John Flemming from the Anniston Star has discovered important documents from the FBI's 1965 investigation of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
An FBI file about a 1965 shooting that provided a catalyst for the Selma-to-Montgomery March contains eyewitness accounts as well as a statement from the victim, who later died.
The file, obtained by The Anniston Star from an archive at Washington University in St. Louis, contains some 160 pages, including interviews with local police and affidavits of people caught up in a riot and its aftermath in Marion that led to the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper.
The trooper, James Bonard Fowler, was indicted for murder by a Perry County grand jury on May 9. He has admitted shooting Jackson, but has maintained to this newspaper that it was done in self-defense. Fowler remains free on $250,000 bond. Circuit Judge Thomas Jones of Selma will set a tentative trial date and Fowler will be allowed to enter a plea on July 10.
Neither the prosecution nor the defense in the case had seen the file until they were provided a copy by The Star this week. Parts of the file could be important to both sides because some statements bolster one side while others seem to bolster the other side, say those familiar with the case....
The names of many witnesses, as well as the names of the FBI agents conducting the interviews, are redacted, along with other parts of the statements. One statement that is mostly intact, however, is Jackson's.
FBI agents interviewing him at Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital on Feb. 23, 1965 - five days after the shooting and five days before he died - wrote that Jackson said he was in a Marion restaurant, Mack's Café, when troopers came inside and started beating him.
The statement says Jackson saw troopers beating his mother and recalls being shot by a state trooper in the stomach. The agents wrote that Jackson recalled then running from the café into the street, where the troopers continued to beat him. The agents added that Jackson could not offer a description of the trooper who shot him or of the ones who beat him or his mother.
Definitely read the rest.
John Flemming, who originally discovered that James Bonard Fowler is alive and could be prosecuted, has been doing excellent reporting on the Jimmie Lee Jackson Case. You can find the archive of all of his articles on the case, as well as related documents, in the sidebar to his original 2005 article on Fowler.
Recently Flemming reported on a surprising claim by one of the doctors who treated Jackson before he died at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. In a 1979 interview, Dr. William Dinkins claimed Jackson was actually killed by an anesthesia overdose and that the cause of death was covered up. The interview was conducted for the documentary, Eyes on the Prize, but was not used in the version that aired on TV.
Also in the Eyes on the Prize archive of interviews is an eyewitness account from civil rights leader Albert Turner, which corroborates Jackson's statement to the FBI.
[T]hey 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.
I originally blogged about Turner's statement in March 2005. I also wrote a letter to the editor about it, which the Anniston Star published that same month. This seems like a good time to get the Albert Turner interview back into the discussion of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTS
