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1/ This is the story about a cold case at the center of the civil rights movement, how a murder rippled through a community and took on a life of its own. npr.org/whitelies
2/ It starts on what became known as Bloody Sunday. March 7, 1965: hundreds of African-Americans gathered in Selma to march to Montgomery and demand the right to vote. They made it only a few blocks before white troopers stopped them. 
3/ Joanne Bland was 11 years old when she marched on the bridge that day.
4/ The next morning, Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram calling on clergy across the country to come to Selma. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, decided to go.
5/ In Selma, Reeb met two other white ministers, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller. After they had dinner, they were attacked by a group of white men.
6/ Reeb died later at a Birmingham hospital. MLK gave the eulogy at Reeb’s memorial in Selma and President Johnson invoked his death when announcing what would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
7/ Three men were charged with first-degree murder. They were tried and acquitted.
8/ Without a resolution, myths made their way into the narrative. A lie about who really killed Reeb took hold, casting the civil rights movement itself as the real villain. Many people still believe it today.
9/9 More than 50 years after the attack, NPR returned to Selma. We wanted to know why the truth about this murder had been so obscured and why so many people wanted to keep it that way. Listen to episode 1 of #WhiteLiesPodcast now. npr.org/podcasts/51034…
Correction: This photo depicting their mugshots should have been attributed to "TopFoto/The Image Works" — not to the FBI.
