The brutal death of 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson -- a deacon and woodcutter who simply wanted to exercise his right to vote -- led Martin Luther King, Jr. aide James Bevel to introduce the idea of marching from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965 to protest his death.
Jackson had tried to register to vote five times in Perry County, where only 265 of 5,202 eligible black voters were on the voting rolls. On February 18, 1965 at a gathering of 200 protesters, an Alabama state trooper shot him point-blank in the stomach as he tried to protect his mother.
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