James Reeb, minister who answered MLK's call to Selma in March 1965

[bobbieinok]

after Bloody Sunday, when state troopers attacked civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge

http://www.philocrites.com/sermons/spiritofjesus.html

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Martin Luther King had appealed to religious leaders to join him in Selma after a peaceful civil rights march by African Americans across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, March 7, 1965, had been brutally attacked by state troopers wearing gas masks, wielding clubs, by sheriff's deputies on horseback, by a posse of local men who set upon the marchers as they hurried back across the bridge. The attack, which came to be known as "Bloody Sunday," outraged Americans. Responding to King's appeal, several hundred ministers, priests, nuns, and concerned lay people hurried to Selma for a second march on Tuesday. On Tuesday evening, after eating dinner at a local restaurant, after marching in that day's demonstration, James Reeb and two other white Unitarian Universalist ministers were attacked on the street by men with clubs. By Thursday, James Reeb was dead.

The public outcry about the violence in Selma was intense. Demonstrations and memorial services across the country drew thousands. In Boston, nearly 20,000 people gathered in Boston Common for a service at the Arlington Street Church, where Reeb and his family attended services. In Washington, DC, several hundred maintained a vigil outside the White House. Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary: "When the news came that the Reverend Reeb had died, Lyndon and I excused ourselves for a hopeless, painful talk with Mrs. Reeb. But what is there to say? When we went upstairs, we could hear the congressional guests and music still playing below, and outside the chanting of the civil rights marchers. What a house. What a life."

On Monday evening, March 15, 1965, exactly a week after James Reeb had boarded a plane at Logan International Airport on his way to Selma, President Johnson went before a joint session of Congress to introduce the Voting Rights Act — the most important civil rights legislation since the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870.

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I'm telling you a bit of this story today, on Palm Sunday, because the story of James Reeb, in its own small way — like the story of Martin Luther King himself — helps us understand the meaning of Jesus' own decision to go to Jerusalem. The story of James Reeb helps us understand not only the meaning of Palm Sunday, but the meaning of our own commitment as a church to "unite in the love of truth and the spirit of Jesus for the worship of God and the service of humanity."

To put it simply, the question on Palm Sunday is this: What if Jesus had chosen not to go to Jerusalem? What if Martin Luther King had chosen not to go to Birmingham? had chosen not to walk into Montgomery? had chosen not to go to Memphis? What if James Reeb — and hundreds like him — had chosen not to go to Selma? What then? What if faith did not involve risk? What if faith were safe?

more....

[MadMaddie]

1. Thanks for this information...I had no idea about James Reeb...

Many things to ponder.......

[bobbieinok]

2. more info from 4oth anniversary

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0307/p03s01-ussc.html

civil rights revisited

Forty years ago today, a march in Selma turned bloody - and as a result the town and nation are today transformed.

By Gary G. Yerkey

It was as close to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as I would ever get - or to history in the making - that bright Sunday morning 40 years ago this month.
A spellbinding orator, he would not disappoint.

"You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation," he said, speaking to the huge crowd that had gathered outside Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church here in Selma at the start of what would become the most celebrated civil rights march in US history. "Walk together, children," he said, "Don't you get weary, and it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America."

It was heady stuff, to be sure, his voice rising to let us know we were serving a cause greater than ourselves, which, to many of us still in college, was a new idea.

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Led by Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams, some 600 protesters for voting rights quietly walked across the bridge on that Sunday 40 years ago on what was supposed to have been the first leg of the 54-mile march to Montgomery only to be beaten back on the other side by Alabama state troopers hurling tear gas and wielding night sticks.

It took two weeks for the organizers to regroup, and by then the number of protesters who had descended on Selma to take part in the march had swollen to just over 3,000.

Those of us who had came from the North - including college students like me - were called "outside agitators," which both pleased and frightened us in equal measure since we clearly saw ourselves as agitators (for justice) ... but then these were also frightening times.

President Kennedy had been assassinated. Four black girls had been killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. And the homes of blacks and black churches throughout the South were being attacked.

Three civil rights workers - James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman - had also been murdered in Mississippi less than a year earlier, and James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston was severely beaten by white men in Selma March 9 after leaving a restaurant and died in a Birmingham hospital. A 39-year-old white woman from Detroit - Viola Liuzzo - was also shot to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan while driving back to Selma from Montgomery the night the march ended on March 25.

Since then, of course, the country has changed, and the city of Selma has changed as well. And as for those of us who came to Selma 40 years ago, we remain changed today.

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