2025 includes three key anniversaries in Alabama’s fight for civil rights. This December is the seventieth anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This year also marks sixty years since two events in and around Selma. Next week marks the sixtieth anniversary of the civil rights incident known as “bloody Sunday,” and the shooting that inspired it. An Alabama State Trooper shot activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who died eight days later. APR news collaborated with the University of Alabama’s Center for Public Television to bring you this account from someone who was there…
“…at that time, we have been singing so we shall overcome and before I be a slave, be dead and buried in my grave.”
If you want to know what prompted the voting rights march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 asked Bennie Lee Tucker. The Selma residents spoke with APR news ten years ago during the 50th anniversary of the attack, now known as Bloody Sunday.
One name kept coming up.
“They were saying…let us… John Lewis and all of us, let us go to Montgomery,” said Tucker. So what we'll do, we'll take the body of Jimmy Lee Jackson and put it on the state capitol and let Governor Wallace know what he had done his people.”
Tucker knew about the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, but he wasn't actually there.
We met someone who was.
“My name is Vera Jenkins. My maiden name Booker,” said Vera Booker. She’s 88 years old.
“I saw so much segregation,” she recalled. “I saw it and it hurt.”
Booker went to school to study nursing that led to a job at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Her life changed on the night of February 18, 1965
“…today, I rise to celebrate the life and legacy of Jimmie Lee Jackson,” said Alabama Congresswoman Terry Sewell, speaking on the floor of the U.S. House. “This 26 year old Marion Alabama native was brutally killed at the hands of an Alabama State Trooper on February 18, 1965…”
That night, Vera Booker was the nurse on the floor. Jimmy Lee Jackson was still alive when he arrived at Good Samaritan and he was talking.
“And then, of course, they carried him on up in hospital,” recalled Booker. “And he told me, he said, was the worst night I've ever seen in my life. It was just terrible.”
“…to think that this, that this occurred because of the audacity of this young man and his family to peacefully protest for their constitutional rights, which led to his brutal murder at the hands of law enforcement,” Sewell told her colleagues in the U.S. House.
It took eight days for Jimmie Lee Jackson to die. Vera Booker was there the whole time.
“…and he just went on and on and on and just talked to me, and he said, But you know what he said after surgery, ‘my Booker, I don't ever believe I leave this hospital alive.’”
“It was the senseless murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson that served as a catalyst for the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama. Jimmy Lee Jackson deserves to have his proper place in American history as a true agent of change,” Sewell contended.
“Yes, we're doing better over and we still but have a long way to go, because we have come a long, long way, but still have a long way to go and many more bridges to cross,” said Bennie Lee Tucker, whom at the beginning of our story.
He and planners of the Selma to Montgomery march talked about carrying the body of Jimmy Lee Jackson of the State Capitol, at least that was the initial idea.
“And so, it was decided that the casket were too heavy to carry fifty miles. And, so where we just walk? And we started out walking, and we were met with the tear gas,” recalled Tucker of the voting rights march that was met by an armed police posse.
“We were beaten tear gas. Some of us was left bloody right here on this bridge,” said the late US House member and voting rights marcher John Lewis at the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
“Jimmy Lee Jackson,” Lewis told the crowd in Selma. “Jimmy Lee Jackson, whose death inspired the Selma march, along with so many others, did not make to see this day, but you and I are here. We can bear witness to the distance we have come and the progress we have made in 50 years. And we must use this moment to recommit ourselves to do all we can to finish the work. There's still work left to be done.”
