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Thread ID: 17231 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-03-11
2005-03-11 02:39 | User Profile
[I'VE TRIED TO CUT OUT ALL THE COLORED COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA AND STICK TO THE STORY OF THIS BITTER AND LOST SOUTHERNER...]
Web Exclusive: Extended content Uncut interview with the man at the center of the Jimmy Lee Jackson 'murder' case. by John Fleming , an Alabama native, current editor-at-large for The Anniston (RED) Star.
Warning: This unedited article contains offensive and racist language.
Jackson was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in nearby Selma, where for days he hovered between life and death, fighting off a growing infection as a result of the gunshot wound. In the throes of his struggle to live, the head of the Alabama state troopers, Colonel Al Lingo (a man often compared in his viciousness towards the civil rights movement to Birmingham's Bull Connor) served Jackson with an arrest warrant, and the Alabama state Senate formally denounced charges of dereliction by Lingo's troopers in Marion.
A few days later, on Feb. 26, Jackson was dead.
The killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson was pivotal in the struggle for civil rights.
And it all came about in just this way because of a shooting in a café.
"There's no doubt that the initial idea for a march to Montgomery emerged in the immediate wake of Jimmy Lee Jackson's death," said Dr. David Garrow, professor of law at Emory University and the author of a number of books on the civil rights era including Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which won him the Pulitzer Prize. "The idea of a procession to Montgomery to confront Gov. Wallace in person with the movement's demands for equality was something that indeed first was born in Marion soon after Jimmy Lee Jackson's shooting."
If you go to Marion, Ala., today you'll find people even more direct about the importance of Jimmy Lee Jackson and his death.
"Without Jimmy Lee Jackson there would not have been a Selma March," said Elijah Rollins, owner of Lee and Rollins Funeral Home in Marion, an establishment that sits atop the spot that Mack's Café once occupied.
"This place here," said Deputy Sheriff Carlton Hogue, a cousin of Jimmy Lee Jackson, "is where it all started. It was because of Jimmy Lee that it all happened. This is the cradle of the civil rights movement."
Albert Turner, Jr., son of the civil rights leader, simply says that, "black people all across America enjoy freedom because of Jimmy Lee." "Marion," he says, "lit the fire."
That virtually nothing is known about the trooper can be chalked up to the ... atmosphere of George Wallace's segregation-era Alabama. This was a time when all-white juries routinely acquitted whites for blatant crimes against blacks, when the governor and other state officials frequently referred to King and other movement leaders as agents of the Communist party, when local and state law enforcement often stood back while Klansmen and trouble-makers beat and harassed peaceful protesters. The chances of law enforcement in Alabama not closing ranks around one of their own was non-existent in 1965. In this case, the trooper went right back to work and continued on the force until he left on his own in 1968.
The night Jackson was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. wired President Johnson's attorney general, Nicholas Katzenback, with this message: "This situation can only encourage chaos and savagery in the name of law enforcement unless dealt with immediately." Katzenback wrote back right away, assuring King that the Justice Department had already launched an investigation into the killing.
Forty years later, no Justice Department official, including members of the FBI, has ever questioned the trooper about the death of Jimmy Lee Jackson. Nor has anyone else.
When a local grand jury declined to indict the trooper in September of 1965, prosecutors also declined to reveal his identity, save the mention of his surname: Fowler.
JAMES BONARD FOWLER is a man given to frankness and simplistic statements. Conversations with him tend toward the folksy. He mingles odd yarns from his native rural south Alabama with a sprinkling of short, declarative sentences. He'll mangle grammar now and then, hurl a curse word at some distant person and ask abrasively for whatever alcoholic beverage might be available. His is a sort of controlled rudeness and overbearing, tools he seems to want to use to convince the listener he fits the seldom-used definition of the word "mean": "destitute of moral dignity or elevation; ignoble, small-minded."
All of this, however, is a façade belying an enormous complexity and intelligence. Talk to him long and hard and you begin to see bolts of brilliance punching through his 70-year-old redneck manner. Bonard Fowler, you might say, hides his intelligence well.
And he has, pretty much, until now, hidden the fact that he shot Jimmy Lee Jackson on that February night so long ago.
That night at Mack's Café, Fowler said, "I don't remember how many times I pulled the trigger, but I think I just pulled it once, but I might have pulled it three times. I don't remember. I didn't know his name at the time, but his name was Jimmy Lee Jackson. He weren't dead. He didn't die that night. But I heard about a month later that he died."
ZION UNITED METHODIST anchors one corner of Marion's town square. It sits there, old, proud and tired looking, reaching up toward the heavens, but also seeming to angle ever so slightly over to the courthouse across the way on the common. Any given weekday will find the modest brick building mostly quiet just like the streets around it, which rumble intermittently with the spotty activity of the lethargic economy of Alabama's Black Belt.
In February 1965, here and throughout Alabama's midsection, quiet was not the case. Nearby Selma, with a population of about 50 percent black, was the epicenter of the civil rights struggle at the time and was way beyond tense. That was thanks, in large part, to Dallas County's fire-headed Sheriff, Jim Clark, and the blatantly unconstitutional court orders of state Circuit Judge James Hare, such as banning public assemblies of three people or more.
For months, one of King's most able lieutenants, Rev. C.T. Vivian, a long time movement worker and a veteran of the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s, had been in Selma to help organize voter registration drives. He was a mesmerizing speaker, charming, young and motivated. And he was, with the help of a core of dedicated Selma blacks, making progress.
Fear was thick in Selma with nearly daily arrests being made in early 1965. The situation grew even more tense when in mid-February Sheriff Clark had a couple of high profile encounters with protesters, including one where he socked Vivian in the face on the courthouse steps and had his deputies haul him off to jail for having the audacity to make a speech about democracy.
Protests, marches and sit-ins were also beginning to spread throughout the area, including in next door Perry County and its county seat of a little more than 3,000, Marion.
Efforts in Marion had picked up momentum in early February under the local black leadership of Albert Turner and James Orange, a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who had been dispatched from Birmingham by King.
At first, local law enforcement, under the leadership of Police Chief T.O. Harris, held back. But soon Harris' men arrested a group of blacks trying to desegregate a restaurant. In response, some 400 students set out to protest. They were quickly arrested for their action and on the following day 200 more students were taken into custody when they marched. A few days later on Feb. 18, with a full-scale boycott of the black schools and local businesses underway, the police arrested James Orange, charging him with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
At this point, Albert Turner felt something had to be done, that a statement of some sort had to be made. So he managed, eventually, to convince a reluctant C.T. Vivian - who had just gotten out of Sheriff Clark's jail - to come to Marion for a nighttime sermon at Zion.
After speaking to the packed church, Vivian slipped out the back door to a waiting car and sped back to Selma. It was then that the congregation, led by Turner and another local leader, Rev. James Dobynes, started leaving the church two abreast to march down the block to sing for Orange's release.
After a couple of songs, the plan was for the group to break up and walk home. But it was, as everyone knew, an extremely dangerous endeavor. Nighttime marches were almost unheard of in the Deep South during the period. The chance of violence was very high. Night gave cover for anyone itching for a fight.
Word had obviously gotten out that trouble was brewing. Perhaps as many as 50 troopers were on hand to assist Chief Harris. Even Sheriff Clark showed up to help out, along with a growing mob of angry whites that were milling around. The press was there as well, including NBCs News' Richard Valeriani, The New York Times' John Herbers and a couple of UPI photographers.
A few moments after Chief Harris yelled over his bullhorn for the crowd to disperse, Dobynes knelt in prayer and was promptly whacked over the head by a trooper and dragged off toward the jailhouse.
It was then that the lights went out, the violence began and terrified protesters scattered. As troopers and police took off after the fleeing marchers, a mob lit into the reporters. Valeriani suffered a serious head wound and the photographers and film crews had their cameras destroyed and lenses sprayed with black paint. Not a single photograph survived.
TROOPER BONARD FOWLER has never told the story of Marion before. But it didn't take long for him to recall that night in detail.
He had, he said, arrived after dark from Montgomery with other troopers. It was, maybe, 9 or 9:30 p.m., he thinks. When he reached the town square, he says, there was already widespread chaos, including looting, a charge that Marion's blacks strongly deny. It was during a lull in the chaos that Al Lingo dispatched Fowler and a few other troopers to Mack's, a place he referred to as a juke joint, where there were reports of people throwing bottles at passing cars.
"Al Lingo told me and about 10 more, 'y'all go down there and put a stop to that.' He didn't tell us to arrest nobody. He said 'you tell them to close it up. There's a curfew on.' So we went down there."
Fowler says that immediately people started throwing bottles and bricks from the upper story of Mack's down on the troopers standing in the street.
"We headed up the stairs. I might have been the first one. I don't know," he said. "We went inside, the juke box was blaring and it was pretty crowded. We told them that this has got to stop." Then, he says, there "might have been a few billy clubs swung. And out of the corner of my eye I saw a state trooper and I saw an elderly black lady. She hit him upside the head with an old timey coke bottle. There were several people on this state trooper. They were men and women on him, clinging to him, swinging at him. I think one state trooper was down. I was going to their assistance when I realized someone was pulling my pistol out of my holster. And the pistol was out of my holster and I reached down and grabbed it around the cylinder and he had the handle of the pistol and I had the pistol and at that time I was very strong and I remember swinging him around with my elbows and arms right like that, and he was right there, and my hand was on the trigger then and I pulled the trigger."
It is fairly consistent with an affidavit he wrote the night of the shooting 40 years ago.
Two other troopers also wrote affidavits that night.
One, written by Corporal B.J. Hoots, is quite similar. Another, written by Corporal R.C. Andrews, tells a slightly different version.
"One of the Negros hit Corporal Fowler on the head with a bottle, and at the same time appeared to try and get his revolver," Andrews wrote. "Corporal Fowler then threw up his arms and shoved the Negro backward, and the Negro again advanced toward Corporal Fowler, he drew his revolver and fired. Corporal Fowler shouted for someone to get a doctor, that someone had been shot."
FOR FOWLER, the killing was simply a question of self-defense. Directly, forcefully and simply put, he had to protect himself. Jackson was going for his gun so he shot him.
"Jimmy Lee Jackson was not murdered," he says. "He was trying to kill me and I have no doubt in my mind that, under the emotional situation at the time, that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol that he would have killed me or shot me. That's why my conscience is clear. But on TV on documentaries you watch, they say that Jimmy Lee was murdered by an Alabama state trooper."
And this is the point he wants to make, the reason he wants to talk. Fowler wants his side of the story to be told and does not fear indictment.
"I don't think legally I could get convicted for murder now no matter how much politics they got 'cause after 40 years they ain't no telling how many people is dead," he says.
It is a bristling kind of confidence when you consider events of the last few years.
As to the past and present, justice and truth, as far as Bonard Fowler is concerned, self-defense pretty much makes it the end of the story. His conscience, he says, is clear. Simply put.
Simplified too, are the defenses he throws up for all of his actions and those of the other troopers during the Civil rights movement in Alabama. He and his colleagues were following orders of one kind or another at one time or another.
He rocks back a little on his slightly rotund figure as he explains this, steadying his recently operated on leg - the result of an old Army injury. Then he sets a steady stare at his questioner before saying, "I would have never went to that café, that juke, whatever you want to call it, if I would not have been dispatched."
Being dispatched to Mack's, standing at the foot of the Pettus Bridge, arresting people for wanting to participate in the democratic process, these were orders sent down from on high, from Al Lingo and Gov. Wallace himself.
They were orders, of course, that resulted in injuries to a good many innocent people. On the night Jackson was killed at Mack's Café at least 10 people went to the hospital with serious wounds. Amzie Luckey, for example, says that state troopers managed to draw blood from his scalp with billy clubs despite the fact he had a sizeable afro at the time, something he says that should have cushioned the blows. Others injured less seriously were piled into the city jail along side James Orange, nursing their wounds.
People like Annie B. Heard were not part of the march. She was standing on the opposite side of the town square.
"There were five or six of us standing near that fire plug at the corner," she said. "When it all started, people were running everywhere and the troopers were swinging at people. I found an unlocked car and went into the back seat of it and lay on the floor in the back and locked the doors."
On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when the troopers famously beat up marchers on the Pettus Bridge, Fowler was there too when 56 people were hospitalized from beatings dispensed by Al Lingo's troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark's deputies and members of his posse. He says he didn't hit a soul, that he never carried a billy club, and since he wasn't wearing a mask that day, the tear gas incapacitated him as much as it did the marchers. But he doesn't say the actions of his colleagues were wrong. He's not sorry about Selma or Marion, or Annie B. Heard or Amzie Luckey. He isn't here to apologize for anything. George Wallace might have sought forgiveness, a broken grieving little man in a wheelchair practically oozing remorse. Not Bonard Fowler, because he feels he has done no wrong.
Back in the days of the civil rights movement he was a lawman sworn to do his duty.
"It was my job; I was doing what I was told to do. I didn't get involved in the right or wrong of it," he says. But nowadays he does get involved in the right and wrong. So, when you really get to the why of it all with him, the simplicity and blind loyalty begin to melt away and bitterness creeps into his voice. That business in Selma and Marion, that was part of George Wallace's war, a politician's war, just like Vietnam and the war in Iraq.
Wallace, Nixon and George W. Bush are all a bunch of lying bastards as far as Bonard Fowler is concerned. The pain in Selma, Marion, Saigon and Baghdad are all because of politicians' thirst for power.
Tugging a camouflaged cap down tighter over his head he spits that, "there's George Bush sending young boys over there to Iraq to get killed, and for why? And my brother got killed, and for why?"
Here Fowler understandably gets very emotional. In 1968, when his brother Robert was killed in Vietnam, he left the troopers immediately and within a few short weeks he was in his brother's old unit.
He went there, he says, to kill as many Vietnamese as he possibly could. But over time, he came to love and respect the people he wanted to kill. Ten years ago, he married a woman from Burma.
"I have a great admiration for the Asian people," he said looking across the couch to his wife Noie. "Asians are so practical and they make such wise decisions that it seems to me that they have forgotten more about human nature they we will ever learn."
For him the world would be a better place if we could all, as the Buddhists stress, "obliterate greed, selfishness and envy. To reach nirvana," he says, "you have to do away with all your wants and desires for materialistic gains. When a rich man dies, how much does he take with him?"
In his view, Western society, including religion, is corrupt. It is all, he steams, about personal gain, power and control. Where, he laments, could the love possibly be?
"You got to have love for people, you have to love freely," he said.
And love is something Westerners, especially whites, lack. So he's got plenty of lashing out to do against his own people. They, he believes, are the wolves in sheep's clothing. Conniving whites, he spits, "they are the ones you have to worry about. The average black is gonna help me more than the average white."
And don't get him started on the modern day lawman. "I don't trust any police department. Police more than anyone else will lie to build their case. I don't trust nobody in law enforcement."
He rails against police who beat prisoners, saying that it is unforgivable what Los Angeles police officers did to Rodney King. "There's no call for that," he said.
All of this is why Fowler has no patience with anyone wishing to call him a racist. His embrace of the individual - no matter the color, as long as the character is true - goes back a long way.
"I was born and raised with blacks," he says. Citing a neighbor from his childhood in rural Geneva County, he says, "Ms.Bessie Swear had a crowd of youngins. I slept at her house a million nights."
As a boy growing up he felt safety and comfort in the bosom of blacks, he insists, and trusted his black neighbors more than most whites that he knew. Even today, he'll tell you that "I don't feel that I have ever been screwed over by black folks nearly as many times as I have by white folks."
But the blacks of the civil rights movement, the ones he confronted, they were different, apart from what he had always known. And this was not their fault; it was the fault of outside agitators.
"The blacks we were dealing with then weren't like the ones we grew up with," he said. In Selma and Marion and throughout the South, he insists, "the blacks were incited to riot, to loot." Those were, he says, a different kind of black.
In his mind, the old segregation-era in the South was a much better place for blacks. "They always fared better when they stayed in their place." And the Civil rights movement, he added, well its achievements would have come about anyhow, in time. But, he says, segregation was really a better system, or should have been.
"I think that segregation was good, if it were properly done," he said. "Now, you got to give equal funds and they got to be handled right. I don't believe in completely mixing the races. I don't think that is gonna help anything."
In today's world, it is like this, he says, "they don't want to be called n_, they don't wanna be called jigaboos. But they won't hesitate to call you a honkey, a redneck, a cracker and," gesturing to his wife, "her a slope head or a slant eye, f_ing gook. They won't hesitate to do that. They won't hesitate to wear their colors, green, black and red, but they will get mad if you put the Confederate flag on the front of your car. They say to hell with your heritage, your culture. And we have just surrendered to that."
He despises affirmative action, believes that blacks blame every single problem they have on whites. And, in essence, believes that the nation can't make a dent in mending race relations, because "this is all about human nature. I think like-kind is going to assemble in the presence of like-kind."
He pulls out his impression of a backwoods black Southern accent to tell a story of attending EEOC meetings while he was in the Army.
"They would say, 'well, what going to happen if I'm riding down through Georgia or Alabama, me with a white woman sitting in the car with me and a bunch of rednecks, bunch of crackers see me.' I would raise my hand and say well hold on a minute, what is going to happen if they see me walking down the street in Harlem? There are places you can't go as a white man in black communities. Try going to Watts."
AFTER MARION and the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Fowler went back to his duties as a state trooper. He was transferred to Birmingham and promoted. He never, he says, got so much as a letter of reprimand.
Life went on. No one from the DA's office in Perry County contacted him about the Jimmy Lee Jackson case, nor did his superiors at the Department of Public Safety want to know more. U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenback's men at the Department of Justice also seemed strangely absent.
"They never asked me about Jimmy Lee Jackson," says Fowler. "I met a couple of [federal] agents, but they never asked me about Jimmy Lee Jackson."
In the middle of a slightly related tale of the civil rights movement - he arrested the mayor of Milrey, Ala., for being, he says, a son of a bitch - he abruptly stopped to return to the question of the Justice Department.
Fowler, it turns out, did have an encounter with John Doar (Katzenback's assistant attorney general who had a reputation for knocking on doors and finding out for himself what was going on.)
"I met John Doer," Fowler said. But it was not related to Jimmy Lee Jackson. It was about another black man he killed near Birmingham in 1966.
Fowler, while on patrol around the town of Alabaster near Birmingham, answered the call of two troopers who had arrested a black man.
"This was a great big feller about six foot five. Big feller. He was black as it would be. He had just about whipped both of them troopers. I handcuffed him and took him on to Alabaster and put him in jail. As I put him in the cell he said 'I'm allowed a phone call ain't I'? So I said I have no objection to that. So I took him into the chief of police's office and let him use the phone. He got in an argument with the telephone operator. He didn't know the number he wanted to call. The chief of police's billy club was laying right up there [on a file cabinet beside the phone]. I finally said hang up the phone, you don't know the number you want to call. He slammed that phone down so hard and before I could think he took that billy club and hit me across the head right here. I pulled my gun and shot him. I shot him three times right here," he said pointing to his heart. "I killed him.
"His name was Johnny Johnson or something; I could never keep him straight from Jimmy Lee Jackson. About a week later on a Saturday night I was patrolling and got a call to come to the office. This guy, John Doar and two FBI agents were there. They never asked me my name, they never asked me nothing. They just wanted me to transport them to the funeral home where the black was.
"John Doer sat in the front seat with me. We went in there and raised the casket and looked down at that black corpse. They looked at it, got information from the funeral director, I just stood back. I looked at him too. I didn't say nothing and they didn't say nothing. And that's how I met John Doer."
In fact, the man Fowler killed, according to press reports, was Nathan Johnson. Jr. of Ensley, Ala., on May 8, 1966.
A few weeks later, he said, two FBI agents did come to question him. But Fowler told them he had nothing to say and "they folded up their books and said 'well OK that's it.'"
Skating with him through the broader questions of race today, the civil rights movement then, and the character of man, and you'll find yourself navigating through unrelenting bigotry mingled tightly with admiration for many who are not his color.
He has a vile hatred for Robert Mugabe, the nearly universally perceived corrupt leader of Zimbabwe who rose to power when the white government stepped down in 1980. But he professes love for Nelson Mandela, calling him the savior of a nation. Colin Powell is a wonderful man, he says, by far the wisest in an administration full of idiots. He's at home with the blacks in his corner of the county, neighbors all of them, good neighbors he would do anything for. It's the ones from outside he can't stand.
And as for the symbol of the Civil rights movement, Martin Luther King? Bonard Fowler could care less.
"I'm on the side of J. Edgar Hoover," he said. "I think he was a con artist. I don't think he's got a snowball's chance in hell of getting into heaven. No more chance than I do. His goal was to screw and f___ over every white woman that he could."
[url]http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0504&article=050420x[/url]
-- "While we kill their bodies, may the Lord have mercy on their sinful soulsââ¬âFIRE!ââ¬Âââ¬âReverend General William N. Pendleton