White Lies and the Branches on the Tree of Systemic Racism

NPR reopens a case from Selma, 1965, that speaks to us more than ever today.

“It’s like a tree with branches, that if you cut off one branch, don’t mean the damn tree going to die. It’s just going to grow another branch. And that’s what’s happening. We need to find the root of all this.” — Joanne Bland, co-founder of the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama

I’ve just finished listening to White Lies, an excellent story of investigative journalism by two white Alabamians into the case of Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who in March 1965 left his wife and four young children at home in Boston, to travel to Selma in response to Martin Luther King’s appeal for clergymen to come and support the cause after the unprovoked Bloody Sunday attack on nonviolent activists on Edmund Pettus Bridge. Less than 24 hours after arriving in Selma, Reeb was leaving a restaurant with two other clergymen (all of them white sympathisers with the civil rights cause) when he was set upon by a group of four or five white men, one of whom hit him hard in the side of the head with a billy club, with a sound that reverberated down the street. A melée ensued, in which all three clergymen were beaten by this group of white locals. Reeb died two days later as a result of his head injury. Three white men were brought to trial, but were…