Mark Reeve

Mark Reeve has been a peace activist most of his life. What he cared most about was work against nuclear weapons. In the mid 1980s, Mark and a group of activists met the trains carrying bombs for submarines from Texas to Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia with vigils and protests against the bombs. Wanting to take a more radical approach, Mark and four others decided to stand on the tracks to stop a train. Today, Mark is working towards finding solutions to address the lack of affordable housing and diminishing diversity in Decatur.

Mark Reeve has been a peace activist most of his life. As a college student in the early 1960s he got caught up in the antiwar movement. “Growing out of that I wanted to change the world. What I cared most about was work against nuclear weapons.” In the mid 1980s, Mark and a group of activists met the trains carrying bombs for submarines from Texas to Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia with vigils and protests against the bombs. Wanting to take a more radical approach, Mark and four others decided to stand on the tracks to stop a train.

“Of course before the train could get anywhere near us we were plucked off the tracks by the sheriff and locked up for five days. We then had the audacity to go back and do it a second time. The judge down there in Macon County, Georgia sentenced us to a year in jail. We got a lot of publicity out of it so after 60 days we were released.”

Mark and his wife, Leslie Withers, landed in Decatur 39 years ago. “We decided to start a communal house where we were going to be training people to do peace work. So we bought this place in the rundown Oakhurst neighborhood.”

At that time, Mark and Leslie were working for the peace and justice organization, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and started renting office space at the Oakhurst Baptist Church. Leslie began attending the church on Sundays and singing in the choir. Mark eventually decided to join in 1999 when the church was kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention for having black members, ordaining women, and finally accepting and ordaining gays as deacons.

In the fall of 2017, Mark organized The Coalition for a Diverse Decatur. The Coalition brought together various community organizations that were interested in finding solutions to address the lack of affordable housing and diminishing diversity in Decatur.

“We become afraid of people who are different from us if we’re not coming in contact with them. It’s healthier for society and for individuals to get exposed to different points of view. If you talk to your neighbor you find out they are human beings and that they have lives, cares and fears just like you do. It’s a matter of having mutual respect and that comes when different people interact with one another.”