Three Who Died for Civil Rights

Selma Memorial

Jimmie Lee Jackson became a martyr of the civil rights struggle when police and state troopers attacked voting rights marchers in Marion , Alabama . Jackson, a black Vietnam veteran, was shot in the stomach as he attempted to protect his mother and grandfather. He died seven days later. Marion's entire black community turned out for Jackson's funeral march. According to civil rights historians, one of the organizers of that witness said "would be fitting to take Jimmie Lee's body and march it all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery," and it is reportedly out of that remark that a plan developed for a march from Selma to Montgomery, fifty four miles away.

As the march to Montgomery crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma on March 7, 1965, state and local police attacked the participants with clubs, tear gas and dogs, forcing them to turn back.

The Rev. James Reeb was living in Boston with his wife and four children. Within days of the March 7 attack, Reeb joined several hundred UU ministers in answering the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's call to clergy from around the country to journey to Selma for a second attempt at the march.

The Rev. Orloff Miller recalls that he, the Rev. Clark Olsen and James Reeb were eating dinner together in Selma to plan a trip for liberal religious students to Russia on the night Reeb was murdered. As they exited the restaurant where they ate, they were attacked and Reeb was fatally clubbed. Reeb died from his injuries on March 11, 1965.

Miller writes that following Reeb's death, the cover of "The Liberal Context" (a component of a UU campus ministry program) carried these words about Reeb, paraphrasing a poem by Hermann Hagedorn:

He died....
but we must do a harder thing than dying is;
we must think, and ghosts will drive us on. 

"Forty years later," Miller reflects, "I can't say it better."

Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo , a Unitarian Universalist committed to working for education and economic justice, was 39 years old and a mother of five when she came to Selma from Detroit to support the marchers. On March 21 she joined 3,000 other marchers in crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the road from Selma to Montgomery. On March 25, Liuzzo was shot to death along Highway 80 by Ku Klux Klansmen. On March 27 President Lyndon Johnson called Liuzzo's husband James and reportedly said, "I don't think she died in vain because this is going to be a battle, all out as far as I'm concerned." Liuzzo responded, "My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity. She had one concern ... she took a quote from Abraham Lincoln that all men are created equal and that's the way she believed."

Liuzzo's life and death were the subject of a documentary motion picture by Nancy Dickenson that was released in 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival, "Home of the Brave." The film has since won widespread acclaim.

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