— SEMINARIAN JONATHAN DANIELS —

Martinis, Martyrdom & a Missed Bus

For all the narrative of the anglophone West being a post-Christian culture, there are still many phrases that have their origins in the Bible. For instance, a reference to ‘the writing on the wall’ is drawn directly from an incident in the Book of Daniel where ominous graffiti ruins a dinner party. Meanwhile, the exhortation to ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ is not originally from Shakespeare or even Hollywood but, rather, is found in a number of places across the Bible, most notably in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.

One of these biblical hangovers in the Western collective lexicon that still sends shivers down the spine is spoken by Jesus in the Gospel according to St John: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ It is etched on war memorials across the English-speaking world and invokes an ideal of self-sacrifice of the very loftiest sort. For most people, Christians included, it is a maxim that will never be put into practice, remaining a lofty ideal or a stock phrase deployed at apposite moments. (Or twisted – one politician famously quipped during a brutal cabinet reshuffle that ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life’.) However, Jonathan Daniels, a trainee Anglican priest in the United States during the troubled years of the mid-twentieth century, did lay down his life in a tragic, brave flash one hot and hazy day in August 1965. Martin Luther King referred to the circumstances of his death as ‘one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry’.

Jonathan Daniels was an unlikely hero in a number of ways, not least as a privileged Northern white man in the context of the struggle for civil rights in the Deep South. Yet such was his commitment to bridging divides, to denying a narrative of hate, to his friends, regardless of the colour of their skin, that he laid down his life. For Jonathan Daniels, those words in the Gospel according to St John were not just a lofty ideal, they were the reality around which he centred his life, and, on a stifling afternoon in Alabama, his death as well.

The history of the Church is full of unlikely saints, but Jonathan Daniels’ upbringing was not one you would expect to lead naturally to his becoming an icon of Christian justice. Contemporary politics on the Western side of the Atlantic has been much exercised about the existence of ‘Two Americas’, two nations that exist side by side and yet know and understand nothing of one another. Jonathan Daniels, born in the leafy, prosperous small town of Keene, New Hampshire, and killed in the dank and dusty streets of Hayneville, Alabama, took the unusual step of trying to reach one America from another.

His parents were prosperous professionals – a consultant physician and a languages teacher who were observant Congregationalists. However, exhibiting the respect for individual choice for which their mountainous little state (motto: ‘Live Free or Die’) was famous, they allowed their second child, Jonathan, to attend the Episcopal Church to which his scout group was attached. It was during his time at high school that the naturally inquisitive and adventurous Jonathan suffered a relatively serious fall from a roof during a night-time escapade, putting him in hospital for a month. During that month of November 1955, the hours of reflection made him turn to prayer and consideration of his own future and so he left his sickbed resolved that he was called to be an ordained minister in the Church. However, he was first sent to the Virginia Military Institute, a prestigious military school known as ‘The West Point of the South’. During his time there, the death of Daniels’ father profoundly challenged his faith and, for a while, he put his dreams of ordination on hold, instead throwing himself into his military studies. He graduated valedictorian of his class in 1961, giving an inspiring speech to his fellow classmates. Yet a military career was not to be; Daniels had also thrown himself into his academic work while in Virginia and so, in the autumn of 1961, went back north to enrol as a student at Harvard University, with the intention of majoring in English Literature. At some point between 16th and 22nd April 1962, Holy Week, Daniels, who had dragged himself along to the Church of Advent in Boston, perhaps more out of duty than in expectation of reconversion, underwent a profound religious experience (the details of which he, in a reticence unusual for one so sociable, never shared with anyone) that left him convinced that the priesthood was his calling.

†

The Episcopal Church was (and in many ways still is) a somewhat strange ecclesial body, balancing two very conflicting identities. On the one hand, it is a part of the Anglican Communion, which provides a tangible link back to England, America’s old foe, and her historic Church, which so many of the continent’s early settlers were determined to escape. Yet, on the other, the Church was founded in direct defiance of orders from Canterbury, making use of rogue Scottish bishops to ordain their first clergy. On one hand, it became the Church of America’s elite, producing more presidents from its pews than any other denomination, as well as feeding the souls of countless Vanderbilts, Astors and Morgans over the centuries. On the other, it has become famous for taking the social mission of the Gospel seriously, opposing the death penalty and advocating for issues such as the minimum wage and gay rights in the face of opposition from many in American society. It occupies a strange place in American religious and social culture that was, perhaps, best summed up by the late comic actor Robin Williams (himself a committed Episcopalian) as ‘Catholic Lite – same religion, half the guilt’. It was to this Church, with its fiery commitment to social justice under a cloak of establishment gentility, that Jonathan Daniels decided (after much trepidation, uncertainty and a loss of faith) to enter as a seminarian.

In the autumn of 1963, Daniels left Harvard and enrolled at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was considered a model student: erudite without being awkward, curious but obedient. Such was his commitment to his studies and to the rules that, when Dr Martin Luther King made his appeal to his fellow religious leaders to come to Selma, Alabama, to protest against the treatment of black people in the state, Daniels initially declined to join fellow seminarians who were determined to go. This was in part due to his commitment to his books but also to the fact that the elderly and cautious Bishop Carpenter, head of the Episcopal diocese of Alabama, aware of the particular reputation that his Church had of supporting ‘outsiders’ or Yankee ‘carpetbaggers’, had asked clergy from the North to stay away.

Not long after that, Daniels recalled being at Evening Prayer in the college chapel when a second life-changing incident occurred. At the heart of the Anglican service of Evensong is the Magnificat, the song of Mary, taken from the Gospel according to St Luke. As Daniels joined in chanting it one evening in Cambridge, the words at the very heart of Mary’s song suddenly hit the young seminarian like a freight train:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat

and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things,

And the rich he hath sent empty away.

‘I knew then that I must go to Selma,’ Daniels later wrote, ‘and the Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.’ So, rather than spending his Spring Break at Cape Cod or on Nantucket Island like the rest of the North’s gilded youth, Daniels answered Dr King’s call and made his way down to Selma with a group of his fellow seminarians, to observe the situation there and to offer what solidarity they could over the course of a long weekend.

It would not have been a life-changing trip were it not for the third (and easily the most prosaic) of the incidents that were to shape Daniels’ ministry: he missed his bus home. The short weekend trip to observe the situation suddenly became an extended stay trapped in a violent, discriminatory part of the country where his very presence was resented. He realised that this was not just an abstract political problem but the reality of life for black Alabamans every single day. When he eventually returned to Cambridge, he immediately put in a request to spend the following semester not in the libraries and study room of the seminary but back in Selma. He described himself as ‘blinded’ by what he had seen there and was adamant that, for him, ‘the road to Damascus’ led back to Alabama.

†

In Alabama, Daniels wrote, ‘Sometimes we take to the streets, sometimes we yawn through interminable meetings … Sometimes we confront the posse, sometimes we hold a child.’ Daniels was left quite literally holding the baby a number of times, either helping to take care of the children of fellow activists or coordinating students and young people, who, though they were too young to vote, could and did protest against segregated public spaces. Daniels was to become enormously important for the eleven children in the West household of Selma. It was with the Wests that Daniels stayed for most of his time in Alabama, ensuring that the children had books, pens and paper and instilling in them his own two loves: for learning and for God.

His primary ministry in the Deep South was to be visible. He was not a senior figure like Fred Shuttlesworth or Dr King, but the sight of the neat, starch-collared young white man with his cut-glass New England accent standing and marching alongside the oppressed people of Alabama sent a profound message. It was not always a popular one, however. Daniels recalled that in a store not far from Selma, a man noticed his seminarian’s garb, put two and two together and spat at him. ‘So you’re a white nigger, ain’t you.’ Daniels wore the insult with pride, as he did all his confrontations – be they with police or pastors of his own church whose congregations Daniels would often forcibly integrate.

The issue of integrated spaces was central to the civil rights struggle in Alabama. Who could sit in certain places, order certain food or use certain amenities at certain times was tightly controlled in order to emphasise the supposed inferiority of black people. As with the intricate racial cataloguing of Nazi Germany, the devil (quite literally, as far as Daniels was concerned) was in the detail. Increasingly, his presence was required to assist desegregation protests elsewhere in the troubled state. Daniels found himself making regular trips to Lowndes County, a largely rural, desperately poor county to the south-east of Selma. Lowndes was ‘the rust buckle on the black belt’, a strip of land across south/central Alabama famed for its rich black soil and its largely black population. As such, the maintenance of segregation in counties like Lowndes required a climate of violence and fear. The Klan was strong, lynching was common and the county at the heart of the belt acquired a new nickname: Bloody Lowndes.

It was to Fort Deposit, the largest town in Lowndes County, that Daniels, a young Roman Catholic priest called Father Richard Morrisroe and twenty-seven other protestors went on 14th August 1965. They were there to assist in the effort to desegregate a number of whites-only businesses in a protest coordinated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group of young black men and women determined to make their voices heard. One of its key members in Fort Deposit was the seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. She and Daniels had got to know one another through his regular trips to Lowndes County to lend what aid he could. The pair had struck up a rapport that might have seemed unlikely given their differing backgrounds – Ruby was the child of a soldier and a nurse and, compared to the erudite Daniels, she felt, in her own words, like ‘a peasant’. Yet a friendship was formed, largely based on mutual teasing. The bright and brilliant Daniels, always keen to instil a love of learning, would joshingly cajole Sales into discussion, correcting her when she got things wrong. Sales, confronted with the (in her words again) ‘starchy’ Yankee ordinand, doubtless had more than enough material with which to get back at him.

The protest in Fort Deposit turned ugly and the twentynine protestors were arrested. Despite Fort Deposit’s size, the administrative centre of Lowndes County was, in fact, the tiny backwater town of Hayneville. Consequently, the group were loaded onto a garbage truck and, amid piles of foetid rubbish, transported to the county jail there. The next day, some protestors were released without charge, while a number, mostly white and including Daniels, were offered bail and the opportunity to leave. Daniels and his fellow protestors refused; either all were offered bail, including the black prisoners, or none were.

Eventually, after six days in prison, on 20th August, the group was tossed out onto Hayneville’s dusty main thoroughfare without any prospect of a lift to Fort Deposit. While they tried to work out how to get back to a centre of comparative urbanisation, Daniels, Sales, Father Morrisroe and another black teenager, Joyce Bailey, wandered over to Varner’s Cash Store for some cold drinks to keep spirits up. As they crossed the concrete step up to the small brick building, a figure appeared brandishing a shotgun. It was one Thomas Coleman, a construction worker, part-time deputy sheriff of Lowndes County and associate of the Klan. ‘Get off this property,’ an enraged Coleman shouted, ‘or I’ll blow your goddamn heads off, you sons of bitches.’

There was little time to react. Coleman swung his gun towards Sales. As he pulled the trigger, Daniels dived into the path of the bullet and, in so doing, laid down his life for Ruby Sales. Morrisroe and Bailey, a few steps behind, turned and fled. Coleman fired after them, hitting the Roman Catholic priest in the back. He then aimed his gun towards Bailey and warned that, if she helped him, she’d be shot too.

†

Ruby Sales only realised that she wasn’t dead when she heard Joyce Bailey’s cries and Father Morrisroe asking for water. Dazed by the force of the gunshot, she came to her senses and realised that Daniels had taken the full blast of Coleman’s gun, so much so that his body, lying motionless like a broken doll in the Alabama dust, was almost severed in half.

Coleman wandered into the sheriff’s office and turned himself in. ‘I just shot two preachers,’ he told his colleagues. A clean-up operation was put into action and the next day, as federal investigators put it, ‘it looked as if there’d been no murder at all’. The powers that be in Lowndes County made it very clear which side they were on, even going so far as to initially refuse the release of the seminarian’s body to his grieving mother. Coleman was tried by an all-white jury and acquitted of murder, with the ‘twelve honest men and true’ shaking hands with him as he left the court a free man. When asked some years later if he had any regrets, he replied that, given the opportunity, he’d shoot both men again.

As well as tributes from Martin Luther King and President Lyndon B. Johnson, Daniels was memorialised by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, John Hines. Hines was young (for a bishop), newly elected and a bullish Southerner himself. His statement pulled no punches. He issued a wake-up call to the Church and the nation, saying that the murder of Daniels showed ‘the fearful price extracted from society for the administration of the system by people whose prejudices lead them to sacrifice justice upon the altar of their irrational fears’. He also observed that, if the most brilliant scion of the white elite could be denied justice in Alabama, what hope did ‘minorities have of securing even-handed justice’? Daniels had laid down his life, but his friends, allies and colleagues now had the task of ensuring it was not in vain. That is, undoubtedly, a process that is still ongoing in the United States of America.

While ensconced in jail, Daniels had written a note to his mother, in anticipation of her sixtieth birthday on 20th August, the very day he would be killed. It shows another side to the man – different from the earnest activist, dedicated student, or pious would-be priest who appears elsewhere. ‘The food is vile,’ he scrawled, ‘and we aren’t allowed to bathe. Phew … As you can imagine, I’ll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.’ Urbane, amusing and with just a soupçon of camp, this was the young man his friends and family back in New Hampshire lost when the Church and the civil rights movement gained their saint and martyr. No more witty asides, no gentle teasing, no more Martinis – Jonathan Daniels had laid down his life, but his friends and family remained bereft. Daniels’ story of bravery has its tragic note, perhaps best expressed by Ruby Sales, speaking many years later as a college professor (something that would have amused and delighted Daniels). She said of her protector’s death, ‘Isn’t it an absolute travesty that society would kill its best and brightest when they stand up for freedom?’

In the same speech, Sales said, in reference to his privileged background and glittering prospects, that when Daniels sacrificed himself, he ‘walked away from the king’s table’. Yet Jonathan Daniels believed he was doing the exact opposite. His entire time in Alabama and his entire commitment to fighting racism was predicated on the fact that, for him, such unselfish love of one’s fellow man was the way to the table of the king who said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’