NPR's 'White Lies' Investigates Civil Rights Cold Case – And Why It Was Never Solved

In 1965 the Rev. James Reeb was attacked and savagely beaten on the streets of Selma, Alabama. Days later, Reeb died of head injuries in a Birmingham hospital. Three white men were tried for the murder of the white Unitarian minister from Boston. All were ultimately acquitted, and no one was ever convicted. More than 50 years later, Alabama journalists Andrew Beck Grace and Chip Brantley returned to that cold case. The details they discovered, about the murder and how the South remembers its history, are the subject of NPR's new podcast, White Lies . Grace and Brantley joined On Second Thought from WBHM in Birmingham.