Jimmy Lee Jackson

Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot in the stomach two weeks ago; he died last Friday morning. His death will probably prove, for the ten thousandth time, that it is not a crime for a white man to kill a Negro (or a civil rights worker) in the Deep South.

Jackson was a 26-year-old Negro from Marion, Alabama. He participated in the recent voter registration drive in Marion, and on February 18 he joined 400 others in an evening protest march. State troopers used nightsticks and cattle prods to break up the demonstration. Newspaper reporters saw dozens of Negroes chased and clubbed in the moonlit streets. Among those beaten was Cager Lee, Jackson's 82-year-old grandfather; Lee was later hospitalized with open scalp wounds and bruises.

Jackson and his mother took refuge with other Negroes in a nearby cafe. According to Mrs. Jackson, the troopers "came in saying, 'If you don't live here, get out.' Two of them hit me on my head. They knocked me down and started beating me on the floor." Jackson attacked the men who were beating his mother, and one of the troopers fired a revolver into his stomach. The wounded man fled from the cafe, ran half a block, and was overtaken and beaten in front of the post office. He died in a Selma hospital.

Blanchard McLeod, the circuit prosecutor, has a signed statement from the man who shot Jackson, claiming that the shooting was done in self-defense. McLeod will put the case before the Perry County Grand Jury within a week. Knowing the temperament of Southern courts, it is safe to predict that there will be no indictment and certainly no conviction.

Lynch parties are no longer frequent, but the murder of Negroes and civil rights workers continues unchecked. Some examples since 1961: Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, both shot to death near Liberty, Mississippi; four girls, killed in the Birmingham church bombing; Johnny Robinson, a 16-year-old shot by police after the Birmingham bombings; William L. Moore, the white postman murdered near Attala, Alabama; Medgar Evers, assassinated in Mississippi; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, lynched near Philadelphia, Mississippi; Lemuel A. Penn, the educator slain near Athens, Georgia; the Negro burned to death in Louisiana last fall; the two multilated bodies found in the Mississippi River last summer; the man recently shot to death by police in a Jackson, Mississippi jail. At least a dozen more could be added to this list. Not one of these crimes has been punished.

In the case of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the Justice Department should seek to prosecute his killer under Section 242, Title 18 of the U.S. Code of 1950. Those suspected of slaying Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were indicted under this law. But Section 242 alone is no remedy; it entails only a one year sentence, can be applied only against state officials, and the final decision still comes from a Southern jury.

A new solution must be found. Wider use of court injunctions is part of the answer. Congress should pass an anti-lynching law. The FBI has not begun to use its preventive powers. If federal agents had used their arrest powers in Marion, against the club-swinging troopers, Jackson would never have been shot. Finally the President has the power (Sections 332 and 333, Title 10) to establish a special police force to protect Negroes and civil rights workers.

The specific solution is not important, but Americans must find some way to prevent and punish murder in the Deep South.