Waiting for Justice: Jury selection begins Monday in civil right-era killing

More than five years ago, former Alabama state trooper James Fowler admitted to The Anniston Star that he shot an unarmed civil rights worker during a 1965 melee in a small, west-central Alabama town. Until his admission, the public did not know the identity of the man responsible for the gunshot wounds that killed Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion.

Now, 45 years after Jackson’s death, five years after the naming of Fowler as the man who shot him and three years after a grand jury indictment, the slow wheels of justice may be turning in the rural part of Alabama’s Black Belt. On Monday, Perry County’s chief prosecutor said last week, jury selection will commence, and with it, “fireworks.”