The first episode of the NPR podcast “White Lies” starts with a lot of truths. Hosts and journalists Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace readily admit that they grew up in “white” Alabama where their communities didn’t readily discuss race.
Raised in a generation after the civil rights movement, both men say some parts of the state seemed far away — particularly the black and white photographs from the 1965 voting rights movement in Selma.
For “White Lies,” Brantley and Grace traveled to Selma more than 50 years after Rev. James Reeb was killed in 1965 to uncover the lies that kept his murder from being solved.
Reeb was a white Unitarian minister and civil rights activist who was living in Boston in 1965 when he saw images from the Bloody Sunday violence in Selma. Following the call of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for clergy around the nation to come to Selma to support the fight for black voting rights in the South, Reeb made his way to Alabama along with hundreds of…
