02/17/2026
What most people don't realize about this iconic photograph from the Civil Rights Movement is that it captures not one, but two men who would be murdered for their role in the struggle for freedom.
Nearly everyone recognizes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., pictured alongside his wife Coretta. Far fewer recognize the man on the left: Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston who had flown to Alabama only the night before, answering Dr. King's call for clergy of all faiths to join their Black brothers and sisters on the Selma march for voting rights.
This photograph was taken in Selma, Alabama on the morning of March 9, 1965. By that evening, Rev. Reeb would be lying in a hospital with a fractured skull, beaten by white supremacists. He died two days later.
If you trace the thread of human progress -- through the abolition of slavery, through suffrage, through every march and movement that has ever pushed us closer to a world that recognizes the humanity of every person -- you will find love at the center.
Not hatred of the oppressor. Love of the oppressed. Not a desire to destroy. A desire to free. The people who changed the world were the ones who loved others unconditionally.
This is what love looks like: A 38-year-old minister in Boston watches the news on a Sunday night in March 1965. On the screen, he witnesses what would be known as "Bloody Sunday" when state troopers beat 600 peaceful marchers on a bridge in Alabama. He hears Dr. King's call for clergy of all faiths to come to Selma. The next evening, he reads his four children a bedtime story and boards a plane to Selma.
In Detroit, a 39-year-old mother of five watches the same footage -- and hears the same call. When she tells her husband she's going to Alabama, he says what many would say: "It's not your fight." Her response: "It's everybody's fight." She kisses her children goodbye and begins the drive south.
Their names were James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo. Both would be dead within weeks. Both were murdered by white supremacists for the simple act of loving people they had never met.
Rev. Reeb had chosen to live in Roxbury, one of Boston's poorest Black neighborhoods, so he could be close to the community he served. When Dr. King sent a telegram calling for clergy to come to Selma after Bloody Sunday, Reeb was one of 450 ministers, priests, and rabbis from around the country who answered.
He arrived at midday on March 9, 1965 -- and marched with King that same afternoon. That evening, after sharing a meal at an integrated restaurant, he and two fellow ministers were attacked. A club came down on his head. As the attackers left, one yelled: "Now you know what it is like to be a real n*gger." He died of his injuries two days later. His killers were identified, but an all-White jury acquitted them in less than ninety minutes.
Two weeks after Rev. Reeb's death, Viola Liuzzo -- also a Unitarian, also answering Dr. King's call -- was using her car to shuttle marchers from Montgomery back to Selma, along with 19-year-old fellow activist Leroy Moton. When she stopped at a red light, a car filled with local Klan members pulled up alongside them. Seeing Liuzzo, a White woman, and Moton, a Black man, together, they followed. They pulled a gun and shot directly at Liuzzo. She was killed by a bullet to the head; Moton, covered in her blood, pretended to be dead when the Klan members investigated the crashed vehicle.
Dr. King would eulogize Viola Liuzzo just as he had eulogized James Reeb -- the man he called "a shining example of manhood at its best." Three years later, he too would be assassinated at 39.
Here is what's often forgotten: these people were breaking the law. The marches were illegal. The injunctions were clear. Eating at integrated restaurants violated the social order. Driving Black citizens on public roads was an act of defiance. There were those who said the marchers got what they deserved -- that they should have simply followed the law, respected authority, stayed home.
But Dr. King answered that argument from a Birmingham jail cell two years earlier: "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." He wrote that anyone who "breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
James Reeb understood this. Viola Liuzzo understood this. They knew that throughout history, the law has often been the instrument of injustice -- and that love sometimes demands we choose conscience over compliance. They did not hate the law. They loved justice more.
What moved these strangers -- a minister and a mother, from Boston and Detroit -- to give their lives for people they'd never known?
They came from a faith tradition built on a simple, radical idea: love your neighbor as yourself. Not the neighbor who looks like you. Not the neighbor who speaks your language or shares your history. "Your neighbor" -- which is to say, everyone. They understood that the circle of "us" has no edge. That the suffering of a stranger is not someone else's problem. That love, real love, does not calculate risk or measure distance.
Rev. Reeb understood this when he boarded that plane. Viola Liuzzo understood this when she told her husband "it's everybody's fight" and began the drive south. They understood what Dr. King had been preaching all along: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
Four days after Rev. Reeb's death, Dr. King delivered the eulogy at Brown Chapel in Selma: "James Reeb says something to each of us, Black and White alike -- says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder."
That same day, President Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress, calling for passage of a voting rights act: "At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama... One good man -- a man of God -- was killed."
The Voting Rights Act passed five months later.
Sixty years on, the echoes persist. Last month in Minneapolis, two more Americans were killed while standing up for their neighbors during another struggle for justice. Renée Good was a poet and a mother of three. Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse who spent his days caring for veterans. Both saw their neighbors being brutalized and could not look away. Both understood that it was everybody's fight.
Dr. King's words ring across the decades: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness -- only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate -- only love can do that."
The architects of progress have never been the ones who hated most. They have been the ones who loved most. Who saw a stranger and recognized a brother, a sister, a neighbor. Who felt chains they did not wear. Who understood, in their bones, that none of us are free until all of us are free.
James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo saw hatred blazing across their television screens, they witnessed the suffering, they heard the pleas for help -- and answered the only way that has ever changed anything.
They answered with love.
May we all find the courage to love that fiercely.
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For a powerful historical account of James Reeb's murder and that of civil rights protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, we recommend "Jimmie Lee & James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement that Changed America" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781941393833 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4tx3hc1 (Amazon)
For two in-depth accounts of Viola Liuzzo's story, we recommend "From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo" (https://www.amightygirl.com/from-selma-to-sorrow) and "Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials" (https://amzn.to/3K01D0a)
For two books to introduce children to heroic girls and women of the famous Selma March, we highly recommend "Child of the Civil Rights Movement" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/child-of-the-civil-rights-movement) and "Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March," for 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/turning-15-on-the-road-to-freedom)
To inspire children and teens with more true stories of girls and women who fought for change throughout history, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
To introduce children and teens to more courageous women who helped lead the fight for equality, we've shared many reading recommendations in our blog post, "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177
NPR has also produced an in-depth investigation podcast about the murder of James Reeb called "White Lies" at https://apps.npr.org/white-lies/
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