Jimmie Lee Jackson

And it's a good thing that he was, because many of your listeners I'm sure will know the story of what happened in Selma in early 1965.

And in March of 1965, uh, a young man, a young man in his 20s named Jimmie Lee Jackson is murdered, and he's murdered by state troopers as he's trying to protect his grandfather at a, what started as a peaceful protest for voting rights.

And Jimmie Lee Jackson is killed by the state troopers, and a whole bunch of groups in the South, this is John Lewis, and Martin Luther King, and all the big civil rights organizations, they say, "Let's go ahead and organize a march.

We're gonna march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, and demand that the governor give us, give us voting rights." Well, they don't even make it out of town, that they're getting, going south out of Selma.

There's a bridge there, and it's called the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

It was, it was during that movement and that period that John Lewis and I became friends.

And, uh, Jesse Jackson and I, uh, had met in Chicago when he was a student and I was working for the, for SCLC, and we, um, I left and went back to Selma, and we were later on, on the march, uh, against fear when Jimmie Lee Jackson got shot.

Mm-hmm.

And Jesse was hollering, "I am somebody, I am," and had the kids, and everybody was excited.