Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson?

My new article came out today in the Black Commentator. Here is the opening section:

The Black Commentator
September 21, 2006 - Issue 198
Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson?
by Benjamin Greenberg
Guest Commentator

Jimmie Lee Jackson did not live to see his grandfather, Cager Lee, finally receive a voting card in his early 80s at the Marion, Alabama Town Hall, August 20, 1965. The day came just two weeks after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law by President Johnson. Congress might not have passed the law in 1965 without the pressure it felt as the whole world watched the spectacle of the Selma to Montgomery March five months earlier.

Jimmie Lee Jackson died on February 26, 1965 from injuries sustained a week prior, during the violent response by state and local police to a night time civil rights demonstration in Marion. His death was never properly investigated. No one was ever charged. He was twenty-six years old.

In 2005, Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson reopened the Jimmie Lee Jackson murder investigation. At the end of August, responding to public pressure and a formal request from the District Attorney, Alabama Governor Bob Riley issued a $5000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the 1965 case. “The person responsible for this murder should be brought to justice,” Riley said.

Governor Riley’s public statement on Jimmie Lee Jackson was delivered by his press secretary, Jeff Emerson, as a recorded message on the answering machine of journalist Kenneth Mullinax. Mullinax published the Governor’s remarks in the Montgomery Advertiser on August 29. “The entire statement was maybe two sentences,” Mullinax wrote to me in an email. Emerson has not returned any of my repeated calls requesting a written statement from the Governor on Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death inspired a determined throng of activists to attempt the dangerous march from Selma to Montgomery. The marchers had originally planned to deliver Jackson in his coffin to Governor George Wallace at the capitol in Montgomery. Their march for Jimmie Lee Jackson became the march for voting rights, which won Cager Lee his voting card, but won no justice for his dead grandson.

For the next week, you can read the rest here for free.

UPDATE: "Who Killed Jimmie Lee Jackson" is now archived here, on the Hungry Blues site.