 |
|
 From Mass Moments see website massmoments.org
On March 10 1965, a white minister from Boston lay near death in an Alabama hospital. As James Reeb's life slipped away, his story was in every morning paper and on every evening news program. Deeply committed to the non-violent struggle for civil rights, he had gone to Selma, Alabama, in response to an appeal from Martin Luther King, Jr. On March 9th, he was viciously attacked by men opposed to civil rights. When he died two days later at the age of 38, President Lyndon Johnson called it "an American tragedy." Reeb's death helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of federal legislation to guarantee voting rights for the country's black citizens.
Before March 10, 1965, the name Jim Reeb would have been familiar only to his family, friends and co-workers. He was not the sort of person who sought publicity; he had spent his adult life working in inner city ghettos. A well-educated white man, he lived with his family in one of Boston's most impoverished black neighborhoods so he would be near his job at a community center in Roxbury. But in early March 1965, Jim Reeb became part of history.
Along with clergymen from around the nation, he flew to Selma, Alabama, to join a peaceful march to demand voting rights for the city's black people. There, on March 9th, he was the victim of an unprovoked vicious attack. As he lay near death, the whole nation learned the story of Jim Reeb's life. When he died on March 11, people around the nation mourned James Reeb as a martyr for the cause of civil rights.
He was born on New Year's Day in 1927 in a small Pennsylvania town. During his early childhood, the family struggled with illness and poverty; they moved repeatedly in search of work for Reeb's machinist father. Finally, when Jim was in his early teens, they settled in Colorado.
Jim was an excellent student and a skilled debater; his classmates and teachers later remembered his intensity, moral certainty, and insistence on reasoning from principles. But Jim Reeb had another distinguishing characteristic: until he had corrective surgery in his teens, he was cross-eyed. He knew how it felt to be stigmatized and excluded because of the way one looked. He understood firsthand the anger, bitterness, and suffering caused by prejudice.
Jim Reeb was a deeply committed Christian, and everyone expected that the friendly but serious young man would become a minister. After serving in World War II, he went to St. Olaf College, a Lutheran school, and then to Princeton Theological Seminary.
While Reeb was preparing for ordination as a minister, he served as a chaplain at a Philadelphia hospital. He found the work deeply satisfying and stayed on at the hospital after graduation from seminary. His next job was working with inner-city youth at the YMCA. His first pulpit was at a Unitarian church that that served a poor black neighborhood in Washington, DC.
After five years there, Reeb decided that the administrative demands of the job took too much time away from his true calling ? ministering to people in need. In 1964, he resigned his pulpit.
In his final sermon, he urged his parishioners to dedicate themselves to helping their black neighbors. He told the congregation that "we are going to have to really take upon ourselves a continuing and disciplined effort with no real hope that in our lifetime we are going to be able to take a vacation from the struggle for justice."
Reeb and his family relocated to Boston where he went to work for the Quaker-run American Friends Service Committee. He would be based in Roxbury and working on a new project to improve housing for the inner-city poor. He and his wife believed they should live in the community they were serving, so they moved to Dorchester. They sent their children to the neighborhood schools.
Most of his colleagues, including black social workers and educators, thought he was foolish to settle his family in the midst of a black ghetto, but Reeb insisted that it was essential to gaining a real understanding of what inner-city blacks faced every day and to earning their trust.
Although he was not working as a clergyman, Jim Reeb treated his job as if it were a ministry. He was committed to restoring human dignity to the urban poor. His goal was to increase the number and quality of housing units available to Boston's poor black residents. In January and February of 1965, he was pursuing a campaign to get the city to revamp its building and safety codes.
Then on March 7, 1965 ? known ever since as "Bloody Sunday"? Alabama state troopers used billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas to break up a peaceful march from Selma to the capital in Birmingham. The brutal scene was broadcast on national television. All around the country, people were horrified by what they saw, as were Jim and Marie Reeb in Boston.
The next day, Martin Luther King appealed to clergy from around the nation to join him for a ministers' march. Although Reeb recognized the risk ? he had four young children ? he felt compelled to answer King's call.
He arrived in Alabama early on Tuesday, March 9th, and spent the day at a relatively peaceful protest. He was returning from dinner with two other white ministers when they were suddenly assaulted by three white men shouting racial epithets. Jim Reeb was clubbed in the head and critically injured. The next day, a banner headline on page one of the Boston Globe read: "2 Hub Ministers Beaten ?1 Badly ? in Selma Street." Five hundred people gathered at the Federal Building to protest the "savagery" of the Alabama police.
The savagery was not new. Two weeks earlier, a young black hospital worker had been shot dead by a police officer as he tried to protect his mother from being beaten, but it was Jim Reeb's story that caught the world's attention. As he lay unconscious in an Alabama hospital, the story spread across the nation and the world.
A friend later wrote that "the entire civil rights struggle suddenly came to a focus in him?. He was a white minister who had come to Selma to support the Negro cause. He was a peaceable man who became the victim of a wholly unprovoked attack."
When he died, early on March 11th, there was mourning ? and outrage ? around the country. The next day, Congress resounded with speeches denouncing the brutality and calling for government intervention. Deeply moved by the death of "that good man," President Lyndon Johnson instructed his aides to draft a voting rights bill.
James Reeb's sacrifice was felt in small towns and big cities, in churches and synagogues, in editorials, songs, and poems. His biographer wrote, "No one knows how many tributes were paid ?. Republican and Democrat, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, rich and poor, Negro and white, all poured forth their lamentations and praise." In Boston, on the Saturday after his death, close to 30,000 people attended a memorial gathering.
Sources
No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story, by Duncan Howlett (Harper and Row, 1966).
When in Boston, by Jim Vrabel (Northeastern University Press, 2004).
|
|
Comment from George Goemans, February, 2009.
I worked with James Reeb at the Philadelphia YMCA where Jim was the Youth Secretary and I was the Physical Education Secretary newly arrived from Appleton Wisconsin, than a 100% white city. The Philadelphia Y adult membership, hotel residents and Y staff were 100% white and the youth membership was 99.6% negro .Jim was great as he fought for justice within that YMCA.
One of my hardest working weeks was the time Jim took it on himself, and got me to help, to rebuild an entire rusted stairway connecting the YMCA locker rooms to the gym and swimming pool. He was hands on and tireless. We talked often about his Washington clergy time so I believe he came to the Philadelphia YMCA from Washington. I was living in California when Jim was killed and remember waking up to the sad TV news, so it was truly a national headline story.
|
|
Do you know something about this topic? Do you have
other pictures or items or knowledge to share? What
about a personal story? Are you a collector? Do you
have questions? Contact us
here.
Created: March 17, 2005 Modified: February 11, 2009
|
|
Site Tips
