The Rev. James Reeb

from The New York Times, April 8, 2000

BELIEFS

A Civil Rights Martyr Remembered

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

In religious terms, spring's coming heralds for many people a renewal of hope and expectation. Christians celebrate Easter and its message of resurrection. Jews, through Passover, tell the story of their liberation and deliverance.

So it is something of a painful paradox that the season is also distinguished by the anniversaries of the deaths of American moral figures who were associated with freedom. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April, and so too, a century later, was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

King's murder was the most momentous among those of the dozens who died in the cause of civil rights for African-Americans. While all could be said worthy of remembrance, one in particular -- the Rev. James Reeb -- may be worth recalling now, because the events surrounding his death helped hasten passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

Reeb, a white Unitarian-Universalist minister who worked with poor people in Boston, died on March 11, 1965, after he and two other Unitarians, the Rev. Clark Olsen and the Rev. Orloff Miller, were attacked in Selma, Ala. They had gone there, to the epicenter of the struggle for black voting rights, two days after state troopers had violently turned back a column of marchers, an event known as "Bloody Sunday."

(Reeb was not the first to die in Selma at that time. Two weeks earlier, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black hospital worker, had been shot by a law-enforcement officer as Jackson tried to protect his mother from being beaten.)

The "Bloody Sunday" confrontation prompted King to call for clergy members nationwide to come to Selma on Tuesday, March 9, to join the marchers.

Olsen, a pastor in Berkeley, Calif., heard the appeal on his car radio on Monday. "I paid close attention to the news broadcast and King's request," he said in a recent telephone interview from Asheville, N.C., where he now lives.

He said he did not think he could go because he lacked the airplane fare. But when he returned home he found a message from a member of his congregation, offering to pay his way.

Olsen arrived in Selma the next day, after a second march had turned back before a line of troopers. Olsen saw King on the steps of a church, declaring the marchers would not be deterred. King asked everyone to return after dinner for a meeting.

In the crowd, Olsen recognized Miller and Reeb. The three decided to go to a cafe in a black neighborhood. After eating, they headed back toward the church on a shorter route, which (unknown to them) passed through a tough, white neighborhood.

As they neared a saloon, they saw some men watching them from across the street. "One of them was carrying a club," Olsen said. The men started toward the ministers.

"I do remember Orloff and Jim saying, 'Just keep walking,"' Olsen said. Civil rights volunteers were taught not to resist if attacked, but to fall to the ground, covering their heads.

Olsen said that the men came up behind the ministers and he looked back just as one man swung a club at Reeb, striking his head. The sound, Olsen said, was "just awful."

Reeb collapsed. Miller dropped to the sidewalk, covering his head. Olsen tried to run, but was caught and punched, his glasses sent flying. Then the attackers left.

As Olsen recalled it, a frightening night ensued as he and Miller, both with minor injuries, tried to get help for the badly hurt Reeb. A black doctor examined him and said he needed to go to a hospital. An ambulance was called to take the unconscious Reeb to Birmingham, but the ambulance blew a tire outside Selma. A carload of white men pulled up to watch. Eventually, another ambulance came.

Reeb died two days later, producing an uproar that resonated to the White House. (The response, notes David J. Garrow, in his 1986 history of the civil rights movement, "Bearing the Cross," was considerably louder than that after Jackson's death.)

President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the events in Selma "an American tragedy," which, he said, should strengthen people's determination "to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people." Johnson's voting rights proposal reached Congress the Monday after Reeb's death.

In retrospect, Olsen said, "it's part of the story of civil rights, and the tragedy of civil rights, that it was the death of a white minister that was the final impetus to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The deaths of any number of blacks had not received anywhere the amount of attention that a white minister's did."

Olsen has revisited Selma. In 1998, after an anonymous donor gave money for a monument to Reeb, Olsen returned to see it dedicated. He was pleased that the event drew blacks and whites. Last year, during an interview for a television documentary, he met Jackson's sister.

Olsen was asked if he thought Reeb might be considered a martyr.

"He didn't know he was going to be killed, but he knew he was going into the face of great danger," Olsen said. "So, yes, Jim was a martyr. His life was sacrificed in a just cause."

"Attacked by people who hated what he stood for makes him a martyr," Olsen said, "as was Jimmie Lee Jackson."

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