Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Seminarian & Martyr
August 21 · d. 1965
also known as Jonathan Daniels
Jonathan Myrick Daniels (1939-1965) was an Episcopal seminarian who went to Selma, Alabama, in answer to Martin Luther King's call, moved by the words of the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. On 20 August 1965, freshly released from a county jail, he stepped in front of a shotgun aimed at a young Black woman, Ruby Sales, and took the blast into his own body. The Episcopal Church counts him among its martyrs, a witness to costly discipleship and to the gospel's claim on the cause of justice.
Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian, no soldier and no obvious saint, a young man from Keene, New Hampshire, studying for the Episcopal priesthood at a seminary near Boston. In the spring of 1965 the struggle for civil rights in the American South had reached its height, and Martin Luther King called for clergy and students of conscience to come to Selma, Alabama, where Black Americans were being beaten for trying to claim the vote. Daniels heard the call, and at first he was not sure he would go.
What decided him was a song. He was at Evening Prayer, singing the Magnificat, the song of Mary that the church sings every evening, when the words of the old Prayer Book translation went into him like a blade: He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek; he hath filled the hungry with good things. He knew then that he had to go to Selma, where the mighty were keeping their seat and the humble were being put down, and that the song he had sung a hundred times was calling him there.
He went, and he stayed long after most of the visiting clergy had gone home, living in the Black community, marching, helping to register voters, in a county where a white man working for Black rights was a marked man. In August he was arrested with a group of demonstrators in the town of Fort Deposit and held for six days in the jail at Hayneville.
On the twentieth of August, 1965, the prisoners were released, suddenly and with no ride home, and while they waited a few of them walked to a small store to buy a cold drink. In the doorway stood a man with a shotgun, a part-time deputy named Tom Coleman, and he leveled it at a seventeen-year-old Black girl named Ruby Sales. Jonathan Daniels pulled her back behind him and took the full charge of the gun into his own body, and died there on the step. He was twenty-six. The girl he had shielded lived. Coleman was tried for the killing before an all-white jury, and acquitted.
It was the plainest obedience to the gospel, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Daniels had gone south because the song of Mary told him that God casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, and he died making that song true with his body, his own life spent to cover a Black girl's, in a country that had taught them they were worth different amounts. Every year now pilgrims walk the road in Hayneville where he fell. He had prayed Mary's song until it cost him everything, and in the dying it was answered: the humble and meek were lifted up, and the mighty did not, in the end, keep their seat.
Jonathan Daniels is a fully documented figure of recent history, attested by his own letters and journals, by the trial record, by the witness of those who were with him, and by careful scholarship, above all Charles Eagles's history of the case. He was born in 1939 at Keene, New Hampshire, graduated as valedictorian of the Virginia Military Institute, and after a period of doubt and a renewal of faith entered the Episcopal Theological School near Boston. He went to Selma in March 1965 in answer to Martin Luther King's appeal after the Selma marches, returned to his studies, and went back to Alabama to continue the work.
He was arrested at a demonstration in Fort Deposit on 14 August 1965, jailed at Hayneville in Lowndes County, and released on 20 August; within the hour he was shot dead by Tom Coleman outside a store while shielding Ruby Sales. A Roman Catholic priest, Richard Morrisroe, was shot and gravely wounded in the same moment. Coleman was acquitted by an all-white jury, an outcome that became part of the case for federal civil-rights enforcement. Daniels was added to the Episcopal Church's calendar of commemorations, and is honored at the Virginia Military Institute and in an annual pilgrimage to Hayneville. His death belongs to the long Christian understanding of martyrdom, a life laid down rather than a faith renounced, and to the particular American reckoning in which the churches' part in the civil-rights movement is remembered.
Jonathan Daniels is commemorated on 21 August, near the August day in 1965 on which he died; his liturgical color is the red of martyrdom. He is honored across the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion as a martyr of the civil-rights era, named among the company of those who gave their lives in that struggle, and his name is kept with particular care at the seminary that trained him and the military institute that he led as a cadet.
His chief memorial is the annual Jonathan Daniels and the Martyrs of Alabama pilgrimage, when Episcopalians and others walk the route in Hayneville from the jail to the place of his death and celebrate the Eucharist in the courthouse where his killer was acquitted, turning the scene of an injustice into a place of witness. Ruby Sales, the young woman whose life he saved, became herself a noted voice for justice and faith, so that his single act went on bearing fruit in the life it spared. He is remembered, simply, as a man who heard the gospel in the song of Mary and obeyed it to the end.
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Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama(English, 1993)
Recommended: Charles W. Eagles (University of Alabama Press)
The definitive account, a meticulous history of Daniels, the killing, and the trial that acquitted his killer; the indispensable book for the facts of the case and its meaning.
Further reading. The definitive history of Daniels and the killing is Charles W. Eagles's Outside Agitator, listed above. His own letters, journals, and reflections are gathered in The Jon Daniels Story (edited by William J. Schneider), which lets the seminarian speak in his own voice.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Morrisroe /ˈmɔːrɪsroʊ/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant Jonathan Myrick Daniels boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.