Nearly 46 years after a Ku Klux Klan attack left her with shotgun pellets permanently lodged in her leg, Opal Lee Jackson was given a symbol of honor by the city she helped change.
Surrounded by family, Jackson, one of five Black women known as the Chattanooga Five, was presented with a Key to the City on July 23 by Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, in recognition of her courage and the fight for justice that followed the 1980 attack.
“In April of 1980, five Chattanooga women survived an attack by members of the Ku Klux Klan,” Kelly said. “Ms. Opal was honored with a Key to the City, serving as a reminder of the hard road fought for civil rights that led to the historic court ruling that not only granted the Chattanooga Five justice, but set a nationwide legal precedent and the banning of the KKK in Chattanooga.”
For Jackson, now 94, the honor comes nearly half a century after she and four other Black women survived one of the darkest episodes in Chattanooga’s history.
On April 19, 1980, three members of the Justice Knights of the Ku Klux Klan went on a shooting spree through Chattanooga’s Black community. The Klansmen first set fire to a wooden cross near railroad tracks. Then, driving along what was then Ninth Street (now Martin Luther King Boulevard), they fired two shotguns loaded with birdshot into a crowd of Black women waiting for transportation outside a local establishment.
Four women were wounded by gunfire, Jackson among them. A fifth, Fannie Mae Crumsey, was injured by flying glass; the blast also scarred a nearby brick wall, a mark that outlasted the moment. The other three women were Viola Ellison, Lela Mae Evans and Katherine Johnson, together known as the Chattanooga Five.
The men identified as responsible were Marshall Thrash, William “Bill” Church and Larry Payne. Thrash fired from the window of a car Church was driving, while Payne sat in the back seat.
George Key, then president of the local NAACP chapter, turned to the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and attorney Randolph McLaughlin for help. McLaughlin filed a federal class-action suit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era law passed under President Ulysses S. Grant to combat conspiracies aimed at stripping people of their civil rights.
The criminal trial that followed became its own painful chapter: an all-white jury acquitted Church and Payne, while Thrash was convicted on lesser charges and served only a fraction of a nine-month sentence. The verdict sparked four nights of unrest and protest across the city; the Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to Chattanooga to help calm tensions.
More than a century after its passage, the Chattanooga Five helped put the Klan Act to a new use in the fight against organized racial violence. The federal case was tried in a courtroom whose own mural, depicting Confederate soldiers returning from war with an enslaved Black man picking cotton at its center, reflected the same history the women were fighting.
In February 1982, after an eight-day trial, a federal jury deliberated roughly two and a half hours before ruling in favor of the Chattanooga Five. The jury awarded them $535,000 in damages. That figure is roughly $1.4 million today, according to McLaughlin. The court also issued an injunction barring the Klansmen from further violence in Chattanooga. It remains on the books, and the underlying law has since been invoked in other civil rights conspiracy cases.
The women’s story reached a new generation through How to Sue the Klan: The Legacy of the Chattanooga Five, a 2024 short documentary directed by Chattanooga filmmaker John Beder and produced by civil rights attorney Ben Crump.
The film premiered locally at the Walker Theatre before going on to win an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary Short and a Midsouth Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Documentary; it was later acquired by PBS’s Reel South series for national broadcast. Kelly encouraged residents to watch it.
But for Jackson, this isn’t history on a screen. She carries it. “I don’t have no trouble with nobody,” she once said. “I didn’t have any trouble then. I can’t hate you for something I don’t know.”
The pellets remain in her leg, yet the violence didn’t define what came after. She has spent the decades since spreading a message of love, even toward the man who pulled the trigger.
The Key to the City honors that: a woman who survived the gunfire, endured a justice system that failed her, and kept fighting anyway.
Jackson and the rest of the Chattanooga Five–Ellison, Evans, Johnson and Crumsey–may not be household names. But their courage reshaped Chattanooga, and the legal fight against organized racial violence, far beyond it.