Minister Dies: Selma Martyr

Mar. 12, 1965 - The Rev. James Reeb, the 38-year-old Boston minister who was beaten by whites in Selma, Ala., Tuesday night, died in the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham last night. Death came at 7:55 p.m. A few minutes later, Wilson Baker, Selma’s Public Safety Director, stepped out of his automobile at Browns Chapel Methodist Church, where 200 demonstrators were praying in the rain, and said: 

“Reverend Reeb has died in the hospital in Birmingham.”

The word spread immediately through the demonstrators, who were holding their second all-night vigil for the wounded minister, and inside the church, where a rally was under way.

John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, left the church and told the demonstrators:

“We will hold one minute of silent prayer for our fallen brother.”Baker said four white men who had been accused of the crime were rearrested and charged with murder immediately after he received word of the death. They were arraigned and released under bonds of $25,000 each, the normal amount required on a capital charge under Alabama law.

Mr. Reeb, a Unitarian, and two other white ministers were attacked on a downtown street corner when they left a Negro restaurant where they had eaten dinner. Four hours before, they had participated in a march led by Dr. Martin Luther King on Highway 80.

In the attack, Mr. Reeb suffered multiple skull fractures, resulting in a large blood clot over the left side of his brain. He underwent emergency surgery the night of the attack, but weakened steadily after that.

It was the second death in the eight-week-old campaign, which Dr. King has led to protest barriers to Negro voting in the Alabama Black Belt, an area of fertile soil and large Negro population. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Negro, was fatally shot in a café in nearby Marion after state troopers broke up a night demonstration. 

Scores have been injured in the violence that has accompanied the demonstrations, and more than 3,500 persons have been arrested.

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