After 42 Years, an Indictment for Jimmie Lee Jackson

by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 9, 2007

A grand jury in Alabama handed up an indictment on Wednesday in an obscure killing that helped inspire the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The case is the latest in a series of belated prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Everyone assumes the identity of the defendant is former Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.

The identity of the killer has long been known, James B. Fowler, a retired trooper, and on Wednesday Mr. Fowler's lawyer, George Beck of Montgomery, said he could "only assume" that Mr. Fowler was the subject of the indictment.The district attorney would not release the name or the charge until the defendant had been notified.Mr. Beck said, "I think we can all assume that Mr. Fowler was indicted."Mr. Fowler, 73, has admitted the killing in interviews but insisted that the shooting was in self-defense as Mr. Jackson tried to grab the trooper's gun.Books on the civil rights movement have painted a different picture of that night. Multiple accounts say that Mr. Jackson was in a group of demonstrators pushed back by club-swinging troopers into Mack's Cafe and that he watched his grandfather, Cager Lee, 82, being beaten and his mother, Viola Jackson, attacked.When Mr. Jackson lunged to protect her, the historians say, a trooper shot him twice in the stomach.He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state's Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act.

As the DA proceeds with the prosecution, keep in mind that though Fowler may well be guilty of shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson, historical accounts suggest that there are others who should also be held accountable. As I've written previously:

Eyewitnesses, including civil rights leader Albert Turner and the owner of Mack's Café where Fowler shot Jackson, say that after the shooting, troopers dragged Jackson outside and had a bona fide lynching, beating him to a pulp with clubs and fists....Jimmie Lee Jackson died at Good Samaritan hospital in Selma. But he was carried first to the local hospital in Marion. According to Albert Turner, Jackson waited there an hour without treatment and it was another hour or more before Jackson was admitted at the hospital in Selma, approximately thirty miles away.

This is not to minimize the importance of the indictment. Jimmie Lee Jackson's family needs to have have some measure of justice in the case---as John Flemming has made clear in a moving article in the Anniston Star.

After 43 years, it's about time, Cager Lee [Jr.] and his family say."This is a chance for justice to finally be served," said B.J. Johniken, Cager Lee's grandson and a cousin to Jimmie Lee Jackson. "Back then people could get off for that kind of thing. But it's a new century now," said the 26-year-old City of Anniston employee.For Cager's granddaughter Kristy Thomas, an Anniston resident who works at the incinerator, the convening of the grand jury is something she thought would never happen."I used to listen to my pa-pa tell this story when I was a kid," said Thomas motioning to Cager Lee. "It was clear to me that there was never any attempt to even find who was responsible for this, any effort to try to get to the bottom of it. They thought then, that's the way things should be, that it was just justified because he was a black man. I certainly never thought we would get to the point of actually doing something about it."Joy Lee of Gadsden, a 37-year-old granddaughter of Cager, believes she lives in a better, more inclusive world because of the sacrifices people made during the civil rights movement."Jimmie Lee and others enabled me to have a life and friends I have now," she said. "My best friend is white. Now that's progress, although we still have a long way to go."Her aunt, Kay Johniken, a 49-year-old who works for the Anniston Water Works, agrees, but at the moment has her eye squarely on the events in Selma."This [grand jury] should have happened in 1965," she said. "Alabama was like an island during the civil rights movement. Law enforcement did whatever they wanted and often they were protected by their superiors."...During a lull in the family chatter of a far-away time, Cager Lee excused himself for a trip to the other end of the house for some rest. When he passed from the room, unsteadily, leaning heavily on a cane, daughter Janice Jackson of Gadsden steered the subject to justice."This is what I think that grand jury means to me, to us," she said. "We want Cager to feel that justice was done. For him that shooting was just like it was yesterday. He has to feel that justice was done. It means everything to us."A few minutes later, when Cager Lee shuffled back into the room, he said in a loud whisper, "Well, if that trooper gets indicted, then I'll just say that I feel like he will be getting what is coming to him."

But as Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner reminds us in the attached podcast, "these trials are in no way the end; these trials are only the beginning."UPDATES