Transcript
James Joseph Reeb, 1953 graduate of Princeton Seminary, Community Relations Director of the Boston Metropolitan Housing Program of the Friends Service Committee, was beaten to death in Selma, Alabama on March 11, 1965, where he had gone to seek to support Negros in their efforts for human dignity and the rights of citizenship. In his memory and to carry forward his work, the alumni of the Seminary have established the James Reeb Memorial Lectureship. The first Reeb Lecture was delivered
in 1966 by Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and Dr. John A. McKay, President Emeritus of the Seminary, delivered an address at the dedication of the plaque in honor of James Reeb, which now occupies a place on the porch of the Campus Center in which we are meeting, where other memorials to martyr missionaries speak of men and women who have given their all for the cause in which they believe.
The flowers before the lectern this evening are in memory of James Reeb. They've been sent by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Reeb of Casper, Wyoming, his parents. We are happy that this evening we can also have members of the family, Mr. and Mrs. Cable, of Willingborough, New Jersey, here in our midst, and they are very welcome. Jim Reeb would be thrilled and honored, I'm sure, to know that the second lecture in his honor is to be given
by Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a national organization with over 500,000 members found in all 50 states of the Union. Mr. Wilkins, who is highly regarded by the leaders of both political parties in this country, has been called to the White House for consultation by three successive presidents. He has worked for the NAACP for 36 years and has been responsible for many of the major advances over
these years. The legal branch of his organization has been responsible for almost every major legal victory in the cause of civil rights. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he grew up in Minnesota to graduate from the University of Minnesota, and his first job was on the staff of the Kansas City Call. He became editor of The Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP, in 1931, and 24 years later, succeeded Walter White as Executive Director of this organization.
Mr. Wilkins, Princeton Theological Seminary considers it a privilege to be your host for the second Reeb Lecture, and I welcome you in the name of President McCord, who is in Africa tonight, and send a special greeting and ask that I particularly remember him to and to say in his name and in the name of the faculty that we are very appreciative of your coming and hope that you will return again. We look forward to your address
and to the question and answer period, which is to follow. We do not know what you will say, but we know that your credentials are beyond reproach, for you have again and again put your life on the line. Mr. Wilkins. Thank you. Thank you very much, I'm happy and honored to be here at Princeton Seminary to deliver this James Reeb Memorial Lecture, and especially honored to be following in the footsteps of my old friend, Dr. Eugene
Carson Blake, who gave the first lecture here last year. And perhaps it's sufficient to recall that Dr. Blake was one of the ten national leaders who helped to plan and participate in the March on Washington in August 1963, and to say that in that terrible tragedy at Selma, Alabama, which this lecture in part recalls, it was my privilege to take part in the last of that trek on the way to Montgomery following the tragic death of
Reverend Reeb. The man whom we memorialize today gave his life two years ago for freedom and for love. The cause was the age-old struggle for decency, dignity, and equality among human beings. Many men have died in that struggle, and many, like James Reeb, have inspired others to beliefs and to deeds in behalf of the ideal. In our country, the crusade has been in progress for many generations. We had set ourselves the task at the outset
of creating a nation where men would be equal before the law, where citizens, irrespective of their origins, would be judged upon their own abilities, and would be free to advance as far as those abilities would take them. All this in a framework of individual freedom which respected the rights of man. By 1965, when James Reeb came upon the great stage, we knew that the fight for our ideals was no easy one. We had had our wrestling
over freedom of speech, of worship, of assembly. We knew that these were under constant assault, sometimes sly and circuitous in nature, often frontal and bold. We had learned through years of slave owning and slave trading how deep and devious were our commitments to the degrading human slave code. When, finally, we could not live longer as a nation with our decadence and its poisoned tentacles of commerce of every sort between men and states and regions, we fought
a war and wiped out slavery. By constitutional amendments, we made the former slaves citizens, gave them the ballot, and decreed equal treatment for them and American life. But the words of Congress and constitutional blessing did not change either the status of black men or the hearts of white ones. Since the days of Reconstruction, we've been trying to right the wrongs we knew to be there. The United States Supreme Court added to the nation's travail with its
wickedly mischievous ruling in 1896, which created the myth of the separate but equal constitutional world of Negro citizens. These latter were to live and die under this dictum for 58 years until the United States Supreme Court of 1954 struck down the separate but equal doctrine and the famous school segregation cases in May of that year. And in that year, which may properly be regarded as the year of the second emancipation, Negro Americans at last came under
the same constitution as that which sheltered their white fellow citizens. There was no more never-never land for them, a land in which their rights as citizens were determined not by the Constitution, but by whimsical but nonetheless forceful interpretations of equality under separatism. The rights of Negroes were what white people in a given locality said they were. The new time and the new colorblind constitutionalism met resistance, cunning, obdurate, violent. The years from 1954 to 1965 were
strewn with heartaches, setbacks, and defeats, also with slow and painful but thrilling advances, both physical and psychological. Who here cannot remember the sit-ins, the marches, the demonstrations, the jails, the songs, the humor, and the tears? Who does not see the gallant Kennedy and the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Who did not go down into the Valley of Souls after Dallas and climb the high mountain of hope and of exalted resolve
with the drive of Johnson toward the finishing of unfinished business and civil rights? We ran into Selma on that mountain climb, and James Reeb helped us across the hateful crevice with his sacrifice. We prayed that the senseless killing of this good man would make the Battle of Selma the last battle for freedom, but even as we prayed, we remembered how many down through the ages had died for man's forward inching, and we knew in our hearts
that after Reeb, there would be more, many more, before the kingdom came. Last Monday, four days ago, Warless Jackson went about his work in the plant of the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company in Natchez, Mississippi. He had just been upgraded to the job of mixer, a category no Negro workman had held before in that plant. He worked overtime and left the plant late. His pickup truck was parked on the street because the company parking lot was
too small for all the cars of the employees. Within a few minutes' drive of the curb, an explosion ripped through the little pickup truck, and Jackson was a dead man. He was the father of five children. He had been treasurer of the Natchez NAACP until last month when he resigned because of his wife's recurrent illness. She had marched in a demonstration in 1965, had been held in Parchman Prison for a time before bail money was made
available, and had never been the same after that experience, which had included sleeping on the floor. Warless Jackson usually gave a ride home to George Metcalf, a fellow worker who was maimed for life by a bomb planted under his car on August 27, 1965. At the time, Metcalf was president of the Natchez NAACP and had just finished leading a campaign to increase the number of registered Negro voters. Fate intervened. Metcalf did not work the same schedule
last Monday as did Jackson. Thus, the failure to kill him in August 1965 was not redeemed by success last Monday. What a fiendish and dastardly and cowardly obstruction to the unending crusade for freedom, and how futile the march to the mass stopped by the brutal murderers of James Reeb, and the march to better jobs, better families, and better education for children in Natchez will not be stopped by the ghastly murder of Warless Jackson and the cruel
maiming of George Metcalf. In January 1966, Vernon Dahmer, a Negro farmer and businessman of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, announced on a Sunday that his grocery store could be used in the voter registration campaign. That night, between midnight and dawn, night riders firebombed his home and his grocery store, burning him so severely that he died the next day. Mr. Dahmer had been president of the Hattiesburg NAACP. He was a widely respected citizen out of his extensive land holdings. His
family had made available the land used by the county for a school. He was a good businessman, operating besides his grocery store a sawmill and a sugar mill. Four sons came to the funeral, two in the uniform of the United States Air Force, one in an Army, and one in a Marine uniform. Four sons he had given to his country. But he was cut down for aiding the campaign to have his people vote. In June 1963,
as you may recall, Medgar Evers, Mississippi State Director for the NAACP, was killed on his doorstep in Jackson by a sniper. A man whose fingerprint was found on the rifle was finally arrested, tried twice, with the jury each time failing to reach a verdict. The man, now free on bond, felt so sure of public approbation, despite the split Mississippi juries, that he filed for the nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi in next fall's election. He said
he wanted thus to express his appreciation for the confidence the people had shown in him during his time of trouble. Then in the summer of 1964, nine months before the Reeve tragedy, three young men, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, were killed in Neshoba County, Mississippi. They were missed in late June after they had been last seen alive at the time of their arrest for a traffic violation. Their bodies were found in August, buried under
an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the Hattiesburg and Neshoba County murders, the United States has secured indictments for conspiracy against about 20 persons, including the sheriff of Neshoba County and his deputy. The state of Mississippi, which under present law is the only government that can prosecute a murder charge, has not acted in either case. This is the monstrous system which James J. Reeve unhesitatingly challenged two years ago this week. Jackson, Neshoba County, and Natchez in
Mississippi, together with Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, and a dozen other outrages going back only as far, for example, to Christmas night 1951 when the Florida State Secretary of the NAACP, Harry T. Moore, and his wife were bombed to death in their bed in Mims, Florida. All these events tell us that the long fight is far from over. We who confront the evil every day know it. We know it by the mean threats to our loved
ones and by the deaths to our brave ones. We know it by the technical evasions and spurious rationalizations of the witting and unwitting collaborators inside and outside of government. Today, however, our federal government knows it, and at long last it has comprehended what we have long insisted, namely that justice to the beleaguered Negro is but vital aid to America itself. The Civil Rights Bill of 1966 proposed, among other things, to make racial discrimination more difficult in
the selection of state and federal juries, and to bring directly into the federal court all cases where persons had been harassed, threatened, attacked, or otherwise persecuted, including murder, because they had insisted on the exercise of rights guaranteed them under the United States Constitution. Those who aided them or the cause would also have been covered. This provision, if it had been enacted into law, would make certain that brazen killings such as those in the Vernon Damer, Viola
Liuzu, and Warless Jackson cases would be tried in the federal courts as murder cases, not as relatively mild conspiracy cases. But the 1966 bill also had a section prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Stubborn resistance to this forced a drastic watering down in the House before the bill was passed, and led to the refusal of the Senate last October to even consider the legislation. Because there is no doubt of both the desirability
and the need for these provisions, they have been included among the seven titles of the 1967 bill which was sent to the Congress by President Johnson on February 15th. The widow and five children of Warless Jackson and Natchez cry out for the enactment of this legislation. The four sons of Vernon Damer don their uniforms each day, knowing that their commitment may demand their lives in the cause of their country. Their country, however, is proceeding against those
accused of murdering their father under a mere conspiracy charge. The accused are accused men, says the mighty United States of America, conspired together to deprive the dead man of his rights under the Constitution. A weak read this to redress the terrible wrong of murder and to bring to the Damers and to the United States of America the justice that the society of integrity and durability requires. Our shame alone should prompt the demand upon the 90th Congress
to enact this legislation. We are being told in many quarters by impassioned men and women that we should halt the killing in far off Southeast Asia, where the hazards and misfortunes of war as in ages past have created conditions not wholly within their or our control. These motivated crusaders, however, see only a tenuous ideological connection between the human misery they would have us alleviate in Asia and the hurt and misery in the Jackson family tonight in
Natchez, Mississippi. They are busy with their politically constructed parallelisms. They are obsessed with personalized denunciation. They are suffused with chanting compassion for those they have never seen and never will see. The horror of a viola lead to assassination does not stir them to sloganeering. The terror of fight in the night for a family of law-abiding citizens in Hattiesburg fails to move them. The cruelty of war in the crude, hate-ridden, and deadly bomb that emptied
the light in the eyes of the Jackson family does not drive them to pilgrimages to Hanoi. The callous cooperation between calculating politicians in their Congress on the maiming or killing of legislation does not rouse them. Yet these factors are all within our power here and now in our own country, subject to our thinking, to our fidelity to our own precepts, and to our outrage at their crass nullification. But we suspend our fidelity to precepts out a
convenient window in times of moral stress and we reserve our outrage, apparently, for the alleged misuse of airline tickets by the office of Representative Adam Clayton Powell. In his message on February 15th, urging enactment of the 1967 Civil Rights Bill, President Johnson brought eloquence to his fellow citizens. He said, we adopted a Constitution to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure the domestic tranquility, and provide for the common defense. In our wars, Americans, Negro and
white, have fought side by side to defend freedom. Negro soldiers, like white soldiers, have won every medal for bravery that our country bestows. In Vietnam, ten and two-tenths percent of our soldiers are American Negroes, bearing equal responsibilities in the fight for freedom. But at home, 11 percent of our people are American Negroes and, he continued, the bullets at the battlefront do not discriminate, but the landlords at home do. The pack of the Negro soldier is
as heavy as the white soldiers, but the burden his family at home bears is far heavier. In war, the Negro American has given this nation his best, but this nation has not given him equal justice. It is time, said the president, that the Negro be given equal justice. This, my friends, is a clear and moving call to the American people, through their Congress, their governmental structure, to deal the Negro citizen even-handed treatment, to exact from
him, yes, the full measure of his responsibility, but to accord him, always, the full measure of his justice. If the life and death of James Reeb suggests anything, however, it is that in addition to the functioning of the machinery of government, a fully rounded society of humans must have the personal commitment unto the ultimate sacrifice to freedom and love. In his way, Warless Jackson and all his fellow martyrs were pursuing this commitment. Certain it is that
the Reverend James Reeb, unashamed and unafraid, armed only with his concern for righteousness and humanity, was pursuing this grail in Salma, Alabama, two years ago. On March 14, 1965, on a sharply cold but clear and sunny day, it was my privilege to join Reverend Reeb's hometown intimates in Casper, Wyoming, in a simple memorial tribute to the neighbor of their boyhood and youth. With your permission, I would like to close this memorial lecture with the words spoken
on that occasion. In the Gospel according to St. Luke, the 10th chapter and the 29th, 30th and 31st verses, we find this passage. But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor? Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now, by chance, a priest was going down that road, and when he saw
him, he passed by on the other side. The priest in whose memory we are gathered here today did not pass by on the other side. James Reeb heard the anguished cry against injustice and heeded it with his warm concern, with his prayers, with his bodily presence at the place of evil, and with his life. It is difficult to realize that only last Sunday, a short week ago, he preached at his services in Boston and ended his
day, as did many of us, by viewing the nightmare TV film of the Selma Sunday. The sight of fully armed state troopers beating down and gassing unarmed men, women, and children who were staging a peaceful marching demonstration to secure the right to register and vote sickened and angered America. But the inhumanity called out to Reverend Reeb. These were his neighbors, beaten and robbed. These were those of the men who were taken prisoner by the Selma Sunday.
The Selma Sunday, the day that we are all living in, became a cradle so many years ago. And James Reeb, a disciple of that savior, felt impelled to go to Selma. Of course, Selma was a challenge to the principles of our United States Constitution, to government. Of course, Selma was a challenge to the disciplines of civilized society, to its carefully built checks and balances and restraints. But more than all these, Selma was a challenge to the
religious teachings upon which James Reeb had built his life. The great precepts of love of God and man and of brotherhood were cruelly scared in that ugly attack of last Sunday. James Reeb rose to that challenge unhesitatingly and unflinchingly. He knew about the underlying issue, the facts and the right to vote campaign. Yesterday, Governor Wallace, in connection with his interview with President Johnson, sought to shift the blame from Alabama's original sin of denying the vote to
Negro citizens, to the protests against that denial. By the Wallace formula, all would be peaceful and everything would remain undisturbed if the demonstrations were forcibly halted. The governor had a dream that he could sell this Alabama idea to the President and that the federal government would help him halt the demonstrations. President Johnson and the federal government know better about the Alabama voting situation. They know that as of today, 1965, in 33 out of the 67 counties
in Alabama, less than 15 percent of the Negroes of voting age are permitted to register and vote. There is only one right way to solve this problem, to have peace and dignity, and that is to remove the barriers to the participation of Negro citizens at the ballot box. James Reeve knew this wrong had to be righted by government, but he knew that a necessary ingredient to the solution of any human stress is concern. Come over into
Macedonia and help us is more than a call for technical and legal aid, more than a belief to universal humanity, a plea for administration to the human spirit in an hour of trial, a call to neighbors. James Reeve knew his neighbor and followed with a fidelity rare in these practical days, the biblical admonition to love God and thy neighbor as thyself. His neighbor was every man, everywhere, geography, religious compartments, nationality and skin color were to him
but labels covering hearts and souls related like his to the God of all mankind. There was a man, a black man, off the highway of life, a black man, and in the gully by the side of the road where he had been left to die by robbers. The thieves stole his dignity. They took away his rights as a man and as a citizen in the land. When he sought to recover his possessions, they struck him down.
They trust him up with all manner of restraint, both crude and subtle, and they left him and his half dead. A priest was going down that road in the middle years of the 20th century. A priest named James Reeve and he did not pass by on the other side. He went straight into the gully of darkness and strife and hate. He offered his great spirit, his unadorned goodness, his unselfish love to his stricken neighbor. He sought
to share the neighbor's misfortune, to minister to his wounds, to lighten his burden and to comfort his spirit. Today, here among his loved ones and the people who watched him grow to manhood, I come as but one spokesman for a sorrowed and grateful people to thank God and to thank his family and to thank all those who shaped him for James Reeve. All of us, black and white, from the north, east, and west, and from the
south, are poorer for his going. But the nation he served is better for his underscoring of her weaknesses in her role as a just government. The faith by which he lived is richer for his devotion and for his supreme sacrifice. May that sacrifice speed the day when love shall conquer even those who struck him down and make all men brothers. Mr. Wilkins has agreed to answer some questions. If some of you would like to ask questions,
who would like to ask the first question? Yes, sir. Mr. Wilkins, on our way in here this evening, some of us received some correspondence from members of the seminary community and were greeted by some signs regarding your attitude as a representative of the NAACP and that organization's attitude to the Powell situation. You briefly mentioned it in your very fine address. I wonder if you would address yourself more specifically to why it is you've maintained a sort
of quiet about it. Well, this is news to me, of course, and rather perhaps a gratifying experience. Nine-tenths of my mail in New York is cussing me out for being on Adam Powell's side. So maybe Princeton isn't in the United States. I don't know. Day before yesterday, that very cold day, a man stopped me on Madison Avenue and he said, I know it's cold and I know you're in a hurry and I know I ought
not to stop you on the street, but I just have to ask you one question. He said, I read your column every week and I listen to you on TV and the radio, and I just don't see how you can be for Adam Powell. He said, will you just take time to tell me why is it that a rascal like that doesn't get your instant condemnation? Well, I think we talked about long enough for both of
us to freeze, and I don't think I convinced him at all. This attitude must be due to the last event in which Mr. Powell was denied a seat in which I refused to comment. Well, I had said everything that I felt ought to be said, and anything else would have been merely a repetition. So when the House finally voted to deny him a seat to refuse the report, reject the report of the committee, I didn't see
any point in repeating what I had said on the 1st of January and what I said on the 10th of January and what I said on the 20th of January and the 1st of February and so on and so forth. It just seemed to be a little tiresome exercise. Now, if anybody only read the New York Times on May, March the 2nd, 1967, and saw that paragraph where Roy Wilkins, the NAACP, refused to comment on it
and judges that by that we are not involved in the Powell matter and refused to take a position, then all I can say is that Princeton ought to become Howard University. Down there, they teach him to read every day, not just on March the 2nd. As a matter of fact, the lawyers for the NAACP made the principal argument in support of Mr. Powell before the committee. And I get a good many letters of approval letters, excuse
me, both from Negroes and white people saying, how can you be for Adam? Now, here I come down to Princeton and there's a switch somewhere. And the Princeton says to me, why is it you're not for Adam? Well, the truth of the matter is that the thing we've had trouble making plain to people is that our criticism of the manner in which the Powell matter has been handled by the Howds does not imply an approval of
Mr. Powell's conduct as a man. These we try to separate. These, of course, the public does not separate. They write you letters and they devote three and four pages. They say, you know, he's running around with a woman who's not his wife. Rather unique situation in this country. And they say also, you know, he's arrogant and he is arrogant. And they say, haven't you heard that he, one man wrote me a letter and the first paragraph
of the letter he says, you know, the reason you asked why did you pick on Powell? He's a thief. That's what he said in the first sentence. In the last sentence, he said, because he's stolen money. So I wrote him back and said, well, there's certainly no doubt about how you feel about Adam Powell. In the first sentence, you call him a thief. In the last sentence, you say he stole money. But I said, I don't
know how you would feel about men who are in the Congress of the United States. One man who sent for an air force jet to come from Washington to Germany to pick him up and bring him home because he didn't want to fly on commercial airline. And this was the full crew air force jet making a round trip between bowling field and Germany to pick up one Congressman and bring him back home in privacy. And it
costs more money than all the airline tickets that Adam Powell's office could have bought. Not all they used, but all they could have bought. So you see how people's feelings enter into these matters. Our contention is that the House, first of all, has not enacted a code of ethics. There are no rules. You can't say that Adam violated the rules of the House because there are no rules. You can't say he insulted the standards of the
House because the House has no standards. And what happened to Adam was, what happens to anybody on a wave of emotional feeling at the time? And a lot of the Congressmen, of course, were prodded on by letters from back home who said, you know, get this terrible man out of there. Now I don't, I imagine that Adam's going to run again. I imagine he's going to be elected again. The last three, four elections, he hasn't been
in Harlem anyway. He was there only once. He walked up and down Seventh Avenue and shook hands there by a wave of people in the windows, and they all call him Adam. He calls him baby, and you see. See, from 110th Street to 160th to 149th Street, the bridge, Adam can walk up Seventh Avenue and everybody loves him, or so they say. And I don't imagine there will be any trouble about him being reelected. I don't
happen to live in his district, so you can't ask me how am I going to vote. But I should imagine that if he chooses to run again, just because of the way they treated him, the report of the committee was bad enough, asking a man to be escorted down by the Sergeant of Arms to the well of the house, there to be publicly rebuked and censured by the Speaker of the house before the 435 members and
all the people in the gallery. You know, they haven't taken away a chairmanship of a house committee since 1807. That's 160 years ago. And all the people say to me, well, how do you say this is racism? Well, I say, well, I don't say it's racism. Let's not argue about that. I don't say they did it to him because he's a Negro. But all I say is that in 160 years, they never took a chairmanship away
from a white man. I said, of course, it may not be racism. It could be, you know, grapefruit juice, or something like that.