Forty years on, the man who shot Jimmy Lee Jackson sits quietly, comfortably on a sofa in a friend’s house in the south Alabama town of Geneva. He listens closely to specific questions of four decades ago and is attentive when the passages of historical accounts of the events in Marion are read to him.He’s a slightly rotund man, yet not unfit. He dresses in a finely-stripped collared shirt, wears khaki shorts and a camouflaged cap. He shifts from time to time only to move his recently operated leg around, the result, he says, of an old Vietnam-era injury he got while in the Army.
He’s the very picture of poise. Surprisingly relaxed considering this is the first interview he has ever given about Jimmy Lee Jackson, the first time he has ever revealed details openly about that night in 1965, save an affidavit he drew up 40 years ago.
He also seems unbothered by a string of indictments and convictions of people involved in Civil Rights-era killings. As recently as January, Mississippi law enforcement arrested a man they say was involved in the killings of three civil rights workers 40 years ago.
The name Jimmy Lee Jackson certainly means something to him. Although, one might say, he doesn’t appreciate the name in the same way that most historians and students of the Civil Rights Movement do.
They maintain that the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, more than any other event provided a catalyst for the Selma to Montgomery march that came together only a few days after he died. On that day, March 7, or Bloody Sunday as it would become known, the nation and the world would understand how low George Wallace and his allies would stoop to protect a bankrupt ideology. It was a moment that solidified the essential rightness of the Civil Rights Movement in the psyche of the nation.
“There’s no doubt that the initial idea for a march to Montgomery emerged in the immediate wake of Jimmy Lee Jackson’s death,” said Dr. David Garrow, author of a number of books on the Civil Right era including “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize.
If you go to Marion today you’ll find people even more direct about the importance of Jimmy Lee Jackson and his death.
“Without Jimmy Lee Jackson there would not have been a Selma march,” said Elijah Rollins, owner of Lee and Rollins Funeral Home in Marion, an establishment that sits atop the spot that Mack’s Café once occupied.
“This place here,” said Deputy Sheriff Carlton Hogue, a cousin of Jimmy Lee Jackson, “is where it all started. It was because of Jimmy Lee that it all happened. This is the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement.”
These days in Marion there is not only a feeling of justice denied, there is a hunger simply to know the truth. Who, after all, was the trooper that shot Jackson? Why has he never been questioned?
The night Jackson was shot Martin Luther King wired President Johnson’s Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenback, with this message: “This situation can only encourage chaos and savagery in the name of law enforcement unless dealt with immediately.” Katzenback wrote back right away, assuring King that the Justice Department had already launched an investigation into the killing.
• • •Forty years later, still no Justice Department official has ever questioned the trooper about the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson. Nor has anyone else.
James Bonard Fowler, the man on the couch in Geneva, is given to frankness and simplistic statements. Conversations with him tend toward the folksy. He mingles odd yarns from his native rural South Alabama with a sprinkling of short, declarative sentences. His is a sort of controlled rudeness and overbearing, tools he seems to want to use to convince the listener he fits the seldom-used definition of the word mean, as in “destitute of moral dignity or elevation; ignoble, small-minded.”
All of this, however, is a façade belying an enormous complexity and intelligence. Seventy-year-old Bonard Fowler, you might say, hides his intelligence well.
That night at Mack’s Café, Fowler said, “I don’t remember how many times I pulled the trigger, but I think I just pulled it once, but I might have pulled it three times. I don’t remember. I didn’t know his name at the time, but his name was Jimmy Lee Jackson. He weren’t dead. He didn’t die that night. But I heard about a month later that he died.”
In February 1965, the whole of Alabama’s midsection was unsettled to say the least. In Marion, a town of only 3,000, local police had arrested some 600 students, as well as James Orange, a popular field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Local black leaders, feeling something had to be done, managed, eventually, to convince one of King’s assistants, C.T. Vivian, to come to Marion for a night time speech at Zion.
After Vivian spoke, the congregation, led by local leaders Albert Turner and Rev. James Dobynes started leaving the church two-abreast to march down the block to the jail to sing for Orange’s release.
Perhaps as many as 50 troopers were on hand to assist the local police. The press was there as well, including NBC News’ Richard Valeriani.
A few moments after Marion Police Chief T.O. Harris yelled over his bullhorn for the crowd to disperse, Dobynes, knelt in prayer. A trooper promptly whacked him over the head and he was then drug off toward the jailhouse.
It was then that the lights went out. As troopers and police took off after the fleeing marchers, a mob lit into the reporters. Valeriani suffered a serious head wound and the photographers and film crews had their cameras destroyed and lenses sprayed with black paint. Not a single photograph survived.
During a lull in the chaos, Al Lingo, the head of the Alabama Troopers, dispatched Fowler — who had recently arrived from Montgomery — and a few other troopers to Mack’s, where there were reports of people throwing bottles at passing cars.
When he and the others arrived, Fowler says, immediately people started throwing bottles and bricks from the upper story of Mack’s down on the troopers standing in the street.
“We went inside,” he said, “the juke box was blaring and it was pretty crowded. We told them that this has got to stop.”
Then, he says there, “might have been a few billyclubs swung. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a state trooper and I saw an elderly black lady. She hit him upside the head with an old-timey coke bottle. There were several people on this state trooper. They were men and women on him, clinging to him, swinging at him.
“I think one state trooper was down. I was going to their assistance when I realized someone was pulling my pistol out of my holster. And the pistol was out of my holster and I reached down and grabbed it around the cylinder and he had the handle of the pistol and I had the pistol and at that time I was very strong and I remember swinging him around with my elbows and arms right like that, and he was right there, and my hand was on the trigger then and I pulled the trigger.”
• • •Normareen Shaw was inside Mack’s that night. She was the manager at the time. And her 69-year-old mind is quite sure it was nothing like the way Bonard Fowler described it.
“I was in the kitchen,” she said, “when I started hearing sticks whacking and people hollering. I said to them in the uniforms, ‘y’all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. These folks not doing anything. And they [the troopers] paused for a second, everyone did. Then these three other troopers came in and it all started again.’ ”
Shaw continued, “I didn’t see no bottle flying, nothing like that.”
Elijah Rollins, the funeral home director, said he was upstairs that night.
“I can tell you one thing,” said Rollins. “There were no bottles or rocks thrown at anyone that night. I was upstairs in Mack’s that night. I would know.”
For Fowler, the killing was simply a question of self-defense.
“Jimmy Lee Jackson was not murdered,” he says. “He was trying to kill me and I have no doubt in my mind that, under the emotional situation at the time, that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol that he would have killed me or shot me.”
And this is the point he wants to make, the reason he wants to talk. Fowler wants his side of the story to be told and does not fear indictment.
“I don’t think legally I could get convicted for murder now no matter how much politics they got ’cause after 40 years they ain’t no telling how many people is dead,” he says.
It is a bristling kind of confidence when you consider events of the last few years.
• • •In early January, Mississippi authorities arrested a 79-year-old preacher named Edgar Ray Killen who, investigators say, helped organize the murders of Civil Rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss. in June of 1964. Other arrests, Mississippi law enforcement officials say, will follow.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was murdered in August 1955 in Money, Miss. for whistling at a white woman. His two killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, but admitted a short time later in a national magazine article that they had indeed killed Till. Now the Justice Department is exploring reopening the case.
In 1963, Byron de la Beckwith assassinated Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary, in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss., home. Mississippi prosecutors convicted de la Beckwith of the murder 31 years later in 1994 and sent him to jail for the rest of his life.
Four little girls died when a bomb went off outside their Sunday school class in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. In 1977, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley managed to convict Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss of four counts of murder. In 2001, U.S. Attorney Doug Jones won a conviction against Thomas Blanton in the same case. The following year he successfully prosecuted the last surviving suspect in the bombing, Bobby Frank Cherry.
• • •As far as Bonard Fowler is concerned, self-defense pretty much makes this the end of the story. So he speaks of the time after Marion, when he continued to be promoted until he finally left the state troopers in 1968, he says, to kill as many Vietnamese as he possibly could. They had, after all, killed his brother, Robert, a decorated war hero and near-legend in Geneva. But over time, he came to love and respect the people he wanted to kill.
“I have a great admiration for the Asian people,” he said looking across the couch to his wife of 10 years, Noie, a native of Burma.
For him the world would be a better place if we could all, as the Buddhists stress, “obliterate greed, selfishness and envy.”
He’ll tell you too that he has no patience with anyone wishing to call him a racist. His embrace of the individual — no matter the color, as long as the character is true — goes back a long way.
As a boy growing up he felt safety and comfort in the bosom of blacks, he said. But the blacks of the Civil Rights Movement, the ones he confronted, they were different, apart from what he had always known. And, he adds, this was not their fault; it was the fault of outside agitators. In his mind, the old segregation-era in the South was a much better place for blacks.
“I think that segregation was good, if it were properly done,” he said.
Still, he professes love and admiration for many blacks. He calls Nelson Mandela the savior of a nation. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is a wonderful man, he says, by far the wisest in an administration full of idiots. He’s at home with the blacks in his corner of the county, neighbors all of them, good people he would do anything for.
And as for the symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King? Bonard Fowler could care less.
“I’m on the side of J. Edgar Hoover,” he said. “I think [King] was a con artist. I don’t think he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into heaven. No more chance than I do. His goal was to screw and ——- over every white woman that he could.”
That’s some bitter rhetoric for someone like Deputy Carlton Hogue to swallow. For him, a cousin of Jimmy Lee and more than an admirer of Martin Luther King, a shooting 40 years ago in a forgotten café in a forgotten town, it’s about justice, it’s about history and it’s about family.
“There ain’t no statute of limitations on murder,” he said. “That man needs to be prosecuted just like they did with [Bobby Frank] Cherry up in Birmingham.”
For Emma Jean Jackson, Jimmy Lee’s sister who was 16 at the time of the shooting, it is even simpler than that.
“Why?” She asked from her office in the nearby town of Eutaw. “All I want to ask him is, why. That’s all. Well, he says it was self-defense, then I still want to know why. Did he really have to go to that extreme? Jimmy Lee didn’t have a gun.”
A few minutes later she said, “We had quite an age spread, so I was just getting to know him. So I think often about all the years we could have had growing up together. I missed all that. And I miss him.”
John Fleming is The Star’s Editor at Large. A version of this article appears in this month's Sojourners Magazine (www.sojo.net).
