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BOOK REVIEW
STEIN

It means to challenge not the forms of oppression, but the oppressive power itself. One young girl boycott leader is quoted by Dr. Fuchs:

"...we don't want our freedom on an installment plan and we don't want our education the same way either...well, my education I have to take it in my own hands and go out in that street and get it."

For those whites who fear Black Power, who see it as directed against them, not against white oppressive power, another young boycotter in his "Picket Line Blues" song has this to say:

When you see what the white man's doing to me
You know it's because he doesn't want me free
You know he's scared to let me have my rights
But he know damn well we're gonna win this fight.
What he doesn't know is that only when we're free
It's not till then he'll be equal to me.

Annie Stein

A DEATH NOT IN VAIN

NO GREATER LOVE: THE JAMES REEB STORY. By Duncan Howlett. Harper and Row, New York. 242 pages. $4.95.

On the night of March 9, 1965, three white clergymen walked down a dark street in Selma, Alabama. Four segregationists, secure in the certainty that these ministers were advocates of non-violence, set upon them. One swung a club with deadly accuracy. The Reverend James Reeb, a Unitarian-Universalist from Boston, fell to the pavement, victim of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

Just thirty-eight years of age, married and with four young children, Reeb had never been in the Deep South before. Against the advice of his wife, he had flown to Alabama only the previous night, in response to an urgent appeal by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asking clergy to support the Selma-to-Montgomery March.

As the grim story of Reeb's death was related on radio and TV, the White House, following the public's reaction to Selma with a political eagle's eye, dispatched a plane to take Mrs. Reeb to her husband's bedside in Montgomery; and when this proved too late, the craft was ordered to return her to her children in Boston, and later transport the family and Reeb's ashes to Casper, Wyoming.

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