Jimmie Lee Jackson’s story cannot be separated from the larger story of the Southern Freedom Struggle in Alabama in the 1960s. Yet it is this very deep and abiding connection between the two stories which makes telling Jimmie Lee’s story so challenging. Newsreel footage, media coverage, eye-witness accounts, articles, books, and films about Selma abound. But the “Selma story” is most-often told from the point of view of well-known individuals or organizations like Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, John R. Lewis, SCLC, or SNCC. Jimmie Lee’s story gets lost. Furthermore, when told from the perspective of these more well-known individuals, his story appears inconsequential. Then, complicating the telling of Jimmie Lee Jackson’s story is the fact that there is little agreement among eye-witness accounts, news footage, and other sources over what that story is. Even Jackson’s murder is shrouded in conflict and differing stories. Everyone agrees he was shot by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler in Mack’s Cafe behind Zion United Church in Marion, Alabama on February 18, 1965. But even witnesses to the shooting do not agree on how the events unfolded.
Bibliography
Steve Fiffer and Adar Cohen. Jimme Lee & James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement that Changed America. (NY: HarperCollins, Regan Arts, 2015). Good detail about Jimmie Lee Jackson but continuing conflict from key eye-witnesses about the circumstances of his life and death.
John R. Lewis. Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998). https://archive.org/details/walkingwithwindm00lewi/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater
One of the most important memoirs of this phase of the Black Freedom Struggle.
Wally G. Vaughn, Mattie Campbell Davis and Christine Bruce. The Selma Campaign 1963-1965: The Decisive Battle of the Civil Rights Movement (Denver: The Majority Press, 2006).
https://archive.org/details/selmacampaign1960000unse/page/n5/mode/2up.
Craig Swanson. The Selma Campaign: Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmie Lee Jackson, and the Defining Struggle of the Civil Rights Era. (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
Periodicals
Debo Adegbile. “The Killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson” in The Marshall Project, February 27, 2015, at: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/27/the-killing-of-jimmie-lee-jackson.
Ari Berman. “Jimme Lee Jackson: The First Martyr of the Selma Struggle” in The Nation. February 19, 2015 at: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jimmie-lee-jackson-first-martyr-selma-struggle/.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. “Jackson, Jimme Lee.” Available at: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/jackson-jimmie-lee. Note this biography of Jackson must be read critically as it propagates the continuing falsehood of Jackson’s service in the US military, when no such military records exist.
Peter J. Ognibene. “Jimmie Lee Jackson: The Death That Gave Life to Voting Rights” in HuffPost, April 20, 2010 at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmie-lee-jackson-the-de_b_456870.
Friends of SNCC Memo on Jimmie Lee Jackson’s Death https://www.crmvet.org/docs/650226_sncc_fos_jlj.pdf.
Filmography
“Eyes on the Prize I,” 1987, an award-winning documentary on the early Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1965. Narrated by Julian Bond. Episode 6, “Bridge to Freedom (1965)” focus on the events in Selma during the Selma to Montgomery marches.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eyesontheprize/ As important as this series is in compiling a historical record of critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, it misses the mark in telling the story of the Selma and Montgomery voting rights campaigns from the ground up. The focus of the series is on the topline organizations, such as SCLC and SNCC, which were instrumental in the Selma to Montgomery marches, but little attention is paid to DCVL (Dallas County Voters League) or the series of events leading up to Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death or what followed.
“Selma,” (2014) written by Paul Webb and directed by Ana Duvernay is described as historical drama, which it is. Important historical or contextual elements are forsaken for the dramatic components needed in a two-hour film. But that makes the film not reflective of the actual events that took place. After watching the film you could not be faulted for coming away believing that Jimmie Lee Jackson’s murder actually took place in Selma, and had just a little to do with the other events depicted in the film. “Selma” focused almost exclusively on the challenges faced by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Selma to Montgomery marches, and in doing so misses the more important story of how and why the Selma to Mongomery march actually began in Marion, Alabama with Jimmie Lee Jackson’s murder. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020072/.