By now, everyone is surely aware that I am an unrepentant news junky and I feed my addiction as frequently as possible – when I’m at home, I’m reading national and international headlines on the computer or thumbing through pages on the history of the U.S. press; when I’m in the newsroom, which is where I can get my most violent cravings, I churn out columns and articles and watch the national news in the background.

But the most enjoyable and ingestible news source for me is NPR, which has become so common in my car that my children now ask to listen to the news, knowing that their old man is going to do it anyway so he can get a thorough dose of chaos on the way to work each day.

A recent podcast launched by NPR and narrated by two University of Alabama professors, which has been my daily earworm for the past couple of days, explores the details of the murder of Rev. James Reeb shortly after Bloody Sunday.

Following the violence of Bloody Sunday, Reeb was one of several pastors who heeded the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for religious leaders of conscience to join the Voting Rights Movement.

Not long after he arrived in Selma, Reeb and two other Universalist pastors were viciously beaten by a mob of racist white men not far from Washington Street – Reeb succumbed to his injuries later and died.

While most people in Selma are familiar with Reeb’s story, and some were present when his murder took place, what is not so widely known is that Reeb’s killer was never brought to justice and, quite possibly, is still living today.

Throughout the podcast, the narrators visit parts of Selma and talk to residents who were present during those tumultuous days in March of 1965 and the stories they share are heartbreaking and difficult to hear, particularly as a white man – white men in this country have largely failed to come to terms with the history of violence that their ancestors perpetrated and many are following in their ancestor’s bloody footprints by fomenting that same kind of violence in our nation.

“White Lies” tells the story of a murder that happened decades ago, but it also tells the dark truth of a Southern city mired in a racist past that it has not completely or successfully addressed – racism still pollutes so much of our nation and Selma is no exception.

My first thoughts upon listening to the podcast and hearing the voices of black women who suffered through the movement was “What if these men, who mercilessly beat three pastors, one of which died, are still haunting this city somewhere?”

It’s a reasonable question – if there are ample voices of victims who survived the struggle, there must surely be silent assailants hiding anonymously in the background.

Racism is a pollutant and Americans must start tackling it in substantive ways – conversations are a start, but they are of little consequence if they don’t lead to action that leads to change.

Our country was built on racism and nowhere is that more evident than Selma, where a bust of the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan went up the same year that the city elected its first black mayor.

We have to do better and media like “White Lies” goes a long way in making us consider our past, which is surely the only way we can ever build our future.