By The Editors

In terms of public accomplishment and personality, Jimmie Lee Jackson was said to be an ordinary man. He was devoted to his family and respected by the members of his church in Marion, Alabama. He did not exhibit in his brief life any passion to capture the public imagination.

But, being an American citizen, Jimmie Lee Jackson, of Marion, Alabama, was determined to exercise his right to vote; and, because this was the Alabama of the mid-1960s, that determination to travel the freedom road put his life in danger.

Jimmie Lee Jackson died at 26 on February 18, 1965 in the melee that erupted when Alabama state police brutally set upon nonviolent protest marchers who had just come from a mass meeting on voting rights in a Marion church. According to witnesses, Jackson had moved to protect his mother from being beaten by the troopers when one took out his gun and shot him. Jackson lingered for several days before he succumbed to his wounds. News reports at the time stated that before he died Jackson identified the trooper who shot him.

Tuesday an Alabama Circuit Court judge set Nov. 29 as the date to begin the trial of former Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler, 76, the man charged with murdering Jimmie Lee Jackson. Fowler claims that Jackson attacked him and he fired in self-defense.

Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death occurred as civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were intensifying their challenge to Alabama’s wholesale denial of voting rights to blacks. Jackson, who had sought to register to vote since his 21st birthday had begun attending the mass meetings that were a hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement in the South during those years.

In a 2008 interview, Charles Steele, Jr., president of SCLC, pointed out the galvanic effect of Jackson’s death. It drew national and international attention to the brutality and state-sponsored lawlessness at the core of Jim Crow in the South and it brought King himself to Marion and its larger neighbor to the southeast, Selma, a key location of SCLC’s voting-rights effort in the state.

Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death “sparked the movement,” Steele told the New York Times two years ago, “in terms of King and others saying that they would take the body of Jimmie Lee Jackson and put it on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery and let Gov. George Wallace see what type of racists we have. That became the march from Selma to Montgomery.”

And that now-famous march led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.