Forty-five years after he was killed by a state trooper in Alabama, Jimmie Lee Jackson will at last get a taste of justice, and only just a tad, according to friends and relatives of the slain civil rights activist.
On Monday in the Perry County Courthouse in Alabama–not too far from the jail where Jackson, 26, was gunned down on Feb. 18, 1965–James Bonard Fowler, 77, charged with second-degree manslaughter, was sentenced to six months in jail.
Indicted three years ago, Fowler maintained that he shot Jackson in self-defense. He claimed that during the fracas, he feared that Jackson might take his gun and use it against him.
To support the claim, Fowler, leaving the courtroom, showed a scar to reporters. “See this scar right here?” he asked. “It’s from a Coke bottle.”
He said it was not his intention to harm anyone that day after a riot erupted following a civil rights demonstration outside the jail.
One of the spectators at Fowler’s trial was Jackson’s daughter. “He took my father away from me, and I wish he had looked me in the eyes when he apologized,” said Cordelia Billingsley. “As far as I’m concerned, he apologized to the judge, not to me and my family.”
Equally perturbed was Albert Turner Jr., a Perry County commissioner. “This whole thing just shows the ineptness of the district attorney,” he asserted. “If he didn’t have enough evidence, he should never have tried to bring it to trial. What happened today is a slap in the face for this community.”
District Attorney Michael Jackson fired back at Turner, whose father was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., insinuating that Turner was only disappointed that he would no longer be able to benefit from Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death.
The prosecutor also noted that Fowler was nearly 80 and in poor health. “I’d rather that he never got out of jail, but I was concerned that he might die before justice was served,” the district attorney said.
Jackson’s death sparked the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, in which Dr. King led thousands of demonstrators to the state capitol.
Six months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act.
Fowler is to begin serving his sentence on December 1.