A Red Letter Day for Civil Rights

Today is a "red letter day" when we celebrate Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965), an Episcopal seminarian who was killed for his work in the American civil rights movement. His death helped galvanize support for the civil rights movement within the Episcopal church.

 Born in New Hampshire, Jonathan Myrick Daniels joined the Episcopal Church as a young man and considered a career in the ministry as early as high school. He began to question his religious faith during his sophomore year of high school, possibly because his father died and his sister Emily suffered an extended illness. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at the Virginia Military Institute and, in the fall of 1961, entered Harvard University to study English Literature. In the spring of 1962 Daniels was attending an Easter service at the Church of the Advent in Boston, and suddenly felt his doubt disappear, to be replaced with a renewed conviction that he was being called to serve God. Soon after he decided to pursue ordination and was accepted to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting his studies in 1963 and expecting to graduate in 1966.

In March 1965, Daniels answered the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, who asked that students and clergy come to Selma, Alabama, to take part in a march to the state capital in Montgomery. Daniels and several other seminary students left for Alabama on Thursday and had intended to only stay the weekend, but realized how badly it must appear to the native civil rights workers that they were only willing to stay a few days. Convinced they should stay longer, Daniels and one other student went back to school just long enough to request permission to spend the rest of the semester in Selma, studying on their own and returning at the end of the term to take exams. Daniels stayed with a local African-American family and devoted himself to integrating the local Episcopal church, taking groups of young African-Americans to the church, where they were usually scowled at or ignored. In May Daniels traveled back to school to take his semester exams and, having passed, went back to Alabama in July to continue his work.

The following heartfelt words, written by Daniels, are taken from American Martyr: The Jon Daniels Story by William J Schneider, copyright 1992.

“There are good men here, just as there are bad men. There are competent leaders and a bungler here and there. We have activists who risk their lives to confront a people with the challenge of freedom and a nation with its conscience. We have neutralists who cautiously seek to calm troubled waters. We have men about the work of reconciliation who are willing to reflect upon the cost and pay it. Perhaps at one time or another the two of us are all of these. Sometimes we take to the streets, sometimes we yawn through interminable meetings. Sometimes we talk with white men in their homes and offices, sometimes we sit out a murderous night with an alcoholic and his family because we love them and cannot stand apart. Sometimes we confront the posse, and sometimes we hold a child. Sometimes we stand with men who have learned to hate, and sometimes we must stand a little apart from them. Our life in Selma is filled with ambiguity, and in that we share with men everywhere. We are beginning to see as we never saw before that we are truly in the world and yet ultimately not of it. For through the bramble bush of doubt and fear and supposed success we are groping our way to the realization that above all else, we are called to be saints. That is the mission of the Church everywhere. And in this, Selma, Alabama, is like all the world: it needs the life and witness of militant saints. “

On August 14, 1965, Daniels and 28 other protesters picketed whites-only stores in the small town of Fort Deposit, Alabama. All of the protesters were arrested and taken to jail in the nearby town of Hayneville. Five juvenile protesters were released the next day. The rest of the group was held for six days; they refused to accept bail unless everyone was bailed. Finally, on August 20, the prisoners were released without transport back to Fort Deposit. After release, the group waited by a road near the jail. Daniels with three others—a white Catholic priest and two female black protesters—went down the street to get a cold soft drink at Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local stores that would serve nonwhites. They were met at the front by Tom L. Coleman, an engineer for the state highway department and unpaid special deputy, who wielded a shotgun. The man threatened the group, and finally leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down to the ground and caught the full blast of the gun. He was killed instantly. The priest, Richard F. Morrisroe, grabbed Joyce Bailey, the other protester, and ran. Coleman was acquitted of manslaughter charges by an all-white jury.

The murder of an educated, white, priest-in-training who was defending an unarmed teenage girl helped shock the Episcopal Church into facing the reality of racial inequality that it had tacitly participated in and continued. Daniels' death helped put civil rights on the map as a goal for the church as a whole, and reminded many Episcopalians that this struggle was not nearly so distant as they had imagined it to be. In 1991, Jonathan Myrick Daniels was designated a martyr of the Episcopal Church, one of fifteen modern-day martyrs, and August 14 was designated as a day of remembrance for the sacrifice of Daniels and all the martyrs of the civil rights movement.

Ruby Sales, the teenager whose life Daniels saved, went on to attend Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School), and has gone on to work as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C. as well as founding an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.

Virginia Military Institute created the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award in 1998, of which former President Jimmy Carter has been a recipient.