A Dangerous Kind Of Self-Delusion

June 25, 2019·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

The Reebs hear for the first time that Elmer Cook swung the club that killed Jim, ending decades of uncertainty.

1. White Lies, from NPR, is hosted by Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley and investigates the 1965 murder of Unitarian minister Jim Reeb in Selma, Alabama, and the decades of concealment that followed. 2. The episode opens with an archival recording of Jim Reeb himself delivering his final sermon at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C. in July 1964 — eight months before his death — warning that complacency after the March on Washington was 'the most dangerous kind of self-delusion.' 3. Ron Engel, Jim's closest colleague at All Souls Unitarian Church in D.C. in the early 1960s, argues that Jim has been seen as a martyr for longer than he was alive and that recovering him as a real person is 'almost a philosophical question about storytelling.' 4. Jim Reeb was born January 1, 1927 in Wichita, Kansas; during a dust storm at age seven his mother May draped wet cloths over his mouth to help him breathe; he grew up in Casper, Wyoming and studied at St. Olaf College and Princeton Seminary. 5. Jim left a comfortable position at All Souls in Washington to work on low-income housing in Boston's majority-Black Roxbury neighborhood with the American Friends Service Committee, living there with his family and sending his children to local schools. 6. In letters to Ron Engel from the fall of 1964, Jim wrote: 'I have seized the bull by the horns. I am doing what seems important and let the damn torpedoes come.' 7. Marie Reeb agreed to speak to the hosts in her Casper, Wyoming home surrounded by four generations of the Reeb family, including oldest son John and daughter Ann, in her first extended interview since March 10, 1965. 8. Marie describes watching Bloody Sunday on television with Jim: he said 'I have to go,' she packed a bag and drove him to Logan Airport on Monday evening, and when asked if she was angry, she said 'I couldn't be angry.' 9. Ann Reeb was five when her father died and recalls being told by her mother that 'he was hurt and he would never be coming back' — never the word 'killed' — and says there was 'an absence of being able to share in that grief.' 10. John Reeb, who was 12 when his father died, recalls feeling after the move to Casper that his father was going to come in the door; Marie says one regret is not getting professional help for the children, especially John. 11. Sitting in Marie's living room, the hosts told the Reeb family the definitive account: that Elmer Cook was the man who swung the club that caused the fatal injury — information the family had never previously heard in full. 12. Marie's response was not about justice for herself, but about how Elmer Cook and the other attackers must have coped: compartmentalizing the act, repeating the counter-narrative until they believed their own story, telling themselves the man died by someone else's hand. 13. Elmer Cook's great-granddaughter Katie Cook sought out the Reeb family after meeting a documentary filmmaker at a university; she had learned about her family's role through a Google search in high school after being told her great-grandfather was merely 'accused.' 14. Katie told Ann Reeb: 'Part of what made him him makes me me. But your family history doesn't make you unless you choose it to. It's kind of ironic that the best way to separate myself from it is to jump straight into it.' 15. Elmer Cook's grandson Drew, who was born after Elmer died and is now living in Jackson Heights, Queens, watched the 2014 film Selma and had to pause it when he realized Jim Reeb's murder was his grandfather's; he began an unfinished letter: 'Dear Mr. Reeb, I don't even know how to begin this letter.' 16. Elmer Cook's son Bob, who agreed to be interviewed at the public library in Iuka, Mississippi, describes going with his father at age 14 at 4:30 a.m. to collect loan payments from Black customers using a billy club and a pistol. 17. Bob describes Elmer breaking his nose when he was late returning home with chili dogs; the Selma Times Journal recorded 25 prior arrests for Elmer, 17 for assault and battery. 18. Bob says he believes his father genuinely thought Jim Reeb was killed in the ambulance, not by his own hand — and Drew confirms his father likely needs to believe that because 'he does not have the emotional tools to deal with it.' 19. The episode's tone is measured, intimate, and documentary-style; it uses archival recordings, letters read aloud, and extended conversations with multiple family members across several visits. 20. Listeners drawn to narrative journalism about civil rights history, intergenerational trauma, or the psychology of self-deception will find the episode substantive; those seeking straightforward true-crime resolution rather than moral complexity should be forewarned that the episode explicitly promises no justice.

As heard by us

A patient civil-rights investigation about denial, memory, and the stories families inherit.

White Lies begins with Jim Reeb’s final sermon in July 1964 at All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., and uses his warning about self-delusion to measure the gap between national progress and ordinary life.

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A civil-rights investigation that begins with a 1964 sermon and ends in a family reckoning.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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