If you came this morning hoping to hear a message of hope in one many ways, I will have to discourage you.

It's July 1964. This recording is from the All Souls Church in Washington, DC. This is Jim Reeb, delivering his final sermon.

There were many people who seemed to feel that once we'd had the march on Washington and once we had the civil rights bill, things were just inevitably going to be easier.

But somehow we'd done it. And I can say to you only that I think that this is the most dangerous kind of self-delusion, that we've not in any way done it.

And that just to the extent that we think we have, we're going to be dismayed when we find out that we have not.

And just to the extent that we permit ourselves to be emotionally dismayed, we ourselves as individuals will in some small way add to this thing that is known as the backlash, which is real.

And I feel in many ways growing and in many ways possibly stronger than we surmise as yet.

Eight months after he delivered the sermon, Jim Reeb went to Selma, Alabama to show support for the voting rights campaign there.

Less than 24 hours later, he was attacked on the corner of Washington Street by a group of men he'd never met before. Reeb died two days later in a Birmingham hospital.

We focused all this time on trying to figure out what happened on the street corner that night.

To understand this brief moment of violence and what came after. And we did that. We tried to on witnesses, we identified the attackers, we untangled the history from the mythology to get the true story of what happened to Jim Reeb.

But there is no justice here at the end of our story. At least not in the way we're taught to think about justice. No redemption.

And as Jim Reeb said in a sermon, it would be a dangerous kind of self delusion to think otherwise.

So the question is, once you've called a lie a lie, what does it mean to live with the truth?

From MPR, this is White Lies. I'm Andrew Beck Grace. And I'm Chip Bradley.

Jim, I'll just say, right off, would not have wanted to be remembered as a martyr. As profound and as moving and as important as the story of his death was, Jim was being lost.

This is Ron Engel. He and Jim worked together at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC in the early 1960s. And in the last years of Jim's life, Ron was among his closest friends.

I think it's so interesting. It's something we've thought a lot about. This idea that Jim is not a real person for many Americans who know his story. He's simply a person who fulfilled a calling whose death is so much more important and memorable than his life.

I'm not saying that's what I think. I'm saying that's the story that gets projected so much. And he has been seen as a martyr in this country for longer than he was alive. And how then do we go back and create him as a real person?

I mean, it's almost a philosophical question about storytelling. I'm just curious if you have thoughts about it.

I think you have to go back and put Jim in context.

Before Jim Reed was transformed into a martyr, he was a real person, a husband, a father or four. He was born on January 1, 1927 in Wichita, Kansas. He was his only child.

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