Jimmie Lee Jackson

Jimmie Lee Jackson (1938-1965), civil rights activist. Jackson was born in the central Alabama town of Marion, the son of impoverished farmers and the great-grandson of former slaves. He finished high school in a time when most African Americans did not go past elementary school, then served in the military and moved to Indiana. His father's sudden death forced him to return to the South to support his family as a farmer and woodcutter, earning the equivalent of $15,000 a year. His and other African Americans' constitutional right to vote had been created by the 15th amendment shortly after the Civil War but then stolen over the next few decades by a combination of fraud, legal trickery, and violence. Blacks officially retained this right, but those who tried to exercise it were barred from registering and then often fired from their jobs or physically attacked. As a result, fewer than 1% of blacks in the Deep South were registered to vote. Because only registered voters were eligible for jury duty, blacks were almost always tried by all-white juries; this was also true in the rare instances that whites were arrested for crimes against blacks. African Americans were also subjected to a law enforcement system of harassment, unjust arrest, and brutality, while the general public either ignored these actions or blamed the victims. All of this helped keep black Americans in an oppression condition not much different from what they had experienced during slavery.

In the 1950s, though, the Civil Rights Movement began as Jackson and others began risking their lives to press for change. He attended civil rights meetings, took part in boycotts of white businesses that mistreated African Americans, and wrote a letter to a federal judge protesting the denial of voting rights. He tried to register to vote as soon as he turned twenty-one and then every year after that but was turned away each time. He also became the youngest deacon in his church's history. In February 1965, Martin Luther King, C.T. Vivian, John Lewis, Amelia Boyton, and other civil rights leaders came to the nearby town of Selma to help register black voters. They chose this location in part because local sheriff James G. Clark had a violent reputation that was considered brutal even by local standards; on one occasion, for instance, he sucker-punched Vivian in full view of news cameras on the courthouse steps. King hoped, as in Birmingham and other settings, that if white Americans saw images of peaceful protesters being attacked, they would pressure the federal government to support civil rights. On the evening of February 18, Jackson and 500 other people were marching peacefully in Marion when they were suddenly attacked by police officers and vigilantes. Jackson, his mother, and his grandfather were pursued into a cafe, and when he tried to protect his relatives from being beaten, state trooper James Bonard Fowler shot him twice in the stomach at point-blank range. He managed to escape the cafe despite his injuries and while being beaten, and he lay in the street for nearly thirty minutes before being taken to the hospital, where another policeman read an arrest warrant against him for assault and attempted murder of an officer. After lingering in intense pain for eight days, Jimmie Lee Jackson died of an infection in his gunshot wounds. He was twenty-six. At his funeral, King said: "I never will forget as I stood by his bedside a few days ago...how radiantly he responded, how he mentioned the freedom movement and how he talked about the faith that he still had in his God. Like every self-respecting Negro, Jimmie Jackson wanted to be free...He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician, from governors on down, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam and cannot protect the rights of its own citizens seeking the right to vote. He was murdered by the indifference of every white minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of his stained-glass windows. And he was murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice." Jackson was buried next to his father in a cemetery that also held the remains of their enslaved ancestors and with a tombstone that read "He was killed for man's freedom." Government officials falsely claimed that the marchers had attacked the police and refused to even release Fowler's name, and an all-white jury refused to indict Fowler. Jackson's death also inspired many others to keep fighting for civil rights. John Lewis later recalled that "We knew then that his death and his funeral would become the linchpin, the spark, to continue the fight for the right to vote. So, Jimmie Lee Jackson's funeral was very sad, and his death. But he didn't die in vain." Another activist put it more plainly: "We were infuriated to the point where we wanted to carry Jimmie's body to [Governor] George Wallace and dump it on the steps of the capitol."

Over the next few weeks, the protesters attempted to march from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, fifty-six miles away. Thousands of people took part, including Jackson's grandfather, but they were thwarted by court orders and further violence. John Lewis' skull was fractured by an officer's nightstick. Amelia Boynton was teargassed and beaten unconscious by another officer on horseback. Two white activists were murdered, and their deaths received much more attention from the media and the government than Jackson's had. Federal officials were finally sent to protect the protesters, and nearly a month after Jackson's murder, 25,000 people marched into Montgomery. All of this helped push public opinion further in support of civil rights. Six months after Jackson died President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had been supported by nearly every member of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, outside the Deep South. This law was designed to protect African Americans' constitutional voting rights by banning the legal trickery that had long been used to deny those rights and by giving the federal government greater supervisory power over elections in certain states. This law had a massive effect on black political power in the South. Within a year, 7,000 African Americans in Selma had registered to vote. The number of elected officials around the country increased from around 1,500 in 1970 to nearly 5,000 in 1980 and 10,500 in 2011; these included John Lewis, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 until his death in 2020. White southern politicians who had long opposed civil rights were now compelled to change their positions or be voted out of office, as was the fate of Sheriff James G. Clark. The increased number of black voters and jurors also meant that many whites who had committed racist crimes during the Civil Rights Movement were finally put on trial. One of these was James Bonard Fowler, who was indicted for murder in 2007 and, despite insisting that Jackson had tried to take his gun and that he had acted in self-defense, pled guilty to manslaughter in 2010. The 77-year-old was sentenced to six months in prison and released after five due to health problems. At the same time, though, most white southerners left the Democratic Party and became Republicans. By the 20th century white southern Republicans remained as opposed to present-day civil rights reforms as their predecessors had been. Tactics like voter ID laws and underfunding of voting centers in predominantly black areas could not fully suppress the black vote, but they did have a significant impact on races like the 2000 presidential election and the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Jackson's tombstone has been vandalized several times. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, enabling southern states to enact new laws that have made voting more difficult for likely Democratic voters like the poor, college students, and minorities. A year later Jimmie Lee Jackson was portrayed by rising star Lakeith Stanfield in the Ava Duvernay film Selma. Jackson returned to the public eye again in 2020 as continued voter suppression, police brutality, and other aspects of racial inequality led to massive protests on a scale not seen since the 1960s and as some of those protests were met with a violent law enforcement response not dissimilar to those that had ended his life 55 years earlier.

©David Brodnax, Sr.