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Back at the church, King tried to see victory in the day's work. "At least," he told his people, "we had to get to the point where the brutality took place. And we made it clear when we got there that we were going to have some form of protest and worship. I can assure you that something happened in Alabama that's never happened before. When Negroes and whites can stand on Highway 80 and have a mass meeting, things aren't that bad."
Murder at the Silver Moon. But the fact was that Tuesday's events had so far added up to a distinct setback for Martin Luther King and the civil rights strategy that he espouses. And once again, it took white racists in their blind ferocity to come to the rescue.
Tuesday night three white clergymen dined at a Negro restaurant in Selma. One of them was the Rev. James Reeb. Reeb, who was born in Casper, Wyo., was ordained a Presbyterian minister but converted to Unitarianism in 1959. A slight, energetic, hard-working man, father of four children, Reeb worked for four years at All Souls' Church in Washington, D.C., but he found parish work too limiting. "He had a great love for people and their needs," says a colleague, the Rev. William A. Wendt. "He could not have cared less about whether they were going to heaven. He cared where they were going now."
Last year Reeb gave up his Washington duties and took a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Boston, where he directed the group's low-income housing project, bought a rundown house in Boston's Negro ghetto of Roxbury, sent his children to the local school, where most pupils were Negroes.
Leaving the Negro restaurant in Selma, Reeb and the two other clergymen walked past a scruffy whites-only restaurant, the Silver Moon Café. At least four white men came toward them. One called, "Hey, nigger!" Another smashed Reeb on the temple with a club. The hooligans jumped the ministers and beat them mercilessly. From inside the Silver Moon, customers could see the fight—but not one lifted a hand to help. Reeb's friends dragged themselves to their feet, stumbled for 2½ blocks before they found help. As they sped toward Birmingham, their ambulance got a flat; they had to wait for another ambulance to pick them up.
For two days Reeb hovered near death in the hospital. Twice his heart stopped, and twice doctors managed to start it beating again. But Reeb never recovered from his coma.
His wife was at his bedside when he died. President and Mrs. Johnson and Vice President Humphrey spoke to her on the phone. The President sent flowers, dispatched a jet plane to return Mrs. Reeb and her father-in-law to Boston. Within two days, local lawmen had arrested four men, William Hoggle,