When is the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday?

Two weeks before Bloody Sunday – the clash in Selma on March 7, 1965, which helped propel the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – there was a march in this small town in 30 miles away.

What happened in Marion is now a lesser known episode in the civil rights movement, a footnote in the textbooks. But the blood spilled here would send hundreds of people from Marion and the surrounding county to Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where history was written.

"Starting the story at Selma is like reading a book starting in the middle and not going back to the beginning so you can get a full picture of what really happened in 1965" , said Perry County Commissioner Alfred Turner Jr. "Without the events in Marion, there is no way you could achieve the same results or the optics of Bloody Sunday."

The demonstration in Marion was sparked by the arrest of a minister who led the effort to put black people to the vote. It ended with the deadly shooting of a 26-year-old black deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by a state soldier.

On the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, people here say they want the whole story to be remembered.

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The road started at the White House a few months ago

The road to Marion, and ultimately to Selma, started at the White House months ago.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Lt. Andrew Young and other activists sat down with President Lyndon Johnson after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "Johnson told Dr. King : "I know you need voting rights. I wish I could do it, but I just don't have the power, 'recalls Young, adding that Johnson seemed depressed.

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When they left, King said, "We have to find a way to get power for the president," said Young, who was to become congressman, mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United States. "I said," This Nobel Prize you won did not come with an army. ""

The King & # 39; s Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose to support the Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee and local groups that focused on voter registration in Alabama, where they organized protests , sit-ins and boycotts.

Reverend James Orange staged protests

SCLC Reverend James Orange organized protests in Marion and Perry County, and hundreds of people were regularly arrested and imprisoned. When the pupils started to leave school to take part in the marches, the authorities arrested Orange on 18 February 1965 for having contributed to the delinquency of minors.

Former Perry County circuit clerk Mary Moore, a sophomore at the time, said the arrest was hypocritical of white officials, noting that black students back then often missed school because farmers needed them to choose cotton.

Rumors have circulated that Orange is being lynched behind bars. It was by no means a far-fetched fear.

“Black people in prison are dead. It was like that at the time, "said Elijah Rollins, 83, then owner of one of the town's funeral homes. "It was just tradition."

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Residents planned a nightly protest march from the Zion Methodist church to the prison in the next block. State and local police were waiting for them outside, where the lamp post was turned off or turned off. With darkness came chaos.

Rollins had skipped the church meeting but heard the commotion, and when he came out, "a lot of people laughed at them."

Maynor, then 14, saw a pastor begin the protest by kneeling down to pray, as was customary. The police told him to get up and club him when he did not, she said. "When I saw this, I was terrified," she recalls. A few seconds later, she was hit while raising her arm to protect her head. An officer on horseback "chased me with a whale".

"They didn't know how old you were. They didn't care. They rocked everyone," she said.

Jimmie Lee Jackson lost his life

Somewhere in the fray, 82-year-old Cager Lee and his daughter Viola Jackson were attacked by police. Lee's grandson, Jimmie Lee Jackson, came to help them and confronted officers at a local meeting place, the Macks Cafe.

"A few minutes later, you heard the gunshot," said Maynor.

Jackson had a stomach injury and was transported to the black hospital in Selma, where he died eight days later. Rollins, who had heard him scream in pain two days earlier, picked up the body.

The SCLC and local leaders began to speak almost immediately of the transfer of his body from Marion to the Alabama capital, Montgomery, but this idea was abandoned. They decided to drop Jackson off to rest in a cemetery in the Marion area during a funeral attended by King, then walk to the capital from Selma, a more logical meeting point.

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"We are going to bring this problem to Montgomery and leave it on the doorstep of Wallace's door," King said to Young, referring to Alabama's arch-segregationist governor George Wallace.

Plans were made for the 54-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, but on the chosen day, King was back in Atlanta, and the federal observers who would have normally observed him and probably served as a deterrent to violence w Were not there when hundreds of walkers with backpacks gathered on the bridge.

State soldiers and local police were waiting for them and were attacked with batons and tear gas.

A terrified Terrance Chestnut, 6 years old at the time, was there with his father, Selma's civil rights lawyer, J.L. Chestnut Jr.

"I saw a cop hitting a guy across the jaw with a billy club. I could hear the crack, ”he said. "It was a very bad scene, something I don't want to remember but something I can't erase from my mind."

The images contributed to the development of historic legislation

The television footage and other footage from that day shocked the country and contributed to the implementation of historic federal law protecting the right of African Americans to vote.

Marion's walkers would not recognize community leadership now.

The state soldier who shot Jackson, James Bonard Fowler, was prosecuted decades later by the first black Perry County prosecutor. Fowler pleaded guilty in 2010 to manslaughter and served five months in prison. The mayor, police chief, sheriff and many other officials from Marion and Perry County are also African American.

A marble monument of the civil rights movement was erected in front of the Zionist Methodist with the names of the people who participated in these demonstrations. The county jail where Orange was held is closed, but plans are underway to turn it into a museum. On the courthouse square is another monument, telling the story of Jackson and adding Marion to the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. It was implemented in 2015.

"They paved the way"

In a letter to the Department of the Interior supporting the inclusion of Marion, representative Terri Sewell of Alabama cited the role that Jackson's death played in Selma's march, saying that close 300 of the more than 500 people who participated in Bloody Sunday came from Marion.

"They paved the way and gave the impetus to change the world," said Mayor of Marion Dexter Hinton.

In the years that followed, Jackson's mother "was never right again after Jimmie's death," said cousin Fairest Cureton, 63.

"Jimmie was one of the nicest and most manageable people I have ever known. He always had a smile on his face, "said another cousin, Julia Cash, 76," and what was most impressive was that it always took time for the elderly. "

In fact, according to his family, Jackson was too sick to come to the church meeting that night in Marion, but he drove his grandfather and mother there and was waiting to take them home.

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As for Orange, he continued to participate in the Bloody Sunday March and spent his life fighting for civil rights and other causes, believing in "this thing called equality," said his daughter, Jamida Orange. . He died in 2008.

"If someone tells you that it is something other than the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson that caused Selma's march to Montgomery," she said, "they are making a revisionist story."