Listen to this: NPR podcast investigates 1965 murder of the Rev. James Reeb

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Listen to this: NPR podcast investigates 1965 murder of the Rev. James Reeb

‘White Lies’ retells the story of the murder of a white Unitarian Universalist minister and civil rights activist, which galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act but which the white residents of Selma, Alabama, refused to help solve.

Christopher L. Walton
Walker’s Cafe in Selma, in 2015

The Rev. James Reeb, the Rev. Clark Olsen, and the Rev. Orloff Miller ate at Walker’s Cafe (above, as seen in 2015), an integrated restaurant in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. While walking back toward Brown Chapel AME for a civil rights meeting, they were attacked by white men and Reeb was mortally injured. (© 2015 Christopher L. Walton/UUA)

© 2015 Christopher L. Walton/UUA

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NPR released the first episode today of a weekly podcast series that investigates the unsolved murder of the Rev. James Reeb, the Unitarian Universalist minister who was killed in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965. “White Lies” combines new and archival interviews to revisit the crime that provoked Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, and it explores the communal refusal by white residents of Selma to solve the crime. Listen to the first episode, “The Murder of the Rev. James Reeb,” subscribe to the podcast, and visit the multimedia page where you can see photos and hear audio recordings related to the podcast.

Learn more from our archives about the Unitarian Universalist involvement in the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma:

  • The Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed’s 2014 cover story, “Selma’s Challenge,” adapted from his book The Selma Awakening, explains why sixty Unitarian Universalists, including Reeb, responded immediately to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s telegram calling religious leaders to Selma the morning after the Bloody Sunday attack on the civil rights march to Montgomery.
  • Amy K. Nelson’s 2015 cover story, “Reckoning with Selma,” accompanies the families of James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jimmie Lee Jackson as they were reunited in Selma for the first time in fifty years with the survivors of the attack that killed Reeb.
  • In 2001, UU World tracked down and published King’s previously unpublished eulogy for Reeb, along with first-hand accounts from other UU participants in the Selma campaign and the march to Montgomery. Read “Unfinished journey: Selma 1965.”

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