Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. He was 26 years old when he was killed. An Army veteran and a recently-ordained deacon, Jackson was a familiar face at the civil rights meetings held at Zion United Methodist Church in Marion, Ala. He had also unsuccessfully tried to register to vote five times since turning 21.
On the night of Feb. 18, 1965, Jackson was shot by a state trooper, James Bonard Fowler, while he was coming to the aid of his mother who had been brutally beaten during a voting rights march. Jackson died eight days later at a hospital in neighboring Selma. Today, Jackson is often thought of as a martyr, one whose death catalyzed the nonviolent Selma-to-Montgomery march that changed America.
But a discernible line connects Jackson’s killing to events that took place almost 100 years before, in Colfax, La. — events that ultimately, and drastically, impacted the federal government’s ability to prosecute racially motivated crimes.
Immediately following the Civil War, Congress sought to enfranchise millions of recently emancipated citizens and ensure that they could exercise their new rights without fear of intimidation or reprisal. The Reconstruction Amendments were crucial to this goal. Adopted between 1865 and 1870, the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery), the 14th Amendment (which granted equal protection and due process), and the 15th Amendment (which granted right to vote to all) extended the civil and political rights to citizens, regardless of race.
There were many who objected to President Lincoln’s call for a “new birth of freedom.” Groups like the Ku Klux Klan set out to intimidate, persecute, and murder blacks, as well as anyone who opposed their efforts to “redeem” the south. A lynchpin of their strategy: opposing those who favored the national government’s pro-Reconstructionist policies.
In 1873, Colfax, La. provided the setting for a particularly horrific scene in the post-Civil War era. Following a disputed statewide election that saw widespread voter intimidation and vote-rigging, over 100 freedmen occupied the Colfax courthouse. Their goal was to thwart anti-Reconstruction officials from taking office.
But on April 13 of that year, Easter Sunday, over 140 men — many of whom were former Confederate soldiers — forced the freedmen out of the building. Most in the mob had sworn an oath to see the day’s “struggle for white supremacy” through, even at the risk of facing execution by the federal government as traitors.