Though his martyrdom lives on, justice has eluded the Rev. James Reeb.
A monument to his life stands in front of the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Ala., marking the day the Wichita native left his wife and children in Boston to attempt to march to Montgomery for voting rights and beaten to death with a club for his participation.
Despite the passage of decades and the official status of his death still ruled unsolved, we can yet deliver to the Unitarian Universalist minister the justice his life so importantly deserves.
Reeb had watched the Bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights marchers and then answered the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national call for clergy to descend on Selma to make another attempt at marching to Montgomery.
But deciding at the last moment not to march into the teeth of a phalanx of law enforcement, King turned around and led marchers back to the church.
That evening, segregationists clubbed Reeb and two other clergy from out of state. Our tour guide said that because Reeb had marched for Black voting rights, the Selma hospital would not treat him. He died two days later from the beating. Dr. King gave the eulogy.
Then President Lyndon Johnson used Reeb’s martyrdom to pass the Voting Rights Act.
But in the decades since, extremists have targeted the Voting Rights Act for dismemberment, attacking key passages and weakening voting rights for wide swaths of the American electorate.
Aware of this and aware that one of Reeb’s accused killers ran a prominent used car lot in Selma, a group of us Kansas tourists toured the town extensively in “Justice for James Reeb” t-shirts.
But more than anything, Reeb likely cared more about the voting rights of others. He’d also more than likely approve of the work the ACLU of Kansas has undertaken in the spirit of voting rights. He chose the Unitarian church specifically because of its emphasis on social activism.
We could honor his memory by cementing certain voting rights measures that include expanding early voting, increasing accessibility (curbside voting, increasing the number of voting sites, and improving language access. We could also work harder to ensure that people with felonies know their voting rights.
So, what do you get the man who gave everything?
An honest fight for these measures would make for a great start.
Date
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 - 12:15pm
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In the 2021 hybrid documentary/scripted feature based on Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, Princeton Prof. Imani Perry connected several historical dots over the span of centuries.
“The response to Black progress in the country is punishment,” said Perry, who works at the Center for African American Studies at the Ivy League school.
History sides with Perry. Reconstruction begat roughly 100 years of segregation and lynching. Just 12 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, death, the Reagan revolution tried to erase Civil Rights gains. President Obama gave way to extremism across the country.
But in that resilience, Black America set out seeking freedom, and agency and the bounty promised to any American daring to dream.
Nicodemus is a product of that resilience.
Formerly enslaved people left Kentucky just as Reconstruction began to crater, releasing a torrent of hatred in violence into the nation’s bloodstream. With terror on their heels and the promise of freedom ahead, thousands of the formerly enslaved hammered together wagons and headed West.
In 1877, a group of those settlers landed in Nicodemus on the high plains of northwest Kansas. Six Black men and one white man created the town company. By 1976, the nation had named Nicodemus a National Historic Landmark. It has survived, but barely. It has only a couple dozen residents anymore.
Still, its historical significance remains sprawling.
Some historians have claimed the name sprang from the biblical story of Nicodemus and Jesus’ declaration that we must be “born again.”
While poetic, that’s just not so, said Angela Bates, a Nicodemus native, the town’s historical protector, and founder of the original Kansas African American History Trail.
“Nicodemus is named for the African Prince mistakenly enslaved but who eventually purchased his freedom,” said Bates.
Bates said many of the town’s original progeny came from the unusual union of Former Vice President of the United States, Richard M. Johnson, and the woman he’d enslaved and married. That genealogy resounds. Despite surface racial differences we’ve turned into galaxies, we remain bound – ironically – by blood and soil.
Nowadays, former residents, Black history tourists and more return to Nicodemus annually to celebrate the town’s bright history, filled with a sense of pride of what the town once represented.
They’re connected to a past where terror played virtually every part and like the people who hurled themselves into the nation’s westward expansion, they’re still in search of that promised land, that promised freedom, that magical land that won’t punish them for flourishing.
Date
Wednesday, February 14, 2024 - 10:45am
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My dear friend, Ted Ayres, after years of serving as vice president/general counsel for Wichita State University, now hosts an engaging show on KPTS in Wichita about one of his passions – books. Ted reads 150 to 200 books a year.
Ted and I worked together years ago, to help WSU secure Mr. Parks’ collected works, letters, record collection, etc. Under Ted’s leadership, WSU beat out the Library of Congress and the New York City Public Library system, which also vied for the collection.
We reminisced about an alternately celebratory but sobering moment he had introducing the renowned photographer, filmmaker, and author. A moment our state and our nation seem tightly locked inside.
As many people have done, Ted dipped into Mr. Parks’ oceans of work and pulled up the poem, “Kansas Land,” which spoke lyrically to the natural beauty here. It reads:
I would miss this Kansas land.
Wide prairie filled with green and cornstalk;
the flowering apple,
Tall elms beside glinting streams
...
Silver September rain, orange-red-brown Octobers and
white Decembers with hungry
smells of hams and pork butts curing in the
smokehouse.
Ted stopped there in the poem, as many people had done in the past.
So, Mr. Parks did what he usually did: he called Ted on it.
With the grace and calm he’d become famous for over the years, Mr. Parks pointed out how often people introducing him choose this poem and how equally often they omit the last stanza that reads:
Yes, all this I would miss--along with the fear,
hatred and violence
we blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.
We laugh about it now but like Ted, I think this anecdote has a message for easily half of our nation.
We don’t live in a racial heaven or Hell, but those extremes do exist. We cannot, as many Americans continue to do, embrace our celebratory moments while denying many if not most of our darker chapters.
Just like with the poem, we must find ways to reconcile the truth of both – the beauty we see as well as the ugliness we choose not to see.
Professor, activist and now longshot-Presidential candidate Cornel West is fond of saying that we do not arrive at “Truth” with a capital “T,” until, “suffering is allowed to speak.” That kind of truth is the key ingredient for any kind of reconciliation.
Truth-telling, moves us forward. It’s the reckoning before the reconciliation. We’re going to have to get comfortable with the sharing of these painful but redemptive truths as we work to move beyond the current, uglier moment.
Date
Tuesday, February 6, 2024 - 3:00pm
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