The death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot after police disrupted a peaceful nighttime demonstration in Marion, inspired the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Jackson, a 26-year-old black Army veteran, church deacon, and hospital employee, had been active in efforts to register black voters and had himself been denied five times. On Feb. 18, 1965, police arrested voting rights organizer James Orange. That night, Albert Turner and the Rev. James Dobynes led several hundred protesters two abreast out of Zion Methodist Church toward the jail a block away. When the streetlights went out, scores of local white police, along with sheriff's deputies and state troopers under the direction of Col. Al Lingo, attacked marchers and news reporters. A group of protesters pursued by troopers ran behind Zion church into Mack's Cafe, where Cager Lee, 82, was clubbed to the floor along with his daughter Viola Jackson, whose son Jimmie Lee was shot in the stomach while trying to help. He died eight days later. Strategist James Bevel then suggested a procession to Montgomery to confront Gov. George Wallace. Some 600 marchers were routed by club-swinging lawmen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, known as Bloody Sunday. An attempt on March 9 was cancelled. On March 21, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led several thousand marchers to Montgomery; they reached the State Capitol in four days, their numbers swollen to 25,000. In 2005, retired trooper James Bonard Fowler told the Anniston Star that he shot Jackson, and in 2010 District Attorney Michael Jackson obtained a guilty plea to manslaughter from Fowler, then 77. Fowler served five months before being released for health reasons. Jimmie Lee Jackson's story was featured in the 2015 film Selma.