08/31/2026
These are two people most Americans have never heard of: Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, and Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit. Within the span of a few weeks in 1965, both would be murdered by white supremacists in Alabama -- for the crime of loving people they had never met.
Days earlier, the country had watched in horror as Alabama state troopers beat 600 peaceful voting-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma -- a day that would be remembered as Bloody Sunday. In its wake, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued an urgent call for clergy and citizens of every faith to come to Selma and stand with the movement. Reeb and Liuzzo, two strangers a thousand miles apart, both answered.
If you trace the thread of human progress -- through the abolition of slavery, through suffrage, through every movement that has pushed us closer to a world that honors the humanity of every person -- you find love at its center.
Not hatred of the oppressor, but love of the oppressed. Not a desire to destroy, but a desire to free. The people who changed the world were, again and again, the ones who loved others unconditionally.
This is what that love looked like. On a Sunday night in March 1965, a 38-year-old minister in Boston watches the footage of the brutality at the bridge -- and does not look away. 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.
James Reeb. Viola Liuzzo. Both would be dead within weeks. Both were murdered by white supremacists for refusing to look away from strangers' suffering.
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 eulogized James Reeb at Brown Chapel in Selma, calling him "a shining example of manhood at its best." Weeks later, he traveled to Detroit for Viola Liuzzo's funeral, where he carried her six-year-old daughter through the crowded church -- a moment the girl would remember for the rest of her life. Three years after that, King too would be dead, 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.
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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