The Murder Of The Rev. James Reeb

May 14, 2019·51 min·4 clips

Civil rights tour guide Joanne Bland corrects the language on a Selma memorial: the victims were murdered, not martyrs who 'gave their lives.'

Three men finish dinner in Selma. They are northern white ministers in a segregated southern city, standing outside a black restaurant as the light fades. They need to get back to a meeting. The question is simple enough to feel almost foolish: left or right? The episode stays on that sidewalk because the moment is ordinary, and because no one there can see what is about to happen. Clark Olson remembers the restaurant as crowded. He puts their arrival around 5:30 on Tuesday afternoon, at one of the town's integrated restaurants. Orloff Miller remembers the phone booth. He calls his wife, then Clark and Jim call theirs. Orloff steps outside with a cigar. The street lights come on. In his memory, the sodium vapor lights and empty street make Selma look, briefly and strangely, like a Midwestern community in Ohio. That quiet is hard to sit with because the narration has already told us one man will be murdered. The details arrive in pieces. Clark Olson is heard in an interview recorded just days after the attack. Orloff's later memory brings back the room, the booth, the cigar, and the dusk. The restaurant matters because white civil rights workers from out of town could not walk into just any place, so the black-owned cafes on Washington Street shape the route. Then the choice lands. Three tired men in a city they do not know have to pick a direction. The episode uses archival tape, memory, and present-tense narration to keep that turn close, until the wider damage starts to show: the other two men, children and grandchildren, and people beyond those families. Even the credits feel loaded, naming Washington University in St. Louis, ABC News, NBC News, Pacifica Radio, WATV Birmingham, eFootage, and the Associated Press as archival sources.

As heard by us

A dinner on Washington Street in Selma opens into a murder that ripples through families and history.

White Lies turns a dinner on Washington Street in Selma into the start of a murder story that reaches well beyond one night or one family. The mix of interviews, archival tape, and scene detail gives the episode a lived-in feel, and the quiet setup makes the turn in events hit…

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Press play for a Selma murder story that starts with a meal and ends in protests nationwide.

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