It was here, among the moss-draped live oaks, antebellum houses, and lasting secrets of those turbulent days, that I’d come chasing the ghost of James Joseph Reeb.
A white 38-year-old Unitarian Universalist minister with an earnest smile and tinted glasses, Reeb lived and worked in Boston’s black neighborhoods. To him, one couldn’t just believe in social justice; one had to defend it. So when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. summoned clergy to Selma after Bloody Sunday – the name attached to March 7, 1965, when Alabama authorities sent 17 marchers to the hospital – Reeb knew he had no choice.
He had been warned about going to Alabama. Many in Selma didn’t take kindly to outsiders dictating how they should live. The day he arrived, a white gang viciously assaulted him and two other ministers on a downtown street, a few blocks from the Pettus Bridge. Struck in the head with a club, he lapsed into a coma and died two days later.
Reeb was hardly the only activist killed in the bloody fight for civil rights – in fact, a black man had been shot dead in a nearby town just weeks earlier. But it took the death of a white minister to move a nation. Four days later, 70 million people tuned in to watch President Lyndon B. Johnson plead with Congress for stronger civil rights laws. That summer, he signed the landmark Voting Rights Act into law.
In what passed for Southern justice in those days, three men were tried for Reeb’s murder and swiftly acquitted by an all-white jury. But last year, after almost a half century, the FBI informed local authorities and Reeb’s family that it was reopening the case, igniting hopes that someone would finally be held accountable. Justice deferred, the thinking went, was still a kind of justice.
