General’s office and the state Bureau of Investigation are on the case, according to a spokesman. Authorities from Perry County and the federal government might also get involved. That’s good.

But we can’t leave this without recalling lost opportunities. Jimmy Lee Jackson and his family deserved an immediate and thorough investigation in 1965.

How much smoother might the state’s transition from then to now have been had we in the 1970s formed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the post-segregation South? South Africans, fresh from the end of official apartheid, can attest to the cleansing benefits of clearing one’s soul and guilty conscience, and of unburdening one’s pain and suffering.

Instead, the South wishing to bury what it found distasteful, has periodically endured old sins being found out.

We have chosen this course, either on purpose or by passive resistance.

Now, we plead with investigators to dig deeply into the details of Jimmy Lee Jackson’s death and bring justice, finally, to this case.

(Whole thing.)