Commission on Anti-Racism
Annual Jonathan Daniels and All Martyrs of Alabama pilgrimage set for August 11
[Episcopal News Service] The ninth annual Jonathan Myrick Daniels and Martyrs of Alabama Pilgrimage honoring Daniels and others, who lost their lives during the civil rights movement, will take place August 11 in Hayneville, Alabama.Daniels was the 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian who answered the call of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help register African-American voters in Alabama, only to be shot and killed months later, on August 20, 1965, while shielding a then 16-year-old Ruby Sales from the shotgun fired as she attempted to enter a store to buy something to drink.
Addressing this year's assemblage will be Dr. Tommie "Tonea" Stewart, an acclaimed actress, professor, and director of the theatre department at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. Stewart is best known for her role as Aunt Etta in the television series "In the Heat of the Night." (more from ENS)
See Photos from Our Pilgrimage to the Tenth Annual Jonathon Daniels and Martyrs of Alabama Pilgrimage held on Saturdat, August 11, 2007 at our Jonathon Myrick Daniels Blog click here
Information about Jonathan Myrick Daniels........After their release on Friday 20 August, four of them undertook to enter a local shop, and were met at the door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly.
Seminarian and Witness for Civil RightsBio from beliefnet.comAlabama martyrs in focus
Jonathan Daniels, Alabama martyrs are focus of August 11-12 pilgrimage
Ruby Sales says gathering serves as 'indelible mark"
By Daphne Mack
[ENS] The memory of Jonathan Myrick Daniels will be honored at the
Eighth Annual Jonathan Daniels and Martyrs of Alabama Pilgrimage,
August 11-12 in Hayneville, Alabama.
Daniels was the a 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian at Episcopal
Divinity School (EDS) who answered the call of the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. to help register African-American voters in Alabama,
only to be shot and killed months later, on August 20, 1965, while
shielding a then 16-year-old Ruby Sales from the shotgun fired as she
attempted to enter a store to buy something to drink.
Sales said the incident rendered her mute for several months.
"The [Civil Rights] Movement was one of the most important struggles
of the century because it broke the back of southern apartheid...
Jonathan Myrick Daniels
Seminarian and Witness for Civil Rights
Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born in 1939. A bad fall in high school put him in the hospital for a month. It was a time of reflection. Soon after, Jon joined the Episcopal Church and began to consider the priesthood.
It was not an easy road that led Jonathan Daniels to the ministry. The son of a doctor and a school teacher in Keene, New Hampshire, Jon had always been active in his church. But his teen-age years were a long storm of rebellion, during which his grades dropped and his parents despaired. Sensing his own need for discipline, Jon attended Virginia Military Institute for his college studies and he graduated with top honors. Despite his success, something inside him was unfulfilled. During his first year in graduate school at Harvard, Jon was overcome by doubt and depression. Then on Easter Sunday in 1962 he had a religious awakening that changed the rest of his life. He left Harvard and decided to become a minister. Jonathan Daniels was a 26-year-old student at an episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued his nationwide call in 1965 for clergy of all faiths to come to Selma to support the voting rights marchers. Daniels knew that he was meant to go to Selma and he went eagerly. During the long hours of waiting, meeting and marching in Selma, Daniels was buoyant in the knowledge that he was living his faith. He made fast friends with a black family who opened their home to him and he quickly saw the urgent need for economic and political reform in the region. When the thrilling pageant of the Selma-Montgomery march was over, Daniels decided to stay and work in Alabama.
AN ABUNDANCE OF STRENGTH
One of his first goals was to integrate a local Episcopal church. Despite their common creeds, Southern churches were (and most still remain) racially separate. Daniels believed churches should be the first to reach out to people of all races but his efforts met with stubborn resistance from white churchgoers and ministers. Daniels soon turned his attention away from reforming white consciences to helping poor blacks exercise their rights. He help them obtain welfare and farm assistance, encourage them to register to vote and tutored many of their children. Who had inadequate education opportunities because they were black. Jonathan Daniels, said a fellow civil rights worker, helped give people the courage they needed to exercise their rights. "He had an abundance of strength the came from the inside that he could give to people," said Stokely Carmichale. "The people in Lowndes County realized that with the strength they got from Jon they had to carry on , they had to carry on!" On Saturday , August 14, black teenagers in Fort Deposit, Alabama, gathered to picket white stores that discriminated. Daniels and two fellow ministers joined in the protest. There were threats of white mob violence and police had already informed the marchers they would be arrested for their own protection. As the group approached downtown, the police kept their word and Jon Daniels and Father Richard Morrisroe were among the 30 marchers taken to the jail in Hayneville.
A LICENSE TO KILL
The marchers spent nearly a week in jail and then suddenly on August 20 they were released without explanation and with no transportation back to Fort Deposit. While one of them went to telephone for a ride, two teen-agers walked with Daniels and Morrisroe toward a nearby grocery store to buy a soda. When they met to the door, they were met by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave "or I'll blow your damned brains out!" In a split second, Daniels pushed one of the teen-agers out of the way and the gun went off. The shot hit Daniels in the stomach, killing him instantly. Morrisroe was hit in the back, critically injured. (Morrisroe eventually recovered after months of hospitalization and physical therapy.) Tom Coleman, 55, a part-time deputy sheriff of Lowndes County, put down his shotgun, walked over to the courthouse and called Colonel Al Lingo in Montgomery. "I just shot two preachers," he told the state trooper commander, "You better get on down here." A grand jury indicted Coleman for manslaughter instead of murder, after hearing Coleman testify Daniels had pulled a knife on him. The members of the all-white jury took less than two hours to find Coleman not guilty and shook his hand as they filed out of the courtroom. It was an old and bitter story of Southern justice but this time even the attorney general of Alabama could not contain his outrage. The acquittal, Richmond Flowers said, represented the "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement...now those who feel they have a license to kill, destroy and cripple have been issued that license." Jon Daniels had died without fear for he knew the dangers of doing civil rights work in the south. He wrote after arriving in Alabama, "I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that...in the only sense that really matters I am already dead and my life is hid with Christ in God."
Helpful Links:
An Aug. 2005 (40th anniversary) NPR radio piece:
Links to books about him on Amazon.com:American Martyr: The Jon Daniels Story (Paperback)
by Jonathan Myrick Daniels (Author), William J. Schneider (Editor)
Decency and Nobility: The Life of Jonathan Myrick Daniels (Paperback)
by Ivy Jeanne Merrill (Author)
this one’s a year old – I’d never known of it
Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (Paperback)
by Charles Eagles (Author)
– note the add for buying this paired with Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge (last of the America in the King Years trilogy) – there’s quite a bit about Daniels in the book, all of which helps put his story into its wider context.
Link to the documentary about him: http://www.keene.edu/orgs/jonathandaniels/synopsis.htm. Courtney Vaughn says there’s also a Disney-produced movie that includes his story – am blanking on the name at the moment – just learned of it from her last week.
Here is a link to the White House tape where Johnson discusses the difficulty getting Daniels’ body home to NH – I’d forgotten this detail from Branch’s book. Haven’t listed to the link, but amazing to me that you can get such things now!
http://www.whitehousetapes.org/exhibits/daniels/
President Johnson is talking w/ staffer Lee White. Note this section of the transcript:
President Johnson: Negro preacher?
White: No, sir. An Episcopalian minister from Atlanta. Very articulate, knew exactly what he was talking about.
(This articulate, non-Negro Epsicopalian’s (!) name was John Morris. Anyone know him back then? Or now?)
WOO Students Make Civil Rights Journey to Hayneville, Alabama
August 13, 2005
Early Saturday morning at the World of Opportunity (WOO), Veronica and DeMarkus were busy making sandwiches and preparing sack lunches which also included an apple, a bag of chips, water and fruit drink. While other students arrived, Johnnie and Jermaine turned on computers and began to surf the web. Jacqueline and Jermaine helped load the lunches. Finally at 8:35AM, with 13 of us (Corey, Angela, Candace, Javon, Jacqueline, Veronica, DeMarkus, Jermaine, Johnny, Ch'tay, Lucille, David & I) in a van and pickup truck, we pulled out of the WOO parking lot to begin our civil rights journey to Hayneville, Alabama, about 120 miles southwest of Birmingham.
Read full story
An Alabama Pilgrimage—A Witness for Justice The road leading to Hayneville is long, lonely and winding. Houses are few and far between. It is an unsettling journey and must have been even more so 40 years ago.
“I knelt and kissed the concrete—like burning coal to my lips, yet words could not
describe all that was in my heart.”
THAT IS WHEN A YOUNG SEMINARIAN, following the famed March from Selma to Montgomery, petitioned the seminary faculty to return to Selma to engage in voter registration in southern Alabama. The seminarian was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, now honored as a saint and martyr in Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
As a classmate of Jon’s also caught up in the Civil Rights Movement, I eagerly read Jon’s letters back to seminary. He was putting his faith into action and
Making a witness and a difference. I became involved in voter registration, too, but in Roxbury, Mass. There were plenty of inequities and injustice all over the country in 1965, and I imagined that it was people like Jon who were really on the cutting edge of the movement. Jon worked through the spring and summer, and on Aug. 14 was arrested for joining a picket line and jailed in Hayneville with several college students and activists. Conditions in the jail were terrible, and
On Aug. 20 the group was unexpectedly released. Four of them walked the short distance to Varner’s Cash Store hoping to get a soda. Ruby Sales, a Tuskegee student, and Jon reached the screen door first. Suddenly, Tom Coleman appeared at the door with his 12-gauge shotgun.
He shouted that the store was closed and ordered the four “to get off this property, or I’ll blow your goddamn heads off, you sons of bitches.” Jon pushed Ruby out of the way just as Coleman fired his shotgun at point blank range, ripping a hole in the right side of Jon’s chest. He fell backward on the concrete apron dead. Richard Morrisroe, a Roman Catholic priest, was shot in the back and was seriously injured.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON I LEARNED OF JON’S DEATH.
In the days that followed, friends of Jon tried to comfort one another and address the haunting question, “Why?” I don’t remember his death being a cause for discouragement; rather, it made us even more determined to witness to the love of God for all people, to fight for equal rights and opportunities, and to combat racism. As shocking as was Jon’s death, and in some ways more bitter, a few months later a jury of white men in Hayneville declared Coleman innocent.
Over the years I have often thought of Jon: bright, articulate, and passionate for justice. I am sure I am not the only one of his classmates who has thought from
time to time, “Jon is dead but I live; the least I can do is honor his convictions with my own fervor for God’s love and justice.” Justice is, after all, at the very heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That was central to my education and experience in the 60s, and the guiding principle for the whole of my life since.
MESSAGE FROM BISHOP IHLOFF
When the Bishop of Alabama invited me to participate in this summer’s 40th anniversary of Jon’s death, I didn’t hesitate to say, “yes.” Yet, I headed off for this Pilgrimage and Procession for the Feast of Jonathan Daniels and All Martyrs of Alabama with some sickness of Heart. On some levels, I dreaded going, reopening old wounds, seeing the actual places I had only seen in my imagination.
On arriving at Hayneville Friday evening, I met a number of white people from surrounding Lowndes County, some of whom had lived there in the 60s. They were the “enemy” and I had in my mind’s eye demonized them over the years. I found them to be sensitive, caring, Christians who felt deeply about the sins of their region’s past, forcing me to rethink my own prejudice that all white residents had been like Coleman, who died three years ago unrepentant. He told a newspaper Reporter a year before he died that he’d do it all over again given the
Chance. This was only the first “miracle” for me at Hayneville. The day of the Pilgrimage in Hayneville was extremely hot and uncomfortable. We moved from the courthouse to the jail to Varner’s Cash Store (now an insurance agency), back to the courthouse. A single Candle stood on the concrete apron where Jon died. Ruby Sales, now an Episcopal priest told the story. One of the Bible passages was read by The Mayor of Hayneville—a young black woman! Forty years ago, Lowndes County was one of the most repressive places in the Deep
South—I know Jon is smiling in heaven! Following the readings, I knelt and kissed the concrete—like a burning coal to my lips, yet words could not describe all that was in my heart. The day was moving in many Ways, and as usual with the Holy Spirit, there were a number of incredible consolations.
THE MOST MOVING THING ABOUT THE DAY
Was our celebration of Holy Communion in the Hayneville Courthouse. Right in the very room where Ruby Sales had testified at Coleman’s trial, and had been openly threatened; right in the very room where Coleman was acquitted.
There we stood, black and white together receiving the Bread of Life. The tears of joy come even now as I think of it! When we witness to the Lord Jesus Christ and to the love of God for all people we may not seem to be heard at that moment, yet our witness is ultimately heard! Jon’s witness was not silenced on Aug. 20, 1965. What a privilege it was to participate in the 40th Anniversary of his entrance into heaven, where all Injustice is righted and God wipes away the tears from our eyes.
+Robert W. Ihloff
