James Orange - Civil Rights Era

Civil Rights Era

Speaking 1993, Andrew Young called Orange one of the "real soldiers of the movement ... a gentle giant." Quoted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at Orange's death, Young said that when Orange was hired as a field organizer in the early 1960s, "He couldn't afford to go to college and was working as a chef. He quit his job and started going with us, although we were only paying $10 a week. And he never left."

In 1962, when Orange was only a year out of high school, he attended one of the weekly Monday night mass meetings at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and was transfixed by a speech on equality by Reverend Ralph Abernathy. In a meeting in the church basement later that night, he volunteered to risk arrest picketing a local store the next day. He was arrested, the first of at least 104 arrests for picketing or acts of civil disobedience.

As part of his civil rights work for the SCLC in Alabama, he was arrested and jailed prior to conviction in 1965 for contributing to the delinquency of minors by enlisting them to work in voter registration drives. His detention in Perry County, Alabama, sparked fears that he would be lynched, and a protest march was organized to support him.

During that march on February 18, 1965, an Alabama state trooper fatally shot a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in the stomach. In 2007, a former trooper named James B. Fowler, 74, was indicted for the death of Jackson. Living witnesses and tapes of the day of the killing were expected to be used at his trial.

The 1965 uproar over Jackson's shooting during Orange's incarceration soon led to the famed Selma to Montgomery marches, including the infamous police brutality on "Bloody Sunday", and the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year.