Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage
“I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin’s
song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.” The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider, Seabury Press, NY, 1967; 67-20940.
On the second Saturday in August, people from all over the country were assembled at 11 o’clock in Hayneville, Lowndes Country, Alabama, to remember the death of an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, on August 20, 1965, as he was protecting an African American teenage girl named Ruby Sales. The processions will travel from the County Courthouse Square to the old County Jail, where Daniels was detained after being arrested for picketing whites-only businesses.
The march continues to where there was previously the old Varner’s Cash Store, a small country store where Jonathan was shot. The 26-year-old pilgrimage then returns to the Lowndes County Courthouse for Eucharist, where the bread and wine are consecrated on an altar that was the judge’s bench for that 1965 sham trial lasting less than an hour that found the man who murdered Jonathan not guilty. This year, The Right Reverend Phoebe Roaf, the Bishop of the Diocese of West Tennessee, was the preacher.
Bishop Russell Kendrick of the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast reminded us a past year that this march remembering the death of the twenty-six-year-old Daniels took place on the same day as the disastrous march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia several years ago. The similarities are sometimes too much to bear, remembering that we are still stuck in a place where we were three-quarters of a century ago about human rights and recognizing who our neighbor is.
Daniels took a leave from Episcopal Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after hearing Martin Luther King Jr call for students to join him to march in Selma, Alabama, to support the civil rights movement. In Evening Prayer, he was moved by singing the Song of Mary, The Magnificat, especially the words, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek.”
Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of black high school students to church to integrate the local Episcopal church. They were seated, but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence and put their priest squarely in the middle.
Jon returned to the seminary in May to take examinations and complete other requirements. In July, he returned to Alabama, where he helped produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources legally available to persons needing assistance.
On Friday, August 13, Jon and others went to Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday, they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they all received bail. After their release on Friday, August 20, four of them went to purchase sodas at a local country store, and were met at the door by a special county deputy with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the construction worker, a part-time deputy, aimed the gun at a seventeen-year-old young black girl in the party, Ruby Sales. Jon pushed her out of the way and was instantly killed.
Ruby later attended the same seminary as Daniels and now heads the SpiritHouse Project in Atlanta, a program using art, spirituality, and education to bring about racial, economic, and social justice.
When we sing or say Mary’s song, The Magnificat, remember Jonathan Myrick Edwards and Ruby Sales and how this canticle changed their lives.
Is there something in that song that also resonates with each of us?
Daniels died on August 20th, but is remembered on the day of his arrest, August 14th.
Book of Common Prayer, 119.
