18A Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage September 6, 2020. Romans: 13:8-14.
“Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
On the second Saturday in August, people all over the country assemble in Hayneville, Lowndes Country, Alabama, to remember the martyrdom of an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, brutally murdered on August 20, 1965, as he protected an African American teenage girl, Ruby Sales, from a shotgun blast aimed at her.1
The pilgrimage starts at the courthouse where a trial lasting less than an hour found the white man who murdered Daniels “not guilty.” It moves to the place where once stood a small country store where Jonathan was killed. The pilgrimage then moves back to the courthouse for Eucharist, where the bread and the wine are consecrated on an altar once used as the judge’s bench for that 1965 sham trial.
Bishop Kendrick of the Central Gulf Coast recalls last year that this march takes place on the same date as the disastrous march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, now three years ago. The similarities are too much to bear, reminding us to question the advancement in racial justice in our last three quarters of a century. Too often we fail to recognize who our neighbor is. We pray that the next generation can do better.
“Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
The twenty-six-year-old Daniels hears the call by Martin Luther King, Jr. for students to join him in the Selma to secure voting rights for African Americans. Simultaneously, Jon hears King’s words blending into the ancient melody of the Song of Mary, the Magnificat, as he sings at Evening Prayer: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat/ and exalted the humble and meek.”2 Jonathan is given leave from Episcopal Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to go to Alabama.
In Selma, he brings small groups of black high school students to services at St. Paul’s, the local Episcopal church. They are initially shut out but eventually seated while parishioners openly scowl at them./ Recently, Bishop Michael Curry preaches at that church when he visits Selma. His message is, “See, we can change.” (Henry Hudson presently serves at St. Paul’s.)
Jon returns to seminary in May to complete his examinations. In July he returns to Alabama, where he lives with a black family and works on resources for people of color.
On August 13, Jon and others travel to Fort Deposit to picket three whites-only local businesses. Just eight days earlier, Lyndon Johnson signed the historic Voting Rights Act. On that Southern-hot-Saturday, all twenty-nine protestors are arrested and taken in a garbage truck to the nearby jail in Hayneville, the county seat. They are held in cramped conditions in the crowded, unsanitary jail without air conditioning or showers, and little water for six days before receiving bail.
Daniels writes his last letter to his mother from the jail for her birthday. “Dearest Mum, An eminently peculiar birthday card…from the Lowndes county jail… The card I bought and the present will have to wait, but I sure will be thinking of you with love and prayers!” The hastily written note arrives on his mother’s 60th birthday, the day of his murder.
After their release Friday, August 20, Jon, a Catholic priest, and two black girls, seeking relief from the heat, go to purchase sodas at a Varner’s Cash Store, one of few local businesses serving non-whites. Tom Coleman, an unpaid special county deputy poised with a 12-gauge automatic pump shotgun, meets them at the door with the message to leave or be shot. The part-time deputy aims the gun at a seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales, a student at Tuskegee. Jon pushes her out of the way, takes the bullets, and dies instantly. Ruby Sales describes the horrific scene as seeing love and hate, the best and the worst of white America in a split second. Ruby is so damaged by the incident that she does not speak for six months.3,4 Coleman also shoots and seriously wounds Richard Morrisroe, the Catholic priest.
When Martin Luther King Jr. hears of Daniels’ murder, his response is: "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels."
“Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
The all-white jury acquits Coleman after a trial of less than one hour. Only registered voters can be on a jury, which excludes most blacks.
The murder of Jon Daniels shocks the Episcopal Church into the realization of racial inequality and moves the church on an expanded path of working for civil rights.
Ruby3,4 goes on to attend the same seminary as Daniels and now heads the SpiritHouse Project in Atlanta, a program using art, spirituality, and education to bring about justice/ with redemption. Ruby believes that a four hundred-year-old “culture of whiteness” is destroying our nation. She reminds us it is not white people, but this canonized “culture of whiteness” that is our socialized problem from birth. But she preaches hope in believing that we are redeemed by telling our story to each other, finding out where that inner hurt comes from that makes us believe the color of our skin can be used as a hierarchical power over others, especially as the circle of whiteness narrows in our country. We are called not to look at the color of someone’s skin, but like artists, look for the life behind and within each other’s faces. Love becomes the frame we see people in.5 How do we do this? Sales 3,4 believe that we must share our collective and individual stories, through the arts, spiritual reflections, and literature/seeking justice/ in the spirit of redemption.
At Daniels’ alma mater, VMI,6 an archway in the barracks is dedicated to him, marked by a plaque with words from Daniels’ 1961 valedictorian address to other graduating cadets: “My colleagues and friends, I wish you the joy of a purposeful life. I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them. I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable.” Every VMI entering class views the documentary Here Am I, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels.
“Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Bishop Curry7 recently describes Jon Daniels as, “an ordinary Episcopalian just like you and me, an ordinary Episcopalian just like you and me, and so many other ordinary Episcopalians we do not know about, who hear about the love of Jesus and are moved by the suffering of others not treated as neighbors. Ordinary Episcopalians who are led to pray on their knees and then pray with their feet.”
Our associate priest, Michael, reminds me that the School of Theology, Sewanee, Tennessee, loads all first-year students into a bus at seminary orientation to go to the Jonathan Daniels pilgrimage. He describes it as a moving experience, as many are visiting the site of a martyrdom for the first time.
Because of the pandemic this year, the march is live streamed from the Diocese of Alabama. I watched it last month, and the pilgrimage is just as powerful as Michael says. I share with you the most moving moment for me at the close of the pilgrimage.1
Participants hold up pictures of the martyrs of Alabama, men, women, children black and white killed because of our blind belief that people of color should be denied basic rights, only available to persons with white skin. A member of the congregation holds up a larger-than-life picture when each martyr’s name is called. That participant holding the picture then loudly responds, “PRESENT.” Would you join me in speaking again this response: PRESENT?
We see and hear called out the names of four young black girls killed instantly by a bomb shortly before church services in 1963 in Birmingham at the 16th Street Baptist Church: “Addie Mae Collins, 14, PRESENT; Denise McNair, 11, PRESENT; Carole Robertson, 14, PRESENT; Cynthia Wesley, 14, PRESENT; and finally, we see and hear Jonathan Myrick Daniels, 26, PRESENT.”
1Virtual Jon Daniels Program 2020, Diocese of Alabama.
2The Jon Daniels Story, William J. Schneider, ed. (The Seabury Press, 1967).
3Ruby Sales Ted Talk, “How We Can Start to Heal The Pain of Racial Division,” September 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_sales_how_we_can_start_to_heal_the_pain_of_racial_division
4Way of Love podcast about Daniels and Sales Going where it Hurts with Bishop Curry https://wayoflove.episcopalchurch.org/episodes/season/3/episode/7
5Frederick Buechner in Beyond Words, originally in Whistling in the Dark.
6Virginia Military Institute Archives.
http://digitalcollections.vmi.edu/digital/collection/p15821coll11/id/1216
7Bishop Curry on Jonathan Daniels Sunday https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2020/08/17/episcopal-martyr-jonathan-myrick-daniels-honored-in-online-commemorations/
Joanna. Joannaseibert.com