Throughline - The X On The Map

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

In 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson was an unarmed black civil rights activist who was murdered in Marion, Ala., after a peaceful protest. His murder brought newfound energy to the civil rights movement, leading to the march to Montgomery that ended in "Bloody Sunday." This week, we share an episode we loved from White Lies as they look for answers to a murder that happened more than half a century ago.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arab-Louie, and this is ThruLine from NPR. Today on the show, Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace are joining us. They're the hosts of NPR's podcast, White Lies.

Chip and Andrew, thank you so much for coming into the studio to talk to us. Yeah, thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. Really appreciate it. Love the show. So, all right, you guys host this great new series from NPR called White Lies, and it investigates a cold case from more than 50 years ago, right? So catch us up. What's the series about? So White Lies is about the unsolved, unresolved murder of a man named James Reeb, who was a Unitarian minister who came down to Selma, Alabama in March of 1965 to support the voting rights campaign going on in Selma.

And he was actually, while he was in Alabama, he was attacked on the streets in Selma, died a couple of days later in Birmingham. And his murder has essentially gone unsolved for the last 54 years. Race is obviously front and center in this story. So I wonder, how did that factor into how you thought about telling it? You know, you're both white reporters. Did you feel like your whiteness granted you or denied you any access in talking to people? It definitely helped with access, for sure. I mean, I think being two white guys from Alabama who look the way we look and also, you know, can kind of talk the talk, helped open doors to get people to talk to us who I think otherwise would not have. And so we tried to use that to

our advantage while also understanding that, being aware of that the whole time we were doing this. Yeah, I want to actually dig into that a little bit more if possible, because, you know, our show, what Rhonda and I think about a lot is how stories from history, like the one you're telling, matter today. Why do they matter today? So listening to the show, I often thought about, I have my own ideas about this, but I want to hear what you all think about why the story of Reeves and why a story that you chose to tell matters today. Well, I think white people think of the civil rights movement and of black history, white people often think of it as black history. It has nothing to do with white people, that this is not American history, but we do these things

in February. We talk about the civil rights movement. We talk about Martin Luther King. This is not connected to who we are as a people. And I think as white Southerners who have long interrogated our own family's roles and our own culpability in the sins of the past, we have felt that that is an insufficient way to talk about where we are as a nation right now. And so I think as white people going down to look at the murder of this white man by other white people and a community of white people who protected it, it actually makes a certain kind of sense that white journalists would be asking questions about the story, even though, of course, the context of this is the

struggle for black voting rights. So I think we've been trying to triangulate our way around to really lean into the strengths we have as white Southerners telling the story, but also being very aware that this is not a story of our own liberation. In fact, it's a story of our own guilt and our own sort of responsibility to the past. It's a great series for everyone listening. You should check it out. But now we're going to pivot a little because today you're bringing us a little bit of a different story, right? Yeah. So the story of James Reeb and how James Reeb gets to Selma in the first place is all because of this thing called Bloody Sunday that happened in early March of 1965 when these peaceful demonstrators decided they were going to walk to Montgomery to protest the lack of voting rights. And they were met at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

They were met by a group of state troopers who beat these peaceful protesters. John Lewis and Hosea Williams were at the front of the line. These kind of iconic images of these peaceful protesters being beaten by all these sheriff's troopers, many of them mounted on horseback, shooting tear gas into the crowd. That event is what prompted James Reeb to come down to Selma along with many, many other white Unitarians and other clergymen and women who decided to lend their support to the movement. Well, all of that only happens because in February of 1965, a man named Jimmy Lee Jackson is shot and married by a state trooper during a night march. And that murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson is what prompts the folks in the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to decide to do the march to Montgomery in the first place.

So Bloody Sunday does not happen without Jimmy Lee Jackson's death the previous month. And Jimmy Lee Jackson's death, I mean, did that get the same sort of national attention that Reeb's death got? No, not at all. In fact, there was very little made outside of the local community of Marion and Selma about Jimmy Lee Jackson's death. So, you know, you do a compare and contrast. When Jim Reeb dies, the president sends flowers to his wife down in the hospital in Birmingham, makes or receives dozens of phone calls with his staff and with others, and then sends a jet to fly Jim Reeb's widow back to Boston. Then a week later invokes Jim Reeb's death when he introduces the Voting Rights Act before

both houses of Congress. When Jimmy Lee Jackson died just a few weeks before, no phone calls, no roses, no airplane, no mention in the press. There's one small story in the press, but none of the national outrage that Jim Reeb's death draws from around the country. And so it took the death of a white man, essentially, to kind of draw that national attention to this bigger issue. Yeah, I think, I mean, it is a testament to the way that white lives matter more than Black lives in 1965. And I think the case could be made that this is still a massive problem today. And that's what makes the Black Lives Matters movement such a resonant story today and how

it connects back to our story as well. Okay, excited to hear this. Here's an excerpt from NPR's podcast, White Lies. When the state trooper who shot Jimmy Lee Jackson was charged with his murder in 2007, a woman named Mary Cosby Moore was a circuit clerk at the Perry County Courthouse in Marion, 30 miles northwest of Selma. I think that's where my interest really grew, looking at the case and following the case and then handling all the court documents, because in that case, all the documents have to come through the clerk's office, and the discovery of it was just fascinating.

Like so many people in town, Moore had a personal attachment to the case. Even though she was only seven years old in 1965, her family and Jimmy Lee Jackson's family knew each other well. Her grandfather was close with Jimmy Lee's grandfather, Kajer Lee, and their mothers were also friends. As a matter of fact, Ms. Viola was the first person that started my mom in chickens. She gave my mom two chickens at the time. And my mom had never dealt with chickens before, so she gave her two chickens and my mom started raising chickens. Of course, we got so attached to the chickens that I don't think any of them ever got on the dinner table, but we did eat the eggs.

Marion was like this, smaller than Selma, more familial. Everybody seemed to know everybody. And Jimmy Lee Jackson was one of theirs. And while the voting rights campaign in Marion would often later be lumped in with the broader movement in Selma, Marion had its own local movement. I had participated in the movement in Birmingham. I was right down the street from where the fire hoses and the dogs. That's Walton McKinney, who had grown up in Marion, but who left for a few years to attend college in Birmingham. So I came home and I was unable to register to vote.

I registered in Birmingham, but when I got home, I still had no authority to vote here in Marion. We would put you off day after day after day, but still we would go up to the courthouse, to the registrars. They said, come back the next day, come back the next day. And then finally when they did let you come in, they would give you a stack of papers, about a half-inch thick, questions to answer. How many pennies in this jar?

And you have a jar full of pennies. Are they going to ask you something about some dead president or back in the 1800s or 1500 BC, just question after question. And you could not answer them. These so-called literacy tests, which weren't fully banned until 1970, could also include sections that required prospective voters to read aloud, then interpret, then transcribe long passages of legalese from the Alabama Constitution, a notoriously noxious and long-winded document that was crafted in 1901 with the explicit mandate to, quote, establish white supremacy in this state,

end quote. That same constitution, by the way, is still the basic governing document of the state of Alabama. But it became my job, some of us, to try to teach people how to pass the test, even though we couldn't pass ourselves. The local leader of the voting rights movement in Marion was Albert Turner. Like Walter McKinney, Turner was a recent college graduate who was fed up with the lack of racial progress in his hometown. Turner died in the year 2000, but here he is from a filmed interview in 1979. And I had insisted, I had tried and always thought I was a pretty good student myself.

And it was kind of a front to me that these dummies who was registrars were saying to me that I couldn't pass a test that they was given and they couldn't hardly write their names. By the beginning of 1965, Turner and other local leaders had been trying to register Black voters for a few years, but they'd managed to register only 75 people. But as more national voting rights organizations came to Selma in January, some of them began fanning out into neighboring communities, including Marion. And when they did, the energy there changed. The first Monday in February 1965

was our, was the voter registration day. And of course we called this the day. We had intended that we had no longer, no longer did we plan to go through the jive or pass no test. So we were just going down and have direct action until we got the right vote.

And we stayed in line there all day long. So finally they arrested us, really, and put us in jail. What followed was a wave of mass arrests in the area, with hundreds of demonstrators taken in. The surrounding jails were too small to hold everyone who was arrested, and so many people were sent to Camp Selma, a work camp on the outskirts of town. Walter McKinney was among those who was sent to Camp Selma.

I've never seen anything like it. It was over a hundred of us in this one big room. They had one toilet and water and a dipper. There were students, old people, people on medication. Some people got sick. We had to clean people up. And that many people cluttered in this one place. It almost get too painful to talk about. Eventually, so many people were arrested, they ran out of room, and authorities had to turn everybody loose. It was just too much for the system to handle. But something about these mass arrests changed the tenor of the protests. After that point, we kind of got madder and madder, whatever you want to say.

And finally this time, we had decided to go around the clock. We were just going to demonstrate day and night. Night marches were rare because they were so dangerous. On a basic logistical level, they were just harder to plan and execute. But also, under the cover of darkness, the crowds of hostile whites who would gather in opposition to the march felt even less inhibited than usual, more likely to lash out in violence. The marchers in Marion, though, knew the stakes. Nobody spoke of dying.

We left home, we didn't know if we were coming back or not. But you didn't say that. Some people would leave their kids. They would leave their children. And so if something, if we don't get back, go to grandma's. We got all the important papers stacked right here. So that's how dedicated people were. They never said, well, we're going to die of this if you don't get back. So you're not really living anyways.

You're just existing. On February 18th, Albert Turner called for a night march. Officials in Marion had heard about the plans and radioed for reinforcements. Selma police officers, Dallas County deputies, members of Sheriff Jim Clark's posse, Alabama state troopers, scores of outside law enforcement rolled into Marion. So did Richard Valeriani, who was covering the Selma campaign as a correspondent for NBC News and got wind of what was happening over in Perry County.

Things were relatively quiet in Selma that day, so he drove over and arrived in Marion just before the night march began. This is from an interview he did in 1985. We knew there was going to be trouble right away because local folks came up to us and threatened us, sprayed our cameras with black paint so we couldn't shoot, ordered us to put the cameras down, and harassed us. And it was a very tense situation. Turner had called for the march to start

after a mass meeting at a church in the center of Marion. Okay, as we went out of the church that night to begin the actual march, we got roughly about a half a block from the door, and the sheriff of the county at that time and several troopers halted us. And of course they started whipping people at that point. So all of us tried to get back into the church.

The line of demonstrators still was in the door of the church. The demonstration really never did get all the way out of the church. And we started to turn. They said, go back inside, go back inside. They're beating people up here. They're beating us up. So we turned and went back around the side of the church. And as we got around the side of the church, there was people coming with billy clubs and sticks and beating people.

The town was surrounded. There was nowhere to go, really. The town, the toll town was surrounded that night by auxiliary police, state troopers, sheriffs, and everybody who wanted to come in really who felt like beating folk up. Some of us tried to go back in the front door and some of us just went where we could because as we moved they also moved. They were whipping us as we went. Billet clubs were broken on people's heads. And I got in the back door of the church, and quite a few of the people did, but Jimmy Jackson was not able to make it back in the church. He went down the hill below the church into a small cafe. The place Jimmy Lee Jackson ran into was called Max Cafe. On the second floor above it was a bar. I was in the club, and I heard noise, and I thought maybe

it was the people singing and marching as usual. That's Elijah Rollins. He would be the one who would wind up burying Jamili Jackson. Today, he runs the funeral home in Marion that sits on the very spot where the attack took place. So I walked out on the front porch, and I saw that it was something different altogether. It wasn't the marching or nothing. People were screaming and hollering. People's heads were being torn up, being crossed the head, wherever they could be hit at or whatever.

I guess in the excitement, somebody walked up behind me and hit me with an axe handle, hit me in the head with an axe handle. The NBC correspondent Richard Valeriani. And then somebody walked up to me, a white man walked up to me, and he said, are you hurt? Do you need a doctor? And I was stunned, and I put my hand back on my head, and I pulled it back, and it was full of blood. And I said to him, yeah, I think I do, I'm bleeding. And then he thrust his face right up against mine, and he said, well, we don't have doctors for people like you.

Jimmy Lee Jackson's 82-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, was also hit with the billy club in the back of the head. He stumbled from the church down into Max Cafe, looking for Jimmy, who could take him to the hospital. But as they tried to leave the cafe, state troopers came through the door and wouldn't let them leave. Jimmy tried to press through them with his grandfather, but they threw Jimmy down and started beating him. When Jimmy's mother tried to get the men off her son, they knocked her back. And then they took Jimmy and pinned him against the walls of the building,

and at close range, they shot him in the side. They just took the pistol and put it in his side and shot him. After shooting him, then they ran him out of the door of the cafe, out of the front door of the cafe. And as he ran out of the door, the remaining troopers, or some of the remaining troopers, lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church. And as he ran by them, they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through.

I always kept a brain book, as I call it. What you did, who you see, the time, and everything that you've done. Which really was a book that they'd given us with every day of the year and somewhere to write. But this one is 21865. That's the date this was made in a composition book. This is original. Vera Booker was a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. You heard from her in an earlier episode.

Booker had just clocked in at 11 p.m. from the night shift on February 18th. Here's what she wrote in her brain book for that day. A call came in and said that the young man had been shot in Marion. It was on their way to the Good Samaritan. And his name, Jimmy Lee Jackson. He was 26 years old. His address was Route 3, Box 37, Marion, Alabama. That was way before zip codes.

And when he came in, brought him in and he was all bent over, put a little thing. Gunshot wound of abdomen. That's his complaint. Also a laceration on back of head.

Approximately two inches long. That's what I put down because that's what I saw. All right, how it happened, this is it. Left mass meeting at church in Marion, Alabama, and went to a cafe. Was shot by a state trooper. He didn't give me no name. The ER in Good Sam had four curtain stalls. They put Jimmy on the table in the second one. Got him up on there and tried to stretch him out, but he was in such pain he was just coming back up. And then I noticed when I pulled the sheet up, there was a hole on the left side. As big as a grapefruit of intestines was out of that hole.

They gave him morphine, then x-rayed him, and then later that night he underwent surgery. For a couple days after, it appeared that he might recover from the wounds. Booker recalls feeling hopeful in those first days. He was one of the patients in my life that I just encouraged him. And he was one of the ones I was sure would get well. I just knew Jiminy would be all right. But that third, fourth night, I could tell he was just getting weaker and he was getting fever. I knew that.

And I said, Lord, he's getting infected. Getting infected. And he did. He died eight days later. Coming up, how Jimmy Lee Jackson's death mobilized the black community in Marion. Two funerals were held for Jimmy Lee Jackson. There was an open casket memorial service at Brown Chapel AME in Selma, which nearly 3,000 people showed up for,

and one at the church in Marion, where he'd been a deacon. After the Marion service, a procession half a mile long walked four miles to the Hurd Cemetery, where Jimmy Lee Jackson was buried. I've been by the cemetery, and after, I don't know whether you probably heard this, after he died and everything, someone went and shot the grave up to him. I mean, the whole day I've been there.

You ever go to Mary and run, they sit on that road. They shot it up. That wasn't good enough for him to die. They shot this tombstone that Mark Cecilia had. I see a bit of poison ivy out here. Well, it's been three plus years since I've been here, and I'm looking at this thing. We're standing at Jimmy Lee Jackson's grave just a little ways outside of Marion, and we're looking at the bullet holes in the headstone. We've come here today with Chuck Fager.

In 65, Fager worked in Selma for Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I don't think I see new bullet holes. Maybe that means people have decided to leave it alone. I don't know. It was shocking when I first saw it. Have you ever seen the video footage of the funeral here? No, but I was in it. You were here for the funeral?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, that was the last time that I was asked to march around Dr. King. One of Fager's jobs during the Selma campaign was to stick close to Dr. King. He wasn't called a bodyguard, but that was essentially the deal. The day of Jackson's funeral, it was drizzling rain. It looked like it was just the most ominous day for a funeral, you know. Yeah, and we marched all the way. It's a pretty long stretch from town. We marched all the way it's a pretty long stretch from town we came all the way out here in the rain I think umbrellas protected Dr. King from snipers more than I did or anybody else

because there were lots of umbrellas in the rain I think it's interesting and something we've talked a lot about standing here in front of Jimmy Lee Jackson's grave is probably a good place to talk about it the contrast and comparison between Jimmy Lee's death and Reeb's death. White man's death gets more attention. Is racism partly behind that? Yes. I have no quarrel with that. That's not the whole story. There's an importance to Jimmy Lee Jackson's

death, which I maybe didn't realize as much until much later. Jimmy Lee Jackson's death, which I maybe didn't realize as much until much later, Jimmy Lee Jackson's death catalyzed the black community in this part of the state, okay? It was a big deal here. Okay, it didn't get it international or whatever, but the catalytic effect on the black community here was very important to Beville's ability. It created a force that he was able to mobilize and direct into the march. Fager's talking about James Beville, the charismatic field organizer of the SCLC who was directing the operations in Selma. Beville's response to Jackson's death was that some large demonstration needed to happen. He found a Bible verse somewhere in the Old Testament where somebody says, I must go see the king. And that became his refrain. The king was George Wallace,

and we got to go see the king until this has to stop. They had enough after Jiminy Jackson, and they wanted to do something. Well, after Jiminy Jackson was killed, Jim Belvin and I decided to go and pay a visit to the family. That's Bernard Lafayette, a veteran civil rights organizer who helped lay the groundwork for the voting rights campaign here. And when we arrived, his home was like one of those shotgun houses. It was on stilts, you know, bricks and stuff like that, and there was open sewage running in the backyard. And the whole family had been brutalized.

There was his grandfather with a knot on his head, and there was his mother all bandaged up, and and sister with her arm broken. There were broken spirits and also broken bones. For months, there had been demonstrations in Marion and in Selma, but this event, the unbridled violence, the police brutality, the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, it was categorically different. We were sitting in the kitchen, and Beville asked the grandfather whether he thought the marches should continue. And he very quickly said, yes, definitely, they should continue. He said, I've lost everything. I have nothing more to lose now. Sitting at the kitchen table with Jimmy Lee Jackson's grandfather,

hearing his accounting of what could be gained and what could be lost, it all sounded familiar to Bernard Lafayette. A couple of years before this, Bernard Lafayette was just starting out with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC. SNCC was sending staff into rural communities to begin voter registration drives. And Lafayette wanted to be the director of one of those projects. I was 22 years old, so, you know, 22, you've got to be in charge of something. So he went to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta.

And there was a map of the South. And there was Alabama, but it had an X through it. I said, well, what about Alabama? He said, well, we're not going there because we already sent two teams of SNCC workers there, and they came back with the same report. Nothing could be done there in Dallas County. They had the same reason. They said it was white folks were too mean and black people too scared. But Lafayette went anyway. Soon he was in Selma surveying the challenge.

As long as you have people who are afraid, they also believe that nothing can be done and they want things to stay the same. So my first task had to deal with helping scared black folks, you know, have some courage. When Lafayette arrived in Selma in early 1963, the civil rights movement was reaching its apex. The Montgomery bus boycott and then the sit-ins and the freedom rides had unleashed a wave of activism against segregation and against voting restrictions. And it would only build from there. Finally, white Americans seemed to be paying attention. But these other demonstrations had happened in larger cities. Selma was an entirely

different story. Black families had worked for the same white family for generations. And some of the women, they were wet nurses. They nursed some of the white children. So there was a closeness that you couldn't imagine. First of all, I didn't believe change was possible. And then they didn't want to disturb their relationship because they felt very protective. They used to tell me that if God wanted us to be equal with whites, he would have made us white. You had to have a great imagination that any change was going to happen in Selma, Alabama. There was an area next to Selma University where the young folks would gather. It was called The Block, and we sort of would hang down there. Charles Malden was a 15-year-old high school student in 1963.

And Bernard Lafayette started showing up down there and talking to guys like myself. Began to ask us simple questions like, well, why can't your parents vote? Or why can't you drink out of the white water fountain? Or just simple questions that we had no answers to. We had been terrorized into staying inside of the box. And he began to ask questions that we had never dared ask ourselves because it was just too threatening. That would have been a danger to white society.

In talking to high schoolers like Charles Malden, Lafayette was assembling an army for an as-yet unannounced battle. What they were gearing up for wasn't just a campaign of incremental skirmishes to achieve legislative victories. This was a broader battle to change the very consciousness of Americans. Once our consciousness was opened by people like Stokely and Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, our minds grew by leaps and bounds. And unless you sort of booted out of normalcy, then it's normal to not strive to increase your consciousness. And Dr. King talked about that in Montgomery,

about ending certain types of normalcies, the normalcy of white know, the normalcy of white supremacy, the normalcy of like poverty, the normalcy of the lack of distribution of wealth. That's normal. It takes electricity to somehow shock you out of that. And we had no way of understanding whether we'd succeed or not because it was all so new and so much bigger than probably anything that happened since the Civil War. Selma had been the X on the map in the SNCC office in Atlanta for a reason. It had a reputation for being too volatile a place to organize. But Lafayette

figured out a way to harness that volatility so that Selma was now generating the right kind of electricity. The kind of electricity that would bring hundreds of black people to the courthouse to register to vote each month. The kind of electricity that would fill the jails with peaceful protesters. The kind of electricity that would attract the attention of the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice actually sued the city in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over unconstitutional voter suppression in 1964. Among the named plaintiffs were Sheriff Jim Clark and the local prosecutor Blanchard McLeod. And after Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot and Marion, it was up to Blanchard McLeod to determine what to do.

A shooting demands an inquiry. A state trooper shot an unarmed civil rights demonstrator in the stomach. McLeod told the press he had a signed confession of the shooter, but that the man had claimed self-defense. McLeod refused to identify him and refused to even acknowledge that he was a state trooper. It's unclear what evidence was presented to the grand jury, but no indictment was handed down. These things, though, are clear. That the man who shot Jimmy Lee Jackson was not brought to justice in 1965.

That Jackson's death made his grandfather say to Bernard Lafayette and to James Bevel, yes, keep marching, I don't have anything left to lose. And that the march, which then happened, resulted in another brutal attack. This one in broad daylight at the foot of a bridge with television cameras rolling. The Alabama state trooper who shot Jimmy Lee Jackson wasn't publicly identified at the time.

Decades later, he admitted to pulling the trigger. But he didn't make this admission to police who were investigating the crime. Instead, he admitted it to a reporter. That's after this. The Search for Justice, more than 40 years later. Coming up. I had heard about him when I was growing up, when I was still a kid growing up in South Alabama, that he had been a former state trooper. He spent time in Vietnam.

He was an intriguing character. He ran for public office a couple of times. And I had also heard that he had killed a man during the Civil Rights Movement. But that's all. That's all I heard. John Fleming is now the executive editor of the Center for Sustainable Journalism. Before that, he spent years covering conflicts in South and West Africa, then returned to his native Alabama to work for the Anniston Star. Everyone knows about Jimmy Lee Jackson.

There's ample reporting about how he was killed in this place called Max Cafe, but it just refers to the trooper. The trooper. Fleming had always been interested in these unsolved murders of the civil rights era, and he started thinking back about the Jimmy Lee Jackson story. He wondered if this man he'd grown up hearing about, James Bonner Fowler, was the same trooper who'd shot Jimmy Lee Jackson. I made a few inquiries to people I knew in South Alabama,

and a friend of mine who knew him offered an introduction. And it took a few weeks to get it into place, but we met at this ranch house down in South Alabama, bucolic woods all around, fish pond next door. And we're sitting on couches. But he did ask for a beer early on, and someone went and fetched him a natural light, as I recall. And then we just, we started. And one of the very first things that Bonner Fowler told me was that he was indeed the person who shot and killed Jimmy Lee Jackson. After Fleming published his story, it didn't take long for the news to make its way to Selma and

Marion. I'm gonna be very honest on this because I believe in being blunt and honest. I thought Fowler was dead. So many years had passed. I just, I grew up reading this stuff, and we learned about it in school, too. So at the time I became district attorney, I actually took office in January 2005. I thought Fowler was dead. That's District Attorney Michael Jackson. In 2005, he was newly elected and the only African-American DA in Alabama. His circuit, which consists of five counties, is the largest in the state. And once that interview hit, I started getting calls from everybody, letters of calls,

people calling saying, you need to open up an investigation. And I said, fine. I didn't think anything was going to come of it, but it was my job as district attorney to look into it. So I hopped in my car and went down to Marion, the courthouse in Marion, and sat on the corner waiting for folk to pay and walk by. A confession to a newspaper reporter is one thing. But in order to actually prosecute the case, Jackson would need more than that. He needed witnesses. So he just went down to the courthouse and started watching people.

And I'm figuring, I'm calculating the age of people. I said, well, this person would have been around then if they grew up and married. So I started talking to people. And pretty quickly, that first day actually, he found a few people who knew people who had been there. A few weeks passed, he gathered more people who could testify, and finally he made his way to Vera Booker. 21865. That's the date this was made in a composition book.

This is original. And Miss Booker can talk. And so after Miss Booker, I think that was like the final thing to say, okay, I'm going to take this to the grand jury. I think I got enough. NPR's Debbie Elliott has more. Standing in a courtroom in rural Marion, Alabama today, 77-year-old James Fowler said he didn't mean to kill anyone. Fowler was soon to face trial for the 1965 murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young voting rights activist shot to death during a clash with white state troopers. District Attorney

Michael Jackson, no relation to the victim, says Fowler agreed to plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter and will serve six months in jail. Fowler was sentenced to six months but spent only five in jail. He was released in the spring of 2011, died in the summer of 2015. If you go to Marion today and talk to people about what happened in this case, you'll hear a lot of different opinions. Some will say that Fowler never should have been tried in the first place. He was an old man. What's past is past.

Water under the bridge. Others will say the short jail time was an insult to Jimmy Lee Jackson's memory. That Fowler walked free for 45 years, and that whole time the main law enforcement agency of the state of Alabama knew his identity. But Michael Jackson had a tough decision to make. So many years had passed since the crime, so few living witnesses. And to take a case this polarizing to trial, it all brought the possibility of a hung jury and a retrial. What if Fowler died in the interim without ever being held accountable?

For Michael Jackson, a plea deal seemed like the best way to square the circle. What's the best case scenario for one of these? Well, I think, of course, the best case is the defendant gets some time. But the second thing is just to bring answers to the family, you know, about what actually happened. These cases, like Reverend Reed, are cases that are discussed in books that kids read when they're growing up. And so to know the truth, I just think that's very important. Whether somebody goes to jail or not, you're still trying to bring closure to these folks' families and also history.

Going back to those communities and telling those stories from beginning to end is something of a healing process for those communities and for the South and for the nation. And, of course, we still haven't had that. Having that outing of all the wrongs that were done is just, it's hugely important. It's a starting point for rebuilding your society. And we've never really had that before.

And it's a collective cleansing that we still need. We'll go another hundred years, but we're still going to need it. Thanks again to Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley. Check out their podcast, White Lies, from NPR to hear how they uncover the truth about who killed another forgotten civil rights activist, James Reeb.