MARCH 7 marked the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when 650 civil rights marchers were savagely beaten by police and attacked by police dogs as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, heading to the state capital in Montgomery to demand that African Americans have the right to vote.
It stands as a solemn moment in the US civil rights movement – one that stirred the conscience of the nation, including drawing to Selma a Boston minister whose support for the cause cost him his life.
The right to vote is the precious centerpiece of American citizenship and democracy.
With voting rights originally conferred only to land-owning white men, constitutional amendments and laws slowly expanded the franchise to women and people of color. Entrenched white racism, male chauvinism, and xenophobia fiercely resisted.
No group in America has been as challenged electorally as Blacks, their presence here rooted in more than two centuries of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow.
Seventy years ago this spring, the Reverend George W. Lee was murdered by a band of white men in rural Mississippi. Lamar Smith, a fellow black Mississippian, was murdered later that year for encouraging voter participation.
In 1964, the nation was shocked as they listened to Fannie Lou Hamer testify before the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer spoke of being jailed and beaten for trying register voters in rural Mississippi.
In the winter of 1965, 26-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot to death by police in Selma while organizing for Black voting rights.
Jackson’s death was the catalyst for increased voting rights activity in Selma. In March, the horror that unfolded during the march over the Pettus Bridge, which would become known as Bloody Sunday, was captured by television and the events shocked America.
In response, Martin Luther King, Jr. summoned clergy from across the country to come to Selma. Among those who answered his call was Rev. James Reeb, an unassuming white Unitarian minister from Wyoming who had moved recently with his family to Boston to work on social justice efforts. Reeb was advocating for housing rights in the Grove Hall section of Dorchester.
Within hours of his arrival in Selma, having eaten dinner at Walker’s Cafe, Reeb and two colleagues were attacked on the sidewalk by a group of white men, one of whom wielded a club or pipe that slammed Reeb’s head.
A local infirmary said Reeb should be taken to a hospital in Birmingham, 65 miles away. The ambulance had a flat tire. Police refused them an escort, saying, “You don’t need any help.” They were chased by Klansmen. Reeb’s friends had to borrow $150 because the hospital demanded a deposit before they would treat him. He had brain surgery but there was no hope.
Reeb was a member of Boston’s Arlington Street Church. Its minister, Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, visited the Reeb home at 3 Half Moon Street near Upham’s Corner to break the news to Reeb’s wife and four young children.
Reeb died two days later. King delivered the eulogy at his funeral at Brown chapel in Selma. President Lyndon Johnson sent yellow roses.
The men tried for Reeb’s murder were promptly acquitted by an all-white jury.
Reeb’s death is considered the catalyst for Congress passing the Voting Rights Act in August 1965.
As we reflect on civic life 60 years after Bloody Sunday and Reeb’s murder, we bitterly witness the retrenchment of voting rights. Key clauses of the Voting Rights Act have been gutted, including section 5, which gave Black voters assurances that electoral violations in former confederate electoral districts of the South could be monitored and investigated at the federal level.
We commemorate the Black protesters who sought to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge 60 years ago this week. Bloody Sunday has consecrated Selma as a sacred civic site. Reeb should be recognized as a Boston hero and martyr whose spilt blood was a sacrifice for democracy.
Now we are reminded again of the arduous journey to achieve the franchise for all, and that Black voters matter.
The Trump era presents new challenges to the voting rights saga. As a white man, he has made egregious claims about voter fraud and other thoroughly debunked charges of misconduct in the 2020 presidential election.
Far right groups now absurdly push for restricting voting rights based upon the canard that undocumented immigrants vote regularly in local, state, and federal elections.
We recall the words of John Lewis, who was among those beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, who yet again summons us “to seek good trouble, necessary trouble, that we may redeem the soul of America.”
And the question that looms before us all remains, as asked by King, “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?” May beloved community prevail.
Rev. Kevin Peterson is founder of the New Democracy Coalition and is adjunct faculty at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Rev. John Gibbons is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Boston.
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