Alabama Black Caucus Wants Ex Trooper Prosecuted in the 1965 Killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson

Members of the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus voted Tuesday to ask federal, state and local officials to prosecute a former state trooper, James Bonard Fowler of Geneva, for the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson 40 years ago. Jackson, a 26-year-old black man, was shot in Marion on Feb. 18, 1965, after law officers forcefully stopped a crowd from marching at night from a church to the Perry County Jail, where a civil rights worker was held. Fowler, 71, said in a phone interview that Jackson grabbed his pistol and the weapon fired as they were fighting over it. ''Jimmy Lee Jackson was not murdered,'' Fowler said. ''It was just an accident. It happened during a melee, during a riot, during a civil disturbance.'' But state Rep. Demetrius Newton, D-Birmingham, an attorney who said he was in Marion just hours after the shooting, said many witnesses at the time said Jackson was trying to defend his grandfather and mother from attacks by law officers and that he was shot ''without provocation.'' Fowler said he never was asked to testify before a grand jury about the shooting. Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, said that's why public officials should investigate Fowler and the shooting now. Originally published in the Birmingham News (Alabama) March 30, 2005 Copyright 2005 The Birmingham News

• Pictured above: Jackson died eight days after he was shot. Newton said he remembers civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Jackson's funeral. Sanders said anger over Jackson's shooting sparked the ''Bloody Sunday'' march of March 7, 1965, when State Troopers beat civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma