Reverend James Reeb Dies After White Supremacist Attack in Selma, Killers Acquitted by All-White Jury

On March 11, 1965, Reverend James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, died from injuries sustained two days earlier when he was attacked by white supremacists outside a Selma, Alabama restaurant. Reeb had answered Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy to come to Selma following Bloody Sunday on March 7, when state troopers brutally attacked voting rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the evening of March 9, after participating in the “Turnaround Tuesday” march, Reeb and fellow ministers Orloff Miller and Clark Olsen were walking to dinner when they were ambushed near the Silver Moon Cafe by several white men who attacked them with clubs. Reeb, 38 years old and father of four, received a devastating blow to his head that sent him into a coma. He died two days later, becoming a martyr to the voting rights cause.

Immediately after the attack, witness Edgar Stripling identified four assailants to police: Elmer L. Cook, William Stanley Hoggle, Namon O’Neal Hoggle, and R.B. Kelley. Police found a club compatible with the murder weapon in Kelley’s car, and Kelley gave a statement implicating the other three men. All four were arrested and indicted for murder in April 1965. However, in December 1965, an all-white jury in Dallas County, Alabama, acquitted three of the defendants after less than 90 minutes of deliberation. The trial was a travesty of justice: the judge ruled eyewitness Stripling incompetent to testify because he had spent time in a veterans hospital years earlier for a mental condition, Kelley was allowed to refuse to testify despite having been granted immunity, and a brother of one of the suspects and a known racist were allowed to serve on the jury. The fourth defendant, Kelley, was never brought to trial.

Reeb’s death sparked national outrage that surpassed even the reaction to Bloody Sunday. The fact that a white minister from the North had been murdered generated extensive media coverage and political attention in ways that violence against Black activists often did not—a disparity that civil rights workers noted with bitter irony. President Lyndon B. Johnson called Reeb’s widow and father to express condolences, and on March 15, 1965, just four days after Reeb’s death, Johnson delivered his historic address to Congress invoking Reeb’s martyrdom while introducing the Voting Rights Act. Johnson stated that Reeb’s death, combined with Bloody Sunday, had galvanized the nation and Congress to act. The Voting Rights Act passed on August 6, 1965. However, the acquittal of Reeb’s killers demonstrated the same pattern of judicial corruption that had enabled the murder of Emmett Till, the Birmingham church bombing, and countless other racist attacks: all-white juries refusing to convict white defendants for crimes against civil rights workers, judges manipulating trial procedures to exclude evidence and credible witnesses, and local law enforcement failing to provide adequate protection or pursue justice. The systematic failure to hold Reeb’s killers accountable revealed how deeply institutional racism was embedded in Alabama’s judicial system, where even the murder of a white minister who had traveled to support voting rights could not overcome the commitment to protecting white supremacist violence, illustrating the complete breakdown of rule of law in jurisdictions determined to resist civil rights through any means necessary.