When people ask me a question, I immediately apologize for what occurs next.
“I’m a preacher and a Southerner,” I say. “And what that means is that I talk in stories.”
I collect stories, always have, and Lord willing, always will. I pass them on and mold them for my own unique delivery.
My storytelling comes in oral and written forms. Sometimes, this means invoking elegant language where I dance in step with descriptors, manage metaphors, and pepper my prose with just the right amount of spice. In those moments, I summon names like Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner to bless my offerings.
That is not the case this time.
No fancy words. No poetry. No well-placed quips of humor.
This time, the story I want to share is enough. It can stand on its own two feet.
I’m just here to make sure you know the story about Jonathan Daniels.
In the spring of 1963, Civil Rights leaders Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. placed calls to any and all who wished to join the movement taking place in the Deep South.
One such call was for presence and protest to address voter suppression in Alabama. Plans were made to march to draw awareness and move in unison toward justice and equality for all. This proposed walk for freedom would begin in Selma, Alabama, and end 50 miles east in Montgomery, the state’s capital.
Many who answered this call were college students and clergy from the United States. One of these was Jonathan Daniels, a young man from New England.
Daniels had grown up in New Hampshire, experiencing what could be considered an affluent upbringing. His father was a physician, and his parents were members of good standing in their local Congregationalist Church.
It was apparent in his adolescent years that Daniels felt a spiritual tug. Those who knew him well speculate that his desire for closeness with the divine was brought on by his father’s early death and his sibling’s chronic illness. Whatever the reason, Jonathan drew close to God.
After graduating from the Virginia Military Institute and a brief stint at Harvard, he entered seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, at the age of 26, Daniels heard the plea and call to action to become involved with the Civil Rights Movement.
He would make two trips to the segregated South, the first a short stay. He and several other students convinced their seminary professors to allow them to go to Alabama while continuing their studies.
For the next two months, Jonathan stayed with a local African-American family, worked in the movement and returned to Cambridge to take exams, which he passed. He then made plans to return that summer.
Back in Alabama, Daniels attempted to help integrate the local Episcopal church in Selma but was met with resistance and hostility. He continued his work in helping register African-American voters and started tutoring local school-age children.
A week after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act on August 14, 1965, Daniels and nearly 30 other protestors were arrested in Fort Deposit, Alabama, for picketing white-only stores.
Upon arrest, they were taken to a jail 20 minutes away in Haynesville.
Daniels and a half dozen other protestors were kept in prison for almost a week before being released. As they waited for a ride to pick them up and take them back to their friends in Fort Deposit, Daniels and three other protestors, including a young Black woman named Ruby Sales, walked down to a local convenience store to grab a snack and drink.
When they tried to enter the Varner’s Cash Store, a white, part-time deputy sheriff named Thomas Coleman met them at the door. Coleman threatened the group before producing a shotgun, which he fired toward 17-year-old Sales.
Daniels stepped in the path of the blast in an act to protect her. He died on the steps of the store.
Coleman would pursue the two other protestors before finally ceasing fire. He was indicted for manslaughter, claiming his actions were rooted in self-defense even though Daniels, Sales, and the other protestors were unarmed.
Soon after, Coleman was acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white male jury. He would die at the ripe old age of 86, never facing any further prosecution for his actions. In a CBS interview a year later, when asked if he regretted his actions, Coleman told reporters, “I would shoot them both tomorrow.”
Sales was traumatized by the incident, carrying Daniel’s death with her for the rest of her life. She would go on to attend the same seminary as Daniels and continue her work as a social justice activist and public theologian.
In 2007, she began the Spirit House project, an initiative bringing attention to the state-sanctioned deaths of Black people. The project uses the “arts, research, education, action, and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic, and social justice, as well as for spiritual maturity.”
Upon learning of Daniels’s fate, Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.” King and other Civil Rights leaders would speak of Jonathan Daniels’s faith as one in sync with that of the teachings of Jesus.
In 1991, the Episcopal Church in the United States honored Daniels by bestowing him the title of martyr. His feast day, August 14, sees faithful pilgrims descend upon Lowndes County, Alabama, to visit the courthouse and the location where Daniels was murdered.
Daniels’s life is remembered as an example of what it looks like to love others as neighbors and brothers and sisters.
His way of living might be described as too difficult, making one wonder, who can accept it? Many are presented with a chance to live this way, to think of the other before themselves, yet many choose not to. To many, this way is dangerous, offensive, scandalous even.
So was the life and message of a radical Galilean.
And that’s why this story needs telling and retelling.
We need more evidence that there is good news in this world.
We need to see that a new way, a kin-dom way, is possible.
received his theological education from Campbell University and Wake Forest University School of Divinity. He is an ordained minister affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and enrolled in the doctor of ministry program at McAfee School of Theology. When not spending time with his spouse and daughters, he can be found writing and baking late into the night. He currently resides in New England with his family. His thoughts and reflections are his own.
