Jimmie Lee Jackson
Age 26
A father, voting rights activist and the youngest deacon in his church
Marion, Alabama
February 18, 1965
"He was sent to be my angel for awhile and then God took him back to be with him."
Emma Jean Jackson
Sister of Jackson
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EJ: He taught me how to, he taught me how to drive. He had a truck. We enjoyed life together — fishing, hunting, and picking berries and all the things that you will find out in the rural area.
He was protective of his little sister.
He was a very loving and caring, compassionate person. And, you know, he loved his family. A lot. And he was a spiritual person also. He became, he was a deacon of his church.
But uh, you know, he knew his place. He knew what he could do and what he couldn’t do. It was a segregated town in a segregated place. Went to segregated schools. So that’s why him and his cousins and, you know, his friends were doing what they were doing back in 1965 because they wanted better. They didn’t have their rights to do what human beings could do.
That’s how they got involved and they started having meetings and organizing then doing all, you know, things like that.
And so that was the beginning of it. He was in Marion at the time of the violence and everything broke out. Jimmie got killed. He got shot.
Nobody expected it because they had, you know, been having meetings all the while before this, and people went to the meeting and they left and they went home. You know, people felt like, you know, this was their right to do what they were doing.
And so, it was the next day, yea, next day, when I found out — me and my mom found out where he was. And uh… But I never got to the hospital to see him. Mhm.
I never saw, I never saw my brother anymore until, um, eight days later after he had passed away.
So at the time of his death he was 26 and that made me 16. You know, being 16, you know it was still a hurt.
He was sent to be my angel for awhile and then God took him back to be with him.
You know, it takes you a while, you know, to get over. And especially when, you gotta understand — the life was taken, just for nothing. Just because of something that he wanted and somebody didn’t want him to have it.
The FBI, they’re calling it one kind of success because they arrested somebody. And I’m calling it not a success for the family. Because there was just so many questions that’s been unanswered. Why was this done? What was the reason? Not just not just killing him. Why, why was this state, why did the state send people in here to, uh, beat and maim people? What was that reason?
END
Photo by Andi Rice Mediaworks
Jimmie Lee Jackson was a father and the youngest deacon in his church. After he graduated from high school, Jackson chopped wood for $6 a day in central Alabama. In the years leading up to his death, Black activists in the area had started to campaign for voting rights, and Jackson had attempted to register to vote several times without success.
On February 18, 1965, Jackson joined his mother, sister, and 82-year-old grandfather, alongside hundreds of other Black people, to protest the jailing of a local civil rights worker. The crowd gathered at the Zion Methodist Church in Marion, Alabama, and then started marching toward the nearby city jail. They soon encountered “a wall of police officers and state troopers who ordered them to disperse, then began beating them with nightsticks” in a “melee,” according to a Department of Justice memo about the case. The protesters scattered, and Jackson sought refuge in a cafe, where he was shot in the stomach by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.
Jackson died in a hospital eight days later, on the morning of February 26, 1965, of an infection caused by the gunshot wound. He was eulogized as a martyr by civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who reportedly said, “You died that all of us could vote, and we are going to vote.” Jackson’s death spurred the historic demonstration on March 7, 1965, now known as Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the civil rights movement, during which a young John Lewis led hundreds of protesters in a march that ended in a brutal attack by state troopers at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The events in Selma contributed to the U.S. Congress passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Initial Investigation
The FBI interviewed Jackson at a hospital in Selma three days before he died, according to the DOJ memo. Jackson recounted the shooting and said he had been beaten by state troopers inside the cafe and again after fleeing it, but he wasn’t able to describe the officers. Several other witnesses corroborated his statement.
James Bonard Fowler, who shot Jackson, claimed that Jackson had hit him on the head with a bottle, and had attempted to take his weapon. Fowler said that Jackson struck him in the hand, which caused his gun to discharge. Varying accounts of what happened are detailed in a DOJ memo on the case. While at least one witness statement generally corroborated Fowler’s account, three witnesses inside the cafe said that they saw the Fowler draw his gun and intentionally shoot Jackson. Another witness said that Jackson had nothing in his hands and was not causing trouble, when Fowler hit him with a club and then shot him.
The FBI received written statements by the trooper who shot Jackson, as well as two other law enforcement witnesses, as supplied by the Circuit Solicitor for the Fourth Judicial Circuit. The results of the investigation were turned over to the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
The State of Alabama Department of Public Safety Investigative and Identification Division led its own local investigation, following which a state grand jury convened in September 1965 and voted that there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.
Till Act Status
The case sat cold for close to 40 years, until Fowler, the trooper who shot Jackson, gave a 2005 interview to journalist John Fleming, from the Anniston Star, a daily newspaper covering Anniston, Alabama. During the interview, Fowler confirmed he had pulled the trigger on Jackson, sparking new interest in the case.
An Alabama district attorney, Michael Jackson, pursued murder charges against Fowler, and in May 2007, Fowler was indicted on charges of first- and second-degree murder. Fowler was 77 when he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter in 2010 and was sentenced to six months in prison. He served five months.
Jackson’s name appeared on the Department of Justice’s list of cases it was reviewing under the Emmett Till Act in 2010. According to the DOJ memo, the review involved reading through prior investigations, autopsy results and media stories about the killing. Files from the original FBI investigation had been destroyed, but agents in Washington, D.C., found excerpts at the National Archives Building and shared them with an FBI field office in Alabama and with the district attorney’s office that prosecuted Fowler.
The DOJ concluded it could not pursue federal prosecution, as Fowler had already pleaded to state charges in 2010. The DOJ closed the case in 2011. Fowler died in 2015.
Case Status closed
Closed 05/03/2011
Themes
- Closed Cases
- Deaths Involving Law Enforcement
- Men
- Prosecuted Cases
- Storycorps Stories
About the Project
This multiplatform investigation draws upon more than two years of reporting, thousands of documents and dozens of first-hand interviews. FRONTLINE spoke to family and friends of the victims, and witnesses, some of whom had never been interviewed; current and former Justice Department officials and FBI agents, state and local law enforcement; lawmakers, civil-rights leaders and investigative journalists, to explore the Department of Justice’s reopening of civil rights-era cold cases under the 2008 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
In addition to an examination of the federal effort, the project features the first comprehensive, interactive list of all those whose cases were reopened by the Department of Justice. Today, the list stands at 151 names. Among the victims: voting rights advocates, veterans, Louisville’s first female prosecutor, business owners, mothers, fathers, and children.
The project consists of a web-based interactive experience, serialized podcast, a touring augmented-reality exhibit, documentary and companion education curriculum for high schools and universities.
A project like Un(re)solved would not be possible without the historic and contemporary contributions of universities, civil rights groups, and the press, particularly the Black press, who have ensured the ongoing public record of racist violence in the United States. To pay homage to these groups, the web interactive begins with a quote from journalist, activist and researcher Ida B. Wells, one of the first to document with precision the horrors of racial terror in America. “The way to right wrongs,” she wrote, “is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
At the outset of the project, FRONTLINE forged a relationship with Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), bringing them on as an academic partner. Launched in 2007 by Distinguished Law Professor Margaret Burnham, CRRJ is a mission-driven program of interdisciplinary teaching, research and policy analysis on race, history, and criminal justice. Their work has expanded beyond the names on the Justice Department’s list, archiving documents in over 1,000 cases of racially motivated homicides.
With support from the CRRJ, FRONTLINE reporters gathered what could be known about the individuals on the list, conducting interviews with family, friends and witnesses, delving into newspaper archives and gathering documentation including headstone applications, draft cards and archival photographs.
At the heart of the project has been a drive to center the voices of the families of those on the list. FRONTLINE partnered with StoryCorps to record nearly two dozen oral histories with victims’ next of kin, which are featured both in the web-based interactive and traveling AR exhibit. These oral histories will also be archived in the National Library of Congress.
To lead the creative vision for the web experience and installation, FRONTLINE partnered with Ado Ato Pictures, a premier mixed reality studio founded by artist, filmmaker, and technologist Tamara Shogaolu.
Shogaolu rooted the visuals in the powerful symbolism of trees. In the United States, trees evoke the ideal of liberty, but also speak to an oppressive history of racially motivated violence. In Persian myth, trees are humanity’s ancestors, while in Toraja, Indonesia, they serve as sacred burial sites.
“I was really inspired by looking at the role of the tree as a symbol in American history” Shogaolu said. “It’s been looked at as a symbol of freedom, we look at it as a connector between generations, and also there’s the association of trees with racial terror.” When designing the creative vision for Un(re)solved Shogaolu wondered whether she might be able to reclaim the symbol of the tree. “As a person of color, we’re often terrified of being in isolated places in the woods. And I thought it was kind of crazy that there are natural environments that instinctually give great fear because of this connection with racial terror and I wanted to reclaim that — to turn these into beautiful spaces.”
Un(re)solved weaves imagery of trees, which also recall family ties, into patterns and textures from the American tradition of quilting. Among enslaved African Americans forbidden to read or write, quilts provided an important space to document family stories. Today, quilting remains a creative outlet rich with story and tradition for many American communities.
We invite you to enter this forest of quilted memories — a testimony to the lives of these individuals, and the multi-generational impact of their untimely, unjust loss.
(Credits to come)