When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked fellow clergy to come to Selma in 1965 to help push for voting rights, the Rev. Clark Olsen was among those who answered the call.
On the national holiday honoring King, Olsen died, according to the Asheville Citizen Times. The Unitarian Universalist minister, who lived in Asheville, N.C., was 85.
While in Selma, Olsen was beaten by white supremacists and witnessed the murder of the Rev. James Reeb, another Unitarian minister.
In 2015, the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches, Olsen spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Charlotte.
“Clearly, Clark was highly respected in our ministry,” the Rev. Jay Leach, minister at the Charlotte church, said. “The fact that he showed up in Selma was completely consistent both with what he was about and what Unitarian Universalism is about: A religion that isn’t about belief. It’s about what one does in the world.”
As Olsen told the story many times in the decades since then, he was a young minister from Berkeley, Calif., in 1965.
Once in Selma, he and Reeb and a third Unitarian minister were on a sidewalk after leaving a dinner spot. Three or four white men came at them, shouting racist slurs, Olsen recounted. One of the attackers was wielding a club.
“We whispered to each other, ‘Keep walking,'” Olsen told a gathering at the National Museum of History in 2017. “They came up behind us. I looked behind just as the guy swung the club. … Jim fell to the ground immediately.”
Olsen said he ran, but one of the other men caught up with him, slugging him several times in the head.
Olsen held the fallen Reeb’s hand until his new friend lost consciousness, Olsen said over the years. Less than two days later, Reeb died from the attack, becoming a martyr of the civil rights movement.
Olsen later testified in court against the men who murdered Reeb, the Citizen Times reported, but an all-white jury acquitted them.
King’s call for clergy to come to the city to march for voting rights for African-Americans came in the wake of “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troopers beat marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The event, which was televised on the national news, led to a march, from Selma to Montgomery, and spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It outlawed practices that denied many African-Americans their right to vote.
In an interview with ABC News in 2015, the year the film “Selma” was released, Olsen called Reeb’s death “a turning point in American history.”
