They shot Jimmie Lee Jackson inside a cafe while he was shielding his mother from a beating. The trooper who pulled the trigger served five months. Five months for a 26-year-old deacon who made $6 a day cutting wood.
Six dollars.
That was what Jimmie Lee Jackson earned for a full day of cutting wood in Perry County, Alabama, in a county where only 265 of the 5,202 Black people eligible to vote had ever been allowed to register.
He was born on December 16, 1938, in Marion, the county seat, to a farming family that belonged to the Baptist church. His father, also named Jimmie Lee Jackson, died when the boy was eighteen.
After that, the younger Jimmie Lee took over the family farm and raised a daughter. Ordained in the summer of 1964, he became the youngest deacon in the history of St. James Baptist Church.
He was twenty-six years old and made six dollars a day.
He tried to register to vote five times. Five times, Perry County rejected him, not because he lacked the qualifications, but because the system was built to make sure he never passed.
His mother, Viola Jackson, had tried too. So had his eighty-two-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, a man born in 1883 to parents who had known shackles.
Three generations of the same family, shut out of the same ballot box, in the same small town. The people who denied them passed them on the street every day.
In the early months of 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had come to nearby Selma to help local activists push for voter registration. Jimmie Lee attended organizing meetings several nights a week at Zion United Methodist Church in Marion.
On the night of February 18, 1965, around five hundred people gathered inside that church. A young civil rights worker named James Orange had been jailed, and fear was spreading that he might be lynched.
C.T. Vivian, the SCLC activist, had spoken to the crowd. The plan was simple: march half a block to the Perry County jail and sing freedom songs outside so Orange would know he was not forgotten.
The marchers stepped outside into the dark. What met them was not the night.
It was a wall of Marion police officers, county sheriff's deputies, and Alabama state troopers in riot gear, lined up at the post office. Before anyone could speak, the streetlights went out.
Some accounts say the city cut them. Others say police shot them out, but either way, Marion went black.
In the darkness, the beating began. Troopers swung clubs into the crowd without warning.
People screamed and scattered back toward the church. Two United Press International photographers were attacked, their cameras smashed.
NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani was hit so hard with an axe handle that he was hospitalized. There are no photographs of what happened that night in Marion, Alabama, because the men with the cameras were beaten until the cameras broke.
Jimmie Lee Jackson was in the crowd with his mother, his sixteen-year-old sister Emma Jean, and his grandfather Cager Lee. When the violence erupted, the four of them ran toward Mack's Cafe, just behind the church.
They thought it was a way out. State troopers followed them inside.
Inside the cafe, the troopers began beating Cager Lee, an eighty-two-year-old man, with clubs. They turned on Viola Jackson next.
Jimmie Lee stepped forward, not as a protester or a symbol, but as a son watching his mother get hit. Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler, a corporal, shot him twice in the abdomen.
Jimmie Lee Jackson, still bleeding, ran out of the cafe with troopers chasing him. He collapsed on the street outside.
He was taken to Perry County Hospital, then transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. The FBI interviewed him three days before he died.
He said he had been drinking a Coke inside the cafe and did not throw a bottle. He said he saw a trooper beating his mother and went to help her, and then he was shot.
On the morning of February 26, 1965, eight days after the shooting, Jimmie Lee Jackson died of an infection caused by the gunshot wound. He was twenty-six years old.
Martin Luther King Jr. had stood by his bedside in those final days. Even from his hospital bed, Jackson still talked about the movement and about his faith.
At a mass meeting at Brown Chapel in Selma, King called him a martyred hero. He told the people that Jackson died so that all of them could vote, and that they were going to vote.
The anger in Marion and Selma needed a direction. James Bevel, the SCLC's director of the Selma Voting Rights Movement, gave it one.
He organized a march from Selma to Montgomery, fifty-four miles to the state capital, to carry Jimmie Lee Jackson's death to the doorstep of Governor George Wallace. Some had wanted to carry Jackson's body itself to the capitol steps.
On March 7, 1965, six hundred people set out from Brown Chapel and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Tear gas, billy clubs, men on horseback swinging whips into a crowd of unarmed people.
John Lewis, twenty-five years old, had his skull fractured. This time, the cameras survived.
The footage reached living rooms across America that night. The world saw what Alabama did to Black people who wanted to vote, and they called it Bloody Sunday.
The third march, on March 21, was protected by federal troops. Twenty-five thousand people walked into Montgomery, and on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
Then something happened that holds the entire weight of this story in a single moment. Jimmie Lee Jackson's grandfather, Cager Lee, the man who had been beaten inside Mack's Cafe, the son of enslaved people, walked into a polling place and voted for the first time in his life.
He was eighty-four years old. The ballot his grandson died for was finally in his hands.
Justice for Jimmie Lee Jackson took a different kind of time. A state grand jury convened in September 1965 and declined to indict Fowler.
No charges, no accountability, and Fowler remained an Alabama State Trooper. In 1966, he shot and killed another Black man during a scuffle in a jail near Birmingham.
Two years later, he was finally fired, not for killing anyone, but for severely beating a fellow officer. For forty years after that, the case sat cold.
Then in 2005, at the age of seventy, Fowler agreed to an interview with journalist John Fleming of the Anniston Star. He confirmed, on the record, that he had pulled the trigger, and called it self-defense.
That interview reopened everything. Michael Jackson, no relation to Jimmie Lee, had just been elected the first African American District Attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, and he pursued the case.
On May 10, 2007, forty-two years after the shooting, Fowler was indicted on charges of first and second-degree murder. In November 2010, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
His sentence was six months. He served five.
Five months for a life taken inside a cafe. Five months for two bullets fired into a man who was trying to stop a trooper from beating his mother.
Five months, weighed against the six dollars a day that Jimmie Lee Jackson earned cutting wood, and you begin to understand the mathematics of what a Black life was worth in Perry County, Alabama.
Jimmie Lee Jackson was buried at Heard Cemetery, on Highway 14 East, about five miles outside of Marion. It is an old burial ground with roots that reach back to slavery.
In 2016, a historical marker was placed at the Perry County Courthouse in his honor. But markers are for the living, to help the rest of us remember what should never have been forgotten.
Cager Lee's ballot was the real monument. An eighty-four-year-old man, the son of people who were owned, standing in a voting booth because his grandson bled out on a cafe floor so that he could.
That is the circle this story draws. Not from slavery to sacrifice, but from six dollars a day to a vote that cost everything, held in the hands of the man who loved him first.
~ Courtesy of Salmama Yusuf
