James Bonard Fowler is 77 now, but in 1965 he was a white Alabama state trooper facing the rising tide of the civil rights movement. On Monday, at the Perry County Courthouse in Alabama, that past came calling: Mr. Fowler pleaded guilty to the 1965 killing of a black man whose death triggered the historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.
Mr. Fowler will face six months in prison for the fatal shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old civil rights marcher who died after a confrontation with the police in Marion, Ala. His death inspired the first of the famous Selma marches the next month, an event that also ended in violence.
In the courthouse Monday, with Mr. Jackson’s family watching, Mr. Fowler apologized for the shooting and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter, but insisted that he had acted in self-defense, believing that Mr. Jackson was trying to grab his gun.
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