|
| Forty-three years coming By Clay Lambert [ clay@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 2:58 PM PST In her bedroom in Casper, Wyo., 79-year-old Marie Maher awoke in a fog sometime before dawn. She reached down from the bed so that she might scoop her daughters in her embrace. The girls weren’t there, of course. They had grown and were living in California on Election Day, 2008. She lay back in bed and let her heart regain its rythym and realized she had been dreaming. She knew what the dream of her daughters was telling her, too. Hours later, the Rev. James Reeb’s widow cast her ballot for Barack Obama. Maher’s daughters, Karen and Anne Reeb, tell a stranger about the dream two days later, in a coffee shop in Half Moon Bay. They don’t have to add that they believe spirits move us. n n n While Obama’s election to the highest office in the land is significant for all Americans, it is personal for those who played a role in the civil rights struggle that made possible the election of a black man to the nation’s highest office. Few Americans contributed any more to that struggle than the Reeb family. Today Anne and Karen Reeb live in Half Moon Bay where they help operate a family business — Palladino Painting. Anne’s sons, Max and Marek, attend Coastside schools. The family’s status as martyr to the cause of equality is well hidden in a predominately white community thousands of miles from the Southern towns where Martin Luther King Jr. and James Reeb both marched — and died. In the mid-1960s, James Reeb, an ordained Unitarian minister, moved his family to the Roxbury section of Boston, a black neighborhood where discrimination in housing, in hiring, in health care, were not academic notions but evident in all aspects of daily life. Reeb took a job with the University Neighborhoods Council as part of a community improvement project sponsored by the Quakers. In 1965, Karen was 6; Anne, 5. They had two siblings, older brother John, who was 12 then, and Steven, an infant. The rambling 11-room Victorian house where they lived — ironically on Half Moon Street — was only the latest stop on an urban tour of sorts for the Reebs. They had also lived in Washington, D.C.’s rotten inner core and, for a time, in Philadelphia, where James Reeb was a hospital chaplain. “My father was adamant that you could not make a difference for African-Americans (while living comfortably in a white community),” Anne Reeb said. The Reeb girls say they were too young to notice much about the discrimination they suffered as white minorities in their community. But Duncan Howlett’s biography of James Reeb recounts a tough time for the eldest of the Reeb children. James Reeb spoke to the principal at his son’s school more than once after the boy’s lunch money was stolen. Whatever the privations his family faced, James Reeb was focused on helping the more unfortunate of his countrymen. It’s not surprising, then, that he was appalled by what he and Marie saw on the family television on the night of March 7, 1965. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had planned a voting rights march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala., on that day. The 600 marchers made it only to the outskirts of town. They were confronted by state and local lawmen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge where they were beaten, trampled and gassed. Eighty marchers went to area hospitals. The Reebs were not the only Americans aghast by what would come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” ABC broke into a planned documentary about Nazi Germany called “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show clips of the violence in Selma. Some confused viewers reportedly thought the Selma clips — of uniformed agents of the state beating unarmed civilians — was simply part of the documentary. “The violence in Selma was so similar to the violence in Nazi Germany that viewers could hardly miss the connection,” the SCLC’s Andrew Young would later write. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was watching, of course. He called for another march two days later and James Reeb could not stay away. King and Reeb were joined by 2,500 more. King led marchers to the Pettus Bridge and a phalanx of lawmen. He stopped and the marchers prayed. Then they turned and walked back in the direction in which they had come. Some considered the march a victory, others wanted confrontation. When the excitement receded, Reeb realized he hadn’t eaten since leaving Marie and the kids the night before. So he and a pair of clergymen — including the Rev. Clark Olsen of Berkeley — shared a dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy from Walker’s Café, a Selma restaurant that catered to black residents. Afterward, the trio walked back toward the nearby Brown Chapel for a meeting. They never made it to that meeting. Four white men approached the ministers. The first blow came from a heavy stick that hit Reeb on the left temple. Reeb fell to the ground and lay on his back as he and his colleagues were beaten mercilessly. Reeb was by far the most gravely injured that night. It seemed to take an eternity to get him to a hospital hours away in Birmingham. Two days later, his family asked that James Reeb be taken off life support. King organized a third Selma-to-Montgomery march several days later. That time there were 25,000 walking over the bridge, too many to stop. That time the marchers made it to the state capitol in Montgomery. Five months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing discrimination at the ballot box on the basis of skin color. n n n The Reebs were showered with love in the aftermath of the murder. Admirers set up scholarships for the children. King himself delivered a stirring eulogy for Reeb. He asked those in attendance not only “who” killed Reeb, but “what.” King blamed clergy too comfortable to care, lawmen who didn’t enforce the law equally, politicians who were only interested in re-election — even “the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice.” Many thought that the death of a white minister in the segregated South had a different kind of impact on the nation than similar atrocities perpetrated against black citizens. Stokely Carmichael, an outspoken member of the SNCC, noted bitterly that the president never called the families of black people felled by racists in the South. For her part, Anne Reeb remembers the moment her mother broke the news that her father had been mortally wounded. Her mother sat the girls down in a chair and attempted to render the indescribable in language preteens could fathom. “I have a vivid memory of Mom telling me Dad was hurt very badly and that he wouldn’t be coming back,” she said. “I knew the finality of it.” Anne Reeb was the family’s California pioneer. She grew to attend college in Utah and moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in dance. Soon she wanted out of the big city. She found Louis Palladino and Half Moon Bay about the same time, in 1990. Sister Karen visited regularly and began to call the coast home herself, off and on. She moved to Half Moon Bay permanently about five years ago. n n n Forty-three years after the death of their father, as they awaited the inauguration of the nation’s 44th president, Anne and Karen were crying together again. “There were tears,” Karen Reeb said, referring to Obama’s acceptance speech on Nov. 4. “We ended up sitting on the floor in another room, holding hands.” “In that moment, when he became president, it was such an affirmation of (my father’s) life,” she said. “People were dying to make a way for this little boy to one day become president.” Both women say they worry for Obama’s safety. “I do,” said Anne Reeb. “I worry for him and I say a prayer. (Violence) is real. It’s real for us.” Anne Reeb brought a copy of Life magazine to the coffee shop meeting to discuss her father. King is pictured on the cover, carrying a wreath of purple roses and white daisies that was delivered for the funeral of James Reeb. The family received a similar gesture last week from the Unitarian Universalist Association, her father’s church. It was a bouquet of yellow roses with a card that read, “In loving memory of your father’s service to our country.” Both women say they missed their father terribly in their formative years. Both say they gained something else. “I think as a daughter you grow up missing your father … you feel you missed out,” Karen Reeb said. “But, as you get older, you start to realize the context.” “He had to go to Selma,” Anne Reeb adds. “He had a greater vision.” |