Eulogy for a Woodchopper

CIVIL RIGHTS

Jimmie Lee Jackson was a $6-a-day Negro woodcutter who lived with his mother, his sister and his grandfather on a patch of red-clay soil outside Marion, Ala. One night last month Jackson, 26, joined a Negro demonstration in Marion. When cops began breaking it up, he and some other Negroes sought refuge in a cafe. State police went in after them. In the melee Jackson was shot in the stomach, and died eight days later.

Last week Jimmie Jackson was eulogized by civil rights leaders as another martyr to the cause. At the first of two crowded funeral services, 1,000 Negroes jammed into a church in nearby Selma, site of Martin Luther King's voter-registration drive, and heard King's aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, declare: "Jimmie Jackson has taken his rightful place alongside such men as Crispus Attucks [a Negro shot to death by redcoats in the Boston Massacre], Abraham Lincoln, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, John Brown, Medgar Evers . . ."

Then the coffin was paraded to the drab Zion Methodist Church in Marion, where King offered the dubious consolation: "There is an amazing democracy about death." Cried King: "Farewell, Jimmie! You died that all of us could vote, and we are going to vote." King also pushed his Selma registration drive through its seventh grinding week. In pouring rain, he led 350 Negroes to the courthouse, where Sheriff Jim Clark was, as usual, standing resolutely in the way.

King appealed to Clark "in the name of humanity" to let the applicants enter and get out of the rain. Said Clark: "There isn't room. It would interfere with orderly procedures. In the name of common sense, they will have to stay out." Though the sheriff did read off the numbers of Negro applicants whose turns before the voting registrars had come up, he turned back many, alleging that they had appeared too late. But others got through, and at day's end a record 200 applications had been received.

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