In Episode 5, we revisit the 1965 murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, an unarmed black civil rights activist shot by police in Marion, Ala., after a peaceful protest. On a map in the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Alabama had long been marked with an “X,” indicating a place too volatile to organize.
But Jackson’s death brought new energy to the civil rights movement in Alabama: The march to Montgomery that ended in “Bloody Sunday” was organized in response to his murder.
Nearly a half century later, a white state trooper named James Bonard Fowler pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and spent five months in jail. We dig through his case and talk to the people involved — including the reporter who found Fowler and the district attorney who gathered witnesses against him — in search of strategies we can use to solve the James Reeb case. Would it be possible to find the alleged fourth attacker? And even if we did, could he still be held accountable after so many years?
WHAT IS “WHITE LIES”?
In White Lies, co-hosts Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley expose the lies that kept the murder from being solved and uncover a story about guilt, memory and justice that says as much about America today as it does about the past. In a place where lies and silence conspire against them, Brantley and Grace search Selma for living witnesses, guided by an unredacted copy of an old FBI file. They meet people who know the truth about the murder but have lied for decades — until now.
LISTEN TO OTHER EPISODES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3sr-hvPeBE&list=PLp-wXwmbv3z8HO5FT1SGJrwCU19qWdSn-
LISTEN TO S2 of WHITE LIES
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510343/white-lies
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Photo Credits:
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FBI
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Chip Brantley
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© 1965 Spider Martin
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Rachel Woolf for NPR
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Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Frank Sikora, Birmingham News.
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Chuck Fager
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