The Martyr's Son

Brendan Meyer: John Reeb plodded down the cracked pavement of Washington Street, his thick white beard and frizzy gray hair glowing orange in the setting sun. His feet ached as he moved slowly past the white-brick café on the right, his first footsteps in Selma, Alabama, shadowing the route his father took 50 years earlier.

Sixty-four strides from the café was a 3-foot-wide memorial with a man immaculately carved on the front. John weaved between photographers, reporters, tourists and locals, and faced the front of the monument.

There, just as he remembered him, was a bronze version of the man he hadn't seen in 50 years. There was the dimple on his left cheek. There was the greased hair,…