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JONATHAN MYRICK DANIELS
SEMINARIAN (14 AUGUST 1965)
Jonathan
Myrick Daniels was born in Keene, 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 , 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, 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, for a march to the state capital in Montgomery 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 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 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 community 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.”
Further Reading:
➢
The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider (Morehouse, 1992 ;
ISBN: 0819215864) (orig. publ. 1967)
➢
Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in
Alabama, by Charles W. Eagles (Univ of North Carolina Pr., 1993; ISBN:
0807844209)]
Links:-
➢ http://www.satucket.com/lectionary/Jonathan_Daniels.htm
➢ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Myrick_Daniels
➢ http://www.pilgrimage4peace.com/
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