Newspaper Page Text
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Friday, April 23, 1965
THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE
AS WE WERE SAYING by Robert E. Segal
The Jim Reeb Story
Must Be Remembered
Reader, your eyes, your mind,
your heart for a moment, please.
This is about Jim Reeb, the 38-
year-old minister who went to
Selma, Alabama, from Boston
the second week of March and
did not return.
I had a call from Jim Reeb’s
modest office the day he left:
he wouldn’t be able to make the
meeting he and others of us
were deeply interested in — the
one about defacto school segre
gation in Boston. This was im
portant to him, but he had asked
his American Friends Service
Committee boss permission to go
to Selma to bear witness to the
appeals of Negroes there. And
that appointment With death had
priority. /
Jim called friends in Boston
soon after he got to Selma and
not long before a Selma hooligan
with white skin and a black
heart stalked him emerging from
a restaurant and struck that cow
ardly and fatal blow. His mes
sage back to Boston deserves a
place among the exalted utter
ances of the ages: “I have been
among giants. I'll never be the
same again.”
Giants there are, and pygmies
also, alas. The giants are the life-
risking, joy-risking, dauntless
Negroes of Alabama, trying to
march in the rain, praying in
the rain, irresistibly dramatizing
their determination to get the
vote. The giants are Jim Reeb
himself and his fellow-clergymen
who leave the security and bless
ings of home to stand and march
with the petitioners. The giants
are the few courageous whites of
the South who can no longer
stomach the tactics and nastiness
of a Governor Wallace, and say
so, and act upon that revulsion.
But the pygmies, oh, the pyg
mies: one of the members of the
House of Representatives in
snug, secure Vermont, leading
the successful fight to table a
simple resolution calling upon the
President to use Federal force to
protect civil rights demonstrators
in Selma—leading the fight by
saying that Jim Reeb was “ded
icated and zealous, but very mis
guided.” The pygmies are the
scoffers and scomers at Boston
airport whose exact words were
recorded by a reporter when
some of the clergymen took off
for Selma, utterances like these:
“Those nigger lovers will get
theirs”; “Why don’t they stay in
Boston and mind their own busi
ness?” “I’m getting sick and tired
of starry-eyed clergy.”
The starry-eyed clergyman,
Jim Reeb, is today only gshes in
the quietness of Casper, Wyo
ming, where he grew up; but his
determination to improve the lot
of the disinherited, his labors on
such issues as employment,
schooling, housing endure in
memory of all who knew him,
all touched by his deeds of kind
ness and thoughtfulness.
Jim Reeb attended St. Olaf’s
College in Minnesota, was grad
uated in 1953 from Princeton
Theological Seminary; obtained a
master's degree in . theology at
Con well School of Theology, in
Philadelphia; was ordained a
Presbyterian minister; entered
the Unitarian Fellowship; moved
on to become associate minister
at All Souls Church in Washing
ton. Then in September, 1964, he
came to the Dorchester section
of Boston to serve as Metropol
itan Director of the low-income
housing program for the Friends
Service Committee. Once in Bos
ton, he sought out the handful of
people who for the past several
years have worried and tugged
over de facto school segregation;
job training and job advancement
for Negroes; the myriad social
problems of large families up re
cently from the South.
Above all, Jim Reeb dug into
the housing problem. He insisted
on living where that problem was
most acute. He fought fervently
against the evils imposed by
slumlords on families trapped in
Boston’s black ghetto — trapped
economically and by the chains
of discrimination. Three months
after Jim came to town, a five-
storv, sub-standard apartment
house in Roxbury caught fire;
and four persons lost their lives.
A mother jumped from the fifth
floor window and died later of
injuries. When she jumped, she
was holding her youngest child,
1 . who was not seriously in
jured by the fire or the fall.
These lines just set down are
copied verbatim from Jim Reeb’s
own report on the fire. It is a
thorough report, based on his
persistent efforts to get at the
heart of the housing scandal. The
photographs of the charred ruins
are Jim’s. The interviews with
inspectors and building commis
sioners and city officials are his.
Yhe work of gathering funds to
succor the survivors was Jim
Reeb’s.
All this was done while others
were busy issuing press release*
deploring the tragedy. Jim was
not one to work that way. Hi*
method was to go quickly in
search of causes and then even
more speedily in quest of help—
immediate and long-term — for
those with no friend at court,
no voice at city hall.
A thousand Jim Reebs, per
haps even only a hundred, could
change the slums of America.
One Jim Reeb has yielded up his
life for the unchampioned, the
maligned, the dispossessed, those
most desperately in need of
friends. Which of us dares for
sake the work he started?
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