Bloody Sunday 117Jackson, Jimmie Lee
(1938–65): Civil rights
activist whose killing
inspired the Selma-to-
Montgomery voting-rights
march.ordered the cameras turned off or be shot out, prompting his deputies to
restrain him, but it was too late. The sheriff broke a finger knocking Vivian
down the courthouse steps.
On 18 February, the Selma protest took a decisive turn in the town of
Marion, twenty miles away. C.T. Vivian and Albert Turner, a bricklayer
and president of the Perry County Civic League, led an emotional rally at
Zion’s Chapel Methodist Church, before making a dangerous evening march
around the courthouse. Local whites sprayed television cameras with black
paint and savagely beat NBC news reporter Richard Valeriani. A man stuck
his face against Valeriani’s and declared coldly, ‘We don’t have doctors for
people like you.’ Suddenly, the lights went out, and public safety director Al
Lingo and fifty state troopers ran wild against the demonstrators and
reporters. One eyewitness said that the troopers ‘beat people at random....
All you had to do was be black.’ As the panicked demonstrators retreated to
the church, troopers stormed in after them, stopping only when marchers
beat them back with furniture.
The troopers then went after blacks left outside, smashing heads and ribs.
Two of the victims were Viola Jackson and her frail father, Cager Lee. Viola’s
26-year-old son, Jimmie Lee Jackson, an army veteran, pulpwood cutter,
and Baptist deacon who tried to register to vote five times, leaped to their
defense and was shot in the stomach. A week later, Jackson succumbed to
infection, the first person to die in an SCLC campaign. The sheriff’s chief
deputy accused SCLC of having ‘wanted him to die. They wanted to make a
martyr out of him and they did.’ Although colonel Lingo knew that a trigger-
happy state trooper killed Jackson, no one was ever prosecuted for the death.
The killing enraged local activists. To accuse the governor, they planned
to walk 54 miles from Selma to Montgomeryand deposit Jackson’s corpse
on the capitol steps. ‘We were going to get killed or we was going to be free,’
one leader recalled. An ambitious five-day trek to Montgomery seemed
unlikely because George Wallace decided a march was ‘not conducive to the
orderly flow of traffic and commerce.’ With his eye on the presidency, he told
an aide: ‘I’m not gonna have a bunch of niggers walking along a highway in
this state as long as I’m governor.’ If the demonstrators stayed in Selma, sher-
iff Clark, not governor Wallace, would be blamed for the unrest. Meanwhile,
King fled to Atlanta because he received more death threats during the Selma
campaign than at any other time. Besides, Wallace’s press release said the
march would be aborted.
The march proceeded without King. On Sunday, 7 March, 1965, SCLC’s
Hosea Williams and SNCC’s John Lewis defied Wallace in leading 525
subdued demonstrators from Brown Chapel to Edmund Pettus Bridge. As
the well-dressed marchers passed the hump of the bridge that crossed the
river east of town, they saw their way blocked by Wallace’s ‘storm troopers,’
Selma to Montgomery
March: A 1965 march
across Alabama led by
Martin Luther King to
dramatize the need for a
federal voter registration
law.