“Remembering a Unitarian Universalist Hero: The James Reeb Story”[1]

by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

January 21, 2007

            On Monday, this nation acknowledged Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It was a day to acknowledge, remember, and celebrate the life of one of the 20^th century’s great moral leaders and the values and vision for which he stood.

            There could have been no better time for us to do this. As this country’s president inanely called for an escalation of the war in Iraq only days earlier, a war in which so many have already unnecessarily suffered and tragically died, there could have been no better time for us to remember a man who changed the world through his commitment to non-violence.

            This morning, however, I want to talk about the life of a man who may be less familiar to you than King, and that is a man named James Reeb.

            I don’t think King would mind, for Reeb was a man that King held in high esteem, and their lives were also deeply interconnected.

            But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the story of Jim Reeb’s life, and let me begin at the beginning.

            He was born on January 1, 1927 - - 80 years ago this month - - outside Wichita, Kansas. His parents were both religiously devout, and his mother’s first pregnancy had ended in a still birth, so before the birth, his mother prayed, “O Lord, if thou wilt heal me and give me another child, I will give him to thee. Whatever you may wish to use him for, that he shall do. Where you need him, there he shall go.”

            Jim was born healthy, and became the center of his parents’ life, which was not an easy one. The Great Depression began when he was still and small child, and work was not easy to come by for his father. The family was poor. To make matters worse, Jim was a sickly child, once suffering from rheumatic fever, and as a result, was often schooled by his mother at home. He was also cross-eyed. Too young to have an operation, he started wearing glasses when he was less than two.

            During his second year of high school, his family moved to Casper, Wyoming. His teachers remember him as being very serious, neat, courteous, and considerate, and while not unpopular among his classmates, he wasn’t popular either.

            There were several reasons for this. First, it didn’t help at all that his last name at this time was “Rape” - - the anglicized version of “Reeb.” Nobody teased him about it directly, but there were plenty of jokes behind his back. A few years later, the whole family changed the name back to Reeb.

            Second, were his crossed eyes, which made others feel uncomfortable.

            Third, he was sometimes argumentative. Intellectual consistency was very important to him, and he always wanted to take any argument to its logical conclusion, no matter where it led. Jim was most argumentative, even with his teachers, about anything that had to do with the suffering of others, to which he had a very deep sensitivity.

            For example, when his Latin class read about Julius Caesar’s treatment of conquered people, it upset him a great deal, and when a class discussed the plight of those on the local welfare rolls and his teacher and classmates took the position that they were there because of their own lack of effort, Jim took the position that it wasn’t their fault and that others had a responsibility to help them.

            Whether it was because of his own poverty and social isolation as a child or because of his eyesight or because of something else, Jim always identified with the outsider.

            It was his participation in the local Presbyterian church that sustained him during his sophomore and junior years of high school. At church, he wasn’t an outsider like he was at school. He was highly regarded for his friendliness, his sense of responsibility, his willingness to work, and his religious devotion. His participation in the youth group was where he first discovered he could be a leader.

            During the summer between his junior and senior year, Jim was finally able to get the operation that corrected his eyes, and coming back to school that fall, he found he was finally more accepted by his peers. It was a profound experience for him. Because of it, he knew both what it felt like to not belong and then to belong.

            It was also during his last year of high school that he decided to pursue the Presbyterian ministry. His mother had been true to her word and had always encouraged her son to follow a life of service to others.

            After graduating from high school, however, Jim enlisted in the army. As a candidate for ministry, he would have been exempt, but for Jim it was a matter of fairness that he should serve too, “If everyone else had to go, then I must go too. The fact that I intend to enter the ministry should not make me exempt,” he said. Jim spent two rather unhappy years in the army, was never sent overseas, and then started at St. Olaf’s College in Minnesota on the G.I. Bill in the fall of 1947.

            Even at this conservative Lutheran school, however, Jim was more religiously conservative than most of his other classmates. He was a literalist regarding the bible and often said in discussions with other students, “If you can’t accept the whole Bible as literally true, then you cannot accept any of it as necessarily true.”            However, rather than using the Bible to condemn others, he saw it as a strict standard which to hold himself. For example, in order to observe the Sabbath, he would never study on a Sunday even if he had a test on Monday.

            It was also while a student at St. Olaf that Jim fell in love with Marie Deason, a young woman from back home in Casper. During his first three years at St. Olaf’s, they wrote to each other often and saw each other whenever Jim went home for vacation. They married at the beginning of his senior year.

            In order to follow his call to Presbyterian ministry, Jim attended Princeton Theological Seminary after graduating from St. Olaf. It was while there the first of Jim and Marie’s four children were born, but seminary wasn’t the experience for which Jim had hoped.

            Though still a biblical literalist, he was beginning to have doubts about some of the things he believed. Courses he had taken in science and history contradicted certain biblical teachings, and he also had discovered that the Bible was often inconsistent with itself. His hope was that seminary would help him deal with these doubts, but if fact, the classes he took led him to ever greater doubt. When he asked his professors about this crisis of faith, they assured him that it was only a phase.

            Seminary did introduce Jim to new experiences. During his first semester, one of his classes took a field trip to Harlem in New York City, and he was appalled by the conditions in which people lived in the inner city. He also was one of six students selected to be student chaplains at Philadelphia General Hospital - - the hospital of the city’s poor, especially of its African American poor. Growing up in Kansas and Wyoming, Jim had never had direct contact with people who lived constantly with the challenges of urban poverty and racial discrimination.

            These experiences furthered his crisis of faith. He began to wonder whether individual sin or unjust social structures were the greater cause of human suffering, and he began to wonder how he could best minister to the patients he met at the hospital. Once he had believed that sharing his faith was how he could best help another person, but he soon came to wonder whether he could most help others not by trying to change their theology but by accepting them as they were and convincing them that they were worthy of love.

            Despite his growing religious doubts, Jim graduated from seminary and was ordained into ministry at the First Presbyterian Church in Casper in 1953.

            Afterward, Jim spent four years working as a hospital chaplain, and he was gifted in the work. His sensitivity to the suffering of others and his unconditional acceptance of people made him an ideal chaplain. He especially enjoyed working with the alcoholics at the hospital.

            However, his religious doubts were growing even larger. He stopped believing in eternal damnation, coming to the conclusion that social conditions were responsible for more evil than original sin.

            He stopped believing in intercessionary prayer. He wrote in his diary: “I was particularly impressed that the mortality rate for the newborn fell markedly when the city fathers appropriated money for more personnel and better equipment for the maternity wards. I never remember an unexpected change occurring after prayers of the church fathers.”

            He even stopped believing in a personal God. He wrote in his diary: “I have clearly progressed in my views until I am much more of a humanist than a deist or theist.”

            The story of clergyman losing his traditional faith is a rather common one, and most continue on in their work anyway, going through the motions of faith and belief, but this wasn’t possible for Jim, even though he was making a difference in people’s lives as a chaplain. Intellectual honesty and moral integrity were values that were very important to him, so he began to think about leaving ministry.

            However, he also knew what a disappointment this would be to his parents. He knew how much it would be a challenge for Marie and their son John. And he still felt called to something. He wrote in his diary, “My understanding of religion has changed, but my desire to pursue the quest for the full depth of the meaning and purpose of life and to give it expression in my day-to-day living has not…I want to participate in the continuous creation of a vision that will inspire people to noble and courageous living. I want to share actively in the adventure of trying to forge the spiritual ties that will bind mankind together in brotherhood and peace.”

            Coincidentally, or one might even dare say providentially, during this time of internal struggle, somebody gave Jim a copy of the book Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage by the Unitarian Universalist religious educator Sophia Lyons Fahs. After reading it, Jim thought to himself, “If this how the Unitarians approach religion,” he thought, “I guess I must be a Unitarian,” and he began the slow process of seeking fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister.

            After two years of waiting, Jim was granted fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister and began work as the assistant minister at the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. in 1959.

            As the assistant minister, he didn’t preach very often, but got to spend a lot of time dealing with people at the church one-on-one, which he loved. As the assistant minister, he also had to deal with a lot of administration, which he didn’t. He wrote in his diary, “If I ever find myself teaching in a theological school, I am going to tell them to replace their course in Old Testament with one in Parking Lot Management.”

            As the assistant minister, Jim also took the lead in organizing the University Neighborhood Council, a coalition of different churches and other organizations that would address the growing social needs of the neighborhood surrounding the church.

            But as Jim spent more and more time working with the University Neighborhood Council, which is where his passion was, he spent less time dealing with his other ministerial responsibilities, which created tensions, and even less time with Marie and their children, which also created tensions.

            After five years at All Souls, Jim made the decision to leave and take a job with the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) as a community organizer in a very poor, predominantly African American neighborhood outside of Boston.

            It was a good job for Jim. He was finally in a position where he could not only be intellectually honest about his beliefs, but felt truly needed and felt like he was making a different. He still considered himself to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, but he was doing his ministry outside the walls of the church.

            Jim had been in this job less than a year, however, when Martin Luther King, Jr. issued his call for clergy to join in Selma, Alabama, to peacefully protest that state’s denial of civil rights to its African American citizens.

            On Sunday, March 7, 1965, King led a march that was to begin in the city of Selma and proceed to the state capitol of Montgomery. However, as some of you remember, that march didn’t make it to Selma. On that afternoon, about 650 African Americans and a few whites began the march, but the marchers only got as far as the outskirts of the city where they met Alabama State Troopers armed with billy clubs, sidearms, and gas masks. The state troopers viciously attacked the marchers, and images of this event were broadcast to the nation.

            This event eventually became known as Bloody Sunday, but when Jim and Marie Reeb watched it on television that night at their new home, they were simply shocked and outraged, and the next day when King issue call for the clergy of the nation to join him for another march in Selma, Jim Reeb struggled in deciding whether to answer that call.

            Duncan Howlett, in his biography of Reeb, describes how Jim reacted after receiving a phone call from the Unitarian Universalist Association asking him whether he would be interested in going to Selma:

            “Jim hung up with a heavy sigh, and for a long time he didn’t speak. He just sat where he was, half slumped in his chair, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, thinking. He wanted to go. He wanted to go very much. This he knew with total clarity. He felt an almost irresistible impulse to call Marie, put on his coat, and head for the airport at once. He knew there were risks. He had seen with his own eyes how the Alabama authorities proposed to deal with freedom marchers. The next time, the injuries might be much more serious. But these reflections did not lessen the impulse which had seized Jim like an external force. They increased it. All the blows should not fall upon the heads and backs of Negroes, he thought. They had already suffered enough. It was time now for privileged white people who believed in integration to stand with them and take some of the blows too. If that was to be Jim’s lot, he was ready.

            “But then came the second thoughts that always follow the first impulses born in high excitement. It did not occur to him that he might never return from Alabama. After all, they were not killing the freedom marchers except very occasionally in lonely spots after dark. But there was real chance that he might be hurt badly, perhaps incapacitated. What would he do then? What would Marie do? And John, the girls, and the baby?”

            That night he discussed his desire to it with Marie.

            “I don’t want you to go,” she said very quietly. “There are others to go. You belong here.”

            “No, I belong there. It’s the kind of fight I believe in. I want to be part of it. Every man who can go is needed.”

            “All right,” she said in a voice he could hardly hear. “I know how deeply you feel. If you must, you must.”

            “We’ll manage - - somehow,” Marie said, her voice breaking for the first time. Now tears stood in her yes. “And I know you’ll be all right. It is important that you go.”

            That night, Marie drove Jim to the airport. As she left him at the curb, he kissed her and said, “Goodbye. I’ll be back soon.”

            Jim flew from Boston to Atlanta to Montgomery. He and other clergy from all over the country assembled at Browns Chapel in Selma, including many Unitarian Universalists. This congregation, by the way, provided funds for its minister at the time - - the Reverend Peter Weller - - to go.

            The march King led that Tuesday afternoon did not make it all the way to Montgomery either. It was halted by Alabama state troopers just outside of Selma, but this time, with the eyes of a nation watching closely, the marchers were allowed to turn back peacefully after kneeling and praying in front of the troopers.

            After the march, Jim decided to stay in Selma and participate in another march that was planned for that Thursday, but that night as Jim and two other Unitarian Universalist  ministers  - - Orloff Miller and Clark Olsen - - were walking back to Browns Chapel from a nearby restaurant, tragedy struck.

            The three of them were walking down the sidewalk - - Olsen on the inside, Miller in the middle, and Jim nearest the curb - - when they became aware of four white local men on the other side of the street coming toward them. They quickened their pace, but they did not run.

            “Hey, niggers,” one of the four local men called. “Hey, you niggers,” he called to the three ministers.

            The three ministers continued walking quickly ahead, and just as Clark Olsen began to glance back, one of the four swung a club over Jim Reeb’s head. After hitting Jim, the thugs began attacking Olsen and Orloff, who dropped to the ground and covered their heads, according to the technique that was taught to civil rights workers.

            Within a minute, the attack was over. The thugs parting words were, “Now you what it is like to be a real nigger.”

            Olsen and Orloff were not badly hurt, but they immediately saw that Jim was. He was conscious, but dazed, and could not talk. He could walk, however, and they got him to his feet and made their way to a nearby business where an ambulance was called.

            It took them four hours to get to the hospital in Birmingham. The first ambulance that was taking them had to turn back with a flat tire because it wasn’t safe for the African American ambulance driver to change a tire on the side of an Alabama highway at night. After arriving at the hospital, Jim was operated on immediately. The blow he suffered, doctors said, had crushed the left side of his skull.

            Marie and Jim’s parents were contacted, and Marie and Jim’s father flew to Birmingham the next day to be at his side.

            By the next day, the name of James Reeb was also on the front page of every newspaper in the country and his story was the lead story on every television and radio broadcast. People across the country and the world prayed for his recovery. However, his injuries were beyond the ability of prayer or medicine to heal, and on Thursday, March 11 at about 7 p.m., Jim Reeb died as a civil rights martyr.

            Later that evening, President Lyndon Johnson called Marie at the hospital to express his personal condolences and to send a military jet to take her back to Boston.

            The announcement of Jim Reeb’s death caused anger and grief to ripple across the country.

            There were protests in front of the White House, demanding federal intervention in Alabama.

            On Friday afternoon, the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s Orpheus. It was the same selection they had played a year and a half before on the announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy.

            The official Roman Catholic newspaper of the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, seriously proposed sainthood for Reeb - - the first and the last time that has ever happened.

            A single-evening show titled Broadway Answers Selma was held in Reeb’s honor in New York City and raised $100,000 for the civil rights movement.

            The following Monday, President Johnson presented the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to a joint session of Congress. In his address to congress, Johnson mentioned Reeb, and it is widely believed that Reeb’s death helped create the political groundswell that led Johnson to present the act to Congress sooner rather than later.

            President Johnson had asked Martin Luther King, Jr. to be present with him as he presented the Voting Rights Act to congress, but King declined so that he could speak at a memorial service for Jim Reeb at Brown’s Chapel in Selma.

            Let’s listen now to King’s words…

[Audio recording:] I say, in conclusion, the greatest tribute that we can pay to James Reeb this afternoon is to continue the work he so nobly started but could not finish because his life-like the Schubert "Unfinished Symphony"-was cut off at an early age. We have the challenge and charge to continue. We must work right here in Alabama, and all over the United States, till men everywhere will respect the dignity and worth of human personalities. We must work with all our hearts to establish a society where men will be-that "out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth." We must work with determination for that great day. "Justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream." We must work right here, where "every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places straight. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." We must work to make the Declaration of Independence real in our everyday lives. If we will do this, we will be able-right here in Alabama, right here in the deep South, right here in the United States-to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. We will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children-as expressed so beautifully in this marvelous ecumenical service-all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands in unity and brotherhood to bring about the bright day of the brotherhood of man under the guidance of the fatherhood of God. So we thank God for the life of James Reeb. We thank God for his goodness. We thank God that he was willing to lay down his life in order to redeem the soul of our nation. So I say-so Horatio said as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet-"Good night sweet prince: may the flight of angels take thee to thy eternal rest."

            Jim Reeb never set out to be a hero, and it certainly wasn’t his desire to become a martyr, but his deep concern for the suffering of others, his deep sense of justice, his desire to go where he was needed most, and paradoxically, his deep desire to live his life to the fullest, led him to become one.

            In one of his first sermons at All Souls Unitarian Church, Jim said, “We shall no find security in existence if the mere continuation of life is our final goal. Man never has been willing and never shall be content to merely live. Is there nothing in life worth risking the end of one’s life for? Are there no dreams so important that we can risk our own destruction in order to make them come true?”

            Jim Reeb had discovered the answer to that question for himself - - that there are some things in life that are worth risking one’s life for, that there are a few ideals that are even worth dying for, that it is by commitment to worthy ideals that our lives gain their fullest meaning.

            As we remembered Martin Luther King, Jr. earlier this week, today let us also remember one who answered King’s call and shared his vision and hopes and dreams, and may they be ours to carry on.Let us remember one of our own, the Reverend James Reeb.

            So may it be. Amen.