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 Jonathan
Myrick Daniels was born in New Hampshire in 1939, one of two offspring of a
Congregationalist physician. When in high school, he had a bad fall which
put him in the hospital for about a month. It was a time of reflection. Soon
after, he joined the Episcopal Church and also began to take his studies
seriously, and to consider the possibility of entering the priesthood. After
high school, he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington,
Virginia (37:47 N 79:27 W), where at first he seemed a misfit, but managed
to stick it out, and was elected Valedictorian of his graduating class.
During his sophomore year at VMI, however, he began to experience
uncertainties about his religious faith and his vocation to the priesthood
that continued for several years, and were probably influenced by the death
of his father and the prolonged illness of his younger sister Emily. In the
fall of 1961 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near
Boston (41:20 N 71.05 W), to study English literature, and in the spring of
1962, while attending Easter services at the Church of the Advent in Boston,
he underwent a conversion experience and renewal of grace. Soon after, he
made a definite decision to study for the priesthood, and after a year of
work to repair the family finances, he enrolled at Episcopal Theological
Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1963, expecting to
graduate in the spring of 1966.
In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join
him in Selma, Alabama (32:24 N 87:01 W), for a march to the state capital in
Montgomery (32:22 N 86:20 W) demonstrating support for his civil rights
program. News of the request reached the campus of ETS on Monday 8 March (my
sources are a bit confused on the chronology of that week, but I think this
is correct), and during Evening Prayer at the chapel, Jon Daniels decided
that he ought to go. Later he wrote:
"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath
rejoiced in God my Saviour." I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that
evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and
reverence I have always felt for Mary's glad song. "He hath showed strength
with his arm." As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found
myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous,
Spirit-filled "moment" that would, in retrospect, remind me of
others--particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. "He hath
put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things." I knew then that I must go to
Selma. The Virgin's song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.
He and others left on Thursday for Selma, intending to stay
only that weekend; but he and a friend missed the bus back, and began to
reflect on how an in-and-out visit like theirs looked to those living in
Selma, and decided that they must stay longer. They went home to request
permission to spend the rest of the term in Selma, studying on their own and
returning to take their examinations. In Selma, many proposed marches were
blocked by rows of policemen. Jon describes one such meeting (ellipses not
marked).
After a week-long, rain-soaked vigil, we still stood face to face with the
Selma police. I stood, for a change, in the front rank, ankle-deep in an
enormous puddle. To my immediate right were high school students, for the
most part, and further to the right were a swarm of clergymen. My end of the
line surged forward at one point, led by a militant Episcopal priest whose
temper (as usual) was at combustion-point. Thus I found myself only inches
from a young policeman. The air crackled with tension and open hostility.
Emma Jean, a sophomore in the Negro high school, called my name from behind.
I reached back for her hand to bring her up to the front rank, but she did
not see. Again she asked me to come back. My determination had become
infectiously savage, and I insisted that she come forward--I would not
retreat! Again I reached for her hand and pulled her forward. The young
policeman spoke: "You're dragging her through the puddle. You ought to be
ashamed for treating a girl like that." Flushing--I had forgotten the
puddle--I snarled something at him about whose-fault-it-really-was, that
managed to be both defensive and self-righteous. We matched baleful glances
and then both looked away. And then came a moment of shattering internal
quiet, in which I felt shame, indeed, and a kind of reluctant love for the
young policeman. I apologized to Emma Jean. And then it occurred to me to
apologize to HIM and to thank him. Though he looked away in contempt--I was
not altogether sure I blamed him--I had received a blessing I would not
forget. Before long the kids were singing, "I love ---." One of my friends
asked [the young policeman] for his name. His name was Charlie. When we sang
for him, he blushed and then smiled in a truly sacramental mixture of
embarrassment and pleasure and shyness. Soon the young policeman looked
relaxed, we all lit cigarettes (in a couple of instances, from a common
match, and small groups of kids and policemen clustered to joke or talk
cautiously about the situation. It was thus a shock later to look across the
rank at the clergymen and their opposites, who glared across a still
unbroken "Wall" in what appeared to be silent hatred. Had I been freely
arranging the order for Evening Prayer that night, I think I might have
followed the General Confession directly with the General Thanksgiving--or
perhaps the Te Deum.
Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of
Negroes, mostly high school students, to church with him in an effort to
integrate the local Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many
parishioners openly resented their presence, and put their pastor squarely
in the middle. (He was integrationist enough to risk his job by
accommodating Jon's group as far as he did, but not integrationist enough to
satisfy Jon.)
In May, Jon went back to ETS to take examinations and complete other
requirements, and in July he returned to Alabama, where he helped to produce
a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources legally
available to persons in need of assistance.
On Friday 13 August Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit (32:00 N
86:36 W) to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were
arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville (32:11 N 86:35 W) for six
days until they were bailed out. (They had agreed that none would accept
bail until there was bail money for all.) After their release on Friday 20
August, four of them undertook to enter a local shop, and were met at the
door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a
brief confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon
pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself.
(Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed
instantly. Not long before his death he wrote:
I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my
bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord's death and
Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead,
and my life is hid with Christ in God. I began to lose self-righteousness
when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly
desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point
is simply, of course, that one's motives are usually mixed, and one had
better know it.
As Judy and I said the daily offices day by day, we became more and more
aware of the living reality of the invisible "communion of saints"--of the
beloved comunity in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of the ones
gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven--who blend with theirs our
faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white
men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the
races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and
"ends" all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably ONE.
(Note: Much of Alabama has brick-red clayey soil. The region
where the soil is black loam is called "the black belt." The term has no
racial referent, although Yankees often assume that it does.)
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