James Reeb was born in 1927 in Wichita, Kansas. He joined the Unitarian Universalist All Souls Church in Washington, DC, in1959, and became a UU minister in 1962. In September 1964, Reeb, his wife Marie, and their four children moved to Boston, where Reeb directed a low-income housing program in Roxbury for the American Friends Service Committee. The family lived in a working-class section of the city, believing it would be hypocritical to move the family to an affluent suburb. 

Reeb soon saw first-hand the effects of racism: de facto school segregation and inadequate delivery of city services. Among his first assignments was to investigate a fire in a tenement house rife with fire code violations that killed four people.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, in the first of a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Dr. Martin Luther King in response to Alabama Black voter registration oppression tactics, white southerners savagely beat 650 peaceful demonstrators. Responding to Dr. King’s call to clergy for witness, Reeb arrived in Selma on Tuesday, March 9, 1965, and joined a march to the same place where Sunday’s march had been met with violence. Reeb stayed in Selma hoping to see the lifting of a court injunction against the full march to Montgomery. After dinner, he and two other UU ministers, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller, were attacked in the streets by four white men. Reeb was struck on the side of the head with a heavy stick. He was taken first to a local hospital and then to the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham, where he died 48 hours after the attack. 

Reeb was one of three people killed following the spring and summer marches in response to their participation; the others were Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian, shot and killed August 20 by a sheriff’s deputy while protecting a group of demonstrators from the Selma march, and Viola Liuzzo, a Civil Rights activist from Detroit killed by the Ku Klux Klan on her way to the march. 

Earlier that year, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black civil rights activist in Marion, Alabama, and a deacon in the Baptist church, was beaten by troopers and fatally shot by an Alabama state trooper while unarmed and participating in a voting rights march in Marion. His death helped spark the continued marches in Selma. He died February 18, 1965.  

Following Reeb’s March 11 death, Black leaders marched in protest as far as they were allowed to and held a vigil for the next four days. The same day, March 15, President Johnson received the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law August 6, 1965.

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