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BOOK REVIEW      MELISH
BOOK REVIEW      MELISH
Institute, where he came in direct contact with the plight of the indigent poor of the inner city, black and white. At the close of his senior year, he became Protestant Chaplain at the hospital, throwing himself without stint into a newly-charted ministry of service to the sick, the forgotten, the disoriented and the alcoholic.

Intellectual consistency was a necessity with Reeb. Tensions between traditional pastoral practices and psychiatric counseling had to be resolved. After soul-searching and consultation with friends and professional advisers, he determined to leave the Presbyterian ministry and applied for admission to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. The same inner imperative drove him to resign his chaplaincy and seek work elsewhere. A fortuitous meeting with a friend who was secretary of the West Branch YMCA in Philadelphia led to his appointment as Youth Director. It was in an area witnessing rapid ethnic change. He fought the imposition of a quota system at the "Y," advocating open admission and a special drive for new white members to preserve some balance.

All Souls Unitarian-Universalist Church in Washington, D.C., was confronting the massive influx of southern Negroes into the areas all around it, and was seeking an assistant minister with experience and capacities suited to its needs. Hearing of Reeb, All Souls called him to Washington, and charged him with the work of community organization. In cooperation with Howard University, and with the aid of a Ford Foundation grant, there was set up the University Neighborhoods Council with Reeb as chairman of the steering committee. Its membership included 30 cooperating churches, 13 school principals, 15 P.T.A.'s, five civic and five neighborhood organizations.

After four years of this work as an assistant, Reeb hungered for an inner city parish of his own, and wrote to various city churches with vacant pulpits; and when there was no constructive response, approached the Urban League and the Friends. The latter were undertaking an important project in the black ghetto of Roxbury, a slum area of Boston. So it was, in the fall of 1964, that the Reebs moved into an old slum house on Half Moon Street in Dorchester and he opened an office on Blue Hill Avenue just over the Roxbury line. A dreadful fire on Hammond Street, that claimed the lives of two children and two adults and left thirty families homeless, led to Reeb's first project—a documented study of housing. It was finished March 3, 1965. Six days later, responding to Dr. King's call to Selma, Reeb was struck down.

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