| Jonathan Daniels | |
| Birth Name: | Jonathan Myrick Daniels |
| Birth Date: | March 20, 1939 |
| Feast Day: | August 14 |
| Venerated In: | Anglican Communion |
| Birth Place: | Keene, New Hampshire, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Hayneville, Alabama, U.S. |
| Titles: | Seminarian and civil rights activist |
Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist. In 1965, he was killed by Tom Coleman, a highway worker and part-time deputy sheriff, in Hayneville, Alabama, while in the act of shielding 17-year-old Ruby Sales from a racist attack.[1] He saved the life of the young Black civil rights activist. They were both working in the nonviolent civil rights movement in Lowndes County to integrate public places and register Black voters after passage of the Voting Rights Act that summer. Daniels' death generated further support for the civil rights movement.
In 1991, Daniels was designated as a martyr in the Episcopal church, and is recognized annually in its calendar.[2]
Born in Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan Myrick Daniels was the son of Phillip Brock Daniels, a physician and Congregationalist, and his wife Constance Weaver. Daniels considered a career in the ministry as early as high school and joined the Episcopal Church as a young man. He attended local schools before graduating from the Virginia Military Institute. He began to question his religious faith during his sophomore year, possibly because his father died and his sister Emily suffered an extended illness at the same time. He graduated as valedictorian of his class.[3]
In the fall of 1961, Daniels entered Harvard University to study English literature. In the spring of 1962, during an Easter service at the Church of the Advent in Boston, Daniels felt a renewed conviction that he was being called to serve God. Soon after, he decided to pursue ordination. After a working out of family financial problems, he applied 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 Martin Luther King Jr., who recruited students and clergy to join the movement in Selma, Alabama, to take part in the march for voting rights from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Daniels and several other seminary students left for Alabama on Thursday, intending to stay the weekend. After Daniels and friend Judith Upham missed the bus home, they had second thoughts about their short stay. The two returned to the seminary just long enough to request permission to spend the rest of the semester working in Selma, where they would also study on their own and return at the end of the term to take exams.
In Selma, Daniels stayed with the Wests, a local African-American family. During the next months, Daniels worked to integrate the local Episcopal church by taking groups of young African Americans to the church. The church members were not welcoming. In May, Daniels returned to the seminary to take his semester exams and passed.
Daniels went back to Alabama in July to continue his work. He helped assemble a list of federal, state, and local agencies that could provide assistance for those in need. He also tutored children, helped poor locals apply for aid, and worked to register voters. That summer, on August 2, 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act which provided broad federal oversight and enforcement of the constitutional right to vote. Before that, blacks had been effectively disenfranchised across the South since the turn of the century.
On August 14, 1965, Daniels was one of a group of 29 protesters, including members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who went to Fort Deposit, Alabama, to picket its whites-only stores. All of the protesters were arrested. They were transported in a garbage truck to a jail in the nearby town of Hayneville. The police released five juvenile protesters the next day. The rest of the group was held for six days in a facility which lacked air conditioning.[4] Authorities refused to accept bail for anyone unless everyone was bailed.
Finally, on August 20, the prisoners were released without transport back to Fort Deposit. After release, the group waited near the courthouse jail while one of their members called for transport. Daniels with three others—a white Catholic priest and two black female activists—walked to buy a cold soft drink at nearby Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local places to serve non-whites. But barring the front was Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid special deputy who was holding a shotgun and had a pistol in a holster. Coleman threatened the group and leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down and caught the full blast of the shotgun and was instantly killed. Father Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed activist Joyce Bailey and ran with her. Coleman shot Morrisroe, severely wounding him in the lower back, and then stopped firing.[5]
Upon learning of Daniels' murder, Martin Luther King Jr. stated that "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels."[6]
A grand jury indicted Coleman for manslaughter. Richmond Flowers Sr., the Attorney General of Alabama, believed the charge should have been murder and intervened in the prosecution, but was thwarted by the trial judge T. Werth Thagard. He refused to wait until Morrisroe had recovered enough to testify and removed Flowers from the case. Coleman claimed self-defense, although Morrisroe and the others were unarmed, and was acquitted of manslaughter charges by an all-white jury.[7] (Disfranchisement had resulted in excluding blacks from jury duty, as only voters were called.) Flowers described the verdict as representing the "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement."[8]
Coleman continued working as an engineer for the state highway department. He died at the age of 86 on June 13, 1997, without having faced further prosecution.[9]
The murder of an educated, white seminarian who was defending an unarmed teenage girl shocked members of the Episcopal Church and other whites into facing the violent reality of racial inequality in the South. Other members worked to continue the civil rights movement and work for social justice.
Ruby Sales went on to attend Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School). She worked as a human rights advocate in Washington, DC, and founded an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.