Civil Rights Events

After the 1965 Voting Rights Act

The Murder of Jonathan Daniels

Part One

The murder in cold blood and in broad daylight of a religious leader is horrifying enough. Especially in America, we associate our preachers with words not swords and expect them to be immune from violence. But merely a half-century ago, someone could brazenly kill an Episcopalian seminarian and shoot a Catholic priest without being punished. It happened, in August 1965, in racist Alabama (Troy 1).

On Saturday morning, August 14, a long line of Blacks wait patiently in sweltering heat at the tiny Fort Deposit Alabama post office where federal examiners are registering voters in compliance with the recently passed Voting Rights Act. Fort Deposit is a Klan stronghold and angry white thugs mingle with local cops to harass and intimidate. For some rural Blacks standing in line, this is the first time they've ever dared venture into Fort Deposit because of its long history of racist violence. Now their only protection is a small contingent of FBI agents present to record violations of the Act.

Under the shade of a nearby tree, a small band of 25 or so teenagers are hand-lettering picket signs. Ever since the Movement first came to Fort Deposit a week earlier in the form of a mass meeting, they have been working up their courage to take a stand for freedom by defying segregation. Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act more than a year earlier, the town grocery store is still segregated. They and their parents are barred from entering, they must make their purchases through a back window without examining the goods or seeing the posted prices. The amounts they are charged are often more than what white customers pay and vary from person to person and day to day according to the whim of the white owner.

SNCC field secretary Jimmy Rogers and other SNCC organizers try to talk them out of demonstrating. A protest will be terribly dangerous and if white violence breaks out it might prevent the adults from registering. A pair of FBI agents warn them that white men are gathering in an angry crowd, and they, the agents, can only "observe," they can provide no protection at all. The Black teenagers are not intimidated. "I don't want to scare the older people away from voter registration, but we need this," says one (Picketing 1-2).

Many [of the students] had been involved in an unsuccessful boycott earlier in the year of their segregated black high school after its superintendent refused to consider a list of demands aimed at improving their education. And the county school board blocked their attempt to integrate the all-white high school in Hayneville about 18 miles away. They wanted to find a niche in the civil right movement in Lowndes County, often called “Bloody Lowndes” for the way violence enforced segregation.

Just eight days earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the historic Voting Rights Act. Most of the young organizers who gathered on Aug. 14 were too young to vote, but they wanted to be part of the movement so they proposed the protest against businesses in Fort Deposit (Schjonberg 1-2).

The SNCC organizers are torn. Their prestige among Black youth is enormous. If they forbid the demonstration the teenagers will reluctantly obey. But should they block the protest? Or should they support the young militants, some of whom are the same age they themselves were when they first defied adult caution and took their own stands.

…

Project Director Stokely Carmichael finally accedes to the young militants insistence on defying white racism with direct action, but only on condition that they pledge commitment to nonviolence. "If that's what you want to do, he tells them, "don't take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil." Purses and pockets are emptied of nail files and knives. Jimmy Rogers and some of the other experienced SNCC veterans are assigned to join them. Assuming all protesters will be arrested, SNCC members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod make lists of names and family contacts.

A car from Selma arrives with freedom school teacher Gloria Larry House and two white supporters, Father Richard Morrisroe and seminary student Jonathan Daniels. Tuskegee student and volunteer organizer Ruby Sales later recalled:

One of the things that we were very conscious of is that, sometimes in that kind of situation, white presence would incite local white people to violence. So there was some concern about what that meant, ... to jeopardize the local black people. The other question was who should be in the forefront of the movement. People like myself thought it should be the people themselves in Lowndes County, the local black people, who should be in the forefront. I had some serious concerns about what it meant to allow white people to come into the county and what kind of relationship that set up in an area where black people had historically deferred to white people, and whether or not that was in some real ways creating the very situation that we were struggling very hard to change. More fundamentally, I was very afraid of unleashing uncontrolled violence because of Lowndes County's history ... and the fact that since I had been in the county I had encountered more than one violent incident ... but ultimately it was decided that the movement was an open place and should provide an opportunity for anyone who wanted to come and struggle against racism to be part of the struggle" (Picketing 2-3).

Born in 1939 in Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan [Daniels] had deep roots in New England. He was a typical kid: going to music camp, attending church, falling in love, and enjoying the company of a steadfast group of friends who still remember him with laughter and fondness. He was not a perfect child by any means. He smoked, stayed out too late, and snuck a beer now and then.

But Jonathan showed a contemplative side as well. His reading list included Camus, Kierkegaard, church fathers, and in an article for his high school paper he lamented young people’s disconnect with the spiritual world. His favorite book, The Chain, portrays an Episcopal Priest who stands with the marginalized in his town and loses his life in the process. After high school Jonathan attended the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he thrived under the rigorous academic and physical discipline.

Graduation found Jonathan at a cross roads. Although he wished his classmates “the joy of a purposeful life” in his valedictory address, his own life lacked such purpose. His father had died two years before, and there was pressure on him to return home to support his mother and sister. He decided, however, to pursue a graduate degree in English at Harvard University. After a year of study he realized that Harvard was not for him, just when Harvard had decided that he needed to seek his degree elsewhere.

And then he had an epiphany. He never shared what he experienced during the 1962 Easter Sunday services at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill, but it changed his life forever. He later called it a “reconversion”; after an on again off again relationship with the church, he had come home. Within a year he was enrolled in seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jon’s textbook margins were well marked with his thoughts and reactions, but he learned his most important lessons from fieldwork in inner city Providence, Rhode Island, where his eyes were opened to the realities of poverty and injustice.

… In March 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King called on American clergy for assistance after the brutal attack on activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. At first Jonathan was not sure – “could I spare the time? Did I want to spare the time? Did He want . . . ?”– but after evening chapel he resolved to go south (Bell 1-3).

Daniels and fellow seminarian Judith Upham … had come to Alabama in March … They arrived on a Thursday, intending to be home in Cambridge in time for classes Monday morning. They stayed nearly a week and returned with the conviction that they were called to return to Alabama as witness to the ongoing struggle for equal rights.

“Something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back,” Daniels once wrote. “I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question … I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.”

Daniels and Upham returned the following week to spend the semester. “Sometimes we take to the streets, sometimes we yawn through interminable meetings … Sometime we confront the posse, sometimes we hold a child,” Daniels wrote, describing their daily work.

He said Selma in 1965 was like the entire world, ambiguous and filled with doubt and fear. Into that world must come saints, he said. And Selma “needs the life and witness of militant saints” (Schjonberg 3-4).

While managing to complete his seminary coursework, he plunged into what he called “living theology”: he helped with voter registration, photographed segregated conditions, worked to integrate a church, and lived with local families. Rachel West Nelson, whose family Jonathan stayed with, remembered that “he was part of our family. . . . In a way, he was a part of every black family in Selma in those days” (Bell 4).

When Daniels wanted to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes County, the group refused, according to legendary SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael.

“We had no base in Lowndes County, so there was no way to protect him, and if he were working with us, he would be clearly a target of the Ku Klux Klan and our work then would be just protecting him rather than doing our work,” Carmichael recalled during a 1988 interview that was a followup to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. Daniels accused him of being racist, he added.

Daniels, instead, joined some Lowndes County work being done by the Southern Leadership Christian Conference, whose first president was King. Meanwhile, Carmichael and Daniels got to know and like each other that summer. Carmichael later said he came to realize that Daniels was “more interested in lasting solutions rather than the temporary ones” (Schjonberg 5-6).

Bloody Lowndes’s … violent bigotry shocked the earnest, decent New Hampshire native, who wasn’t naïve, having proved himself tough enough to graduate as valedictorian of Virginia Military Institute. In an article published posthumously, he described his travels in the land of “whites only.” One night, buying coffee at a truck stop, he encountered a sign: “ALL CASH RECEIVED FROM SALES TO NIGGERS WILL BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE UNITED KLANS OF AMERICA.” Sickened, he recalled, the “nausea rising swiftly and savagely…. It was lousy coffee. But worse than chicory was the taste of black men’s blood.”

Another day, while in Selma’s post office “a redneck turned and stared: at my seminarian’s collar, at my ESCRU button.” The man exclaimed: “Why, he’s a white niggah.” As everyone stared at Daniels, “deep within me rose an affirmation and a tenderness and a joy that wanted to shout. ‘Yes!’” Daniels called this, “the highest honor, the most precious distinction I have ever received. It is one that I do not deserve—and cannot ever earn. As I type now, my hands are hopelessly white.” But, he added, “my heart is black.”

This was the poetic and pious voice of Jonathan Daniels, humbled by his privilege, by his black friends’ suffering, and by the efforts required “to confront a people with the challenge of freedom and a nation with its conscience.” Hurt by the racism otherwise good people expressed, despairing, with King, of “the neutralists who cautiously seek to calm troubled waters,” Daniels concluded that our crazy world “needs the life and witness of militant Saints” (Troy 1-3).

August 14 – Jonathan Daniels joins the 30, mostly student protesters. They walk to Fort Deposit's miniscule "downtown" in three groups of 10 (so as not to be arrested for "parading") and begin to picket McGough's Grocery with their hand-made signs carrying slogans like "No More Back Doors" and "Wake Up! This is Not Primitive Time." Fifty hostile Klansmen armed with clubs and guns quickly close in on them. A deputy sheriff shouts that they're all under arrest (the protesters, of course, not the KKK). "For what?" asks Jimmy Rogers. "For resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood."

Some of the protesters manage to evade arrest, but 20 are forced into a waiting garbage truck. In addition to local youth, among those arrested are SNCC members Jimmy Rogers, Willie Vaughn, Scott B. Smith, and Stokely Carmichael, freedom school teacher Gloria House, Tuskegee student Ruby Sales, and Father Morrisroe and Jonathan Daniels. The two whites are particularly singled out by the cops for special abuse (Picketing 3).

The arrestees are taken to the new county jail in Hayneville. Bail bonds are set high, far more than SNCC can scrape up (Hayneville 1). Daniels shared a cell with Carmichael … The group spent six hot August days in the jail without air conditioning. There were no showers and no toilets. Daniels led the group in hymn singing and prayers, boosting morale and combating the bleakness of the situation (Schjonberg 7).

Stokely and Scott B. are bailed out [August 20] to continue organizing and to arrange lawyers and bond for the others. The remaining prisoners agree they will all remain together, no one else will bail out until everyone can be freed. Seventeen year old Tuskegee student and SNCC volunteer Ruby Sales lies about her age so they won't incarcerate her as a juvenile delinquent without trial (as Mississippi did to Brenda Travis and Florida did to the "St. Augustine Four"). As usual, women prisoners are separated from the men. There are four women in the filthy, cramped, roach and lice-infested cell: Joyce Bailey and Ms. Logan from Fort Deposit, Gloria House, and Ruby Sales who later recalled:

You know, growing up in the South, — or growing up in America — only "bad" women went to jail. That was the last thing your mama raised you to do was to find your butt in jail. There I was in this place that my mother had told me only bad women went to. So that was a really important moment, the transformation of that space. It moved from being a space of disgrace to being a space of honor to be there.

Now you have to understand what it means for four Black women — it was terrifying, psychologically terrifying because they engaged in psychological warfare. By telling the women that if we didn't stop singing that they were going to make the Black trustees — the Black prisoners — come into the cell with us and rape us. And they threatened that they would have the Black prisoners beat the men. So [they used] this whole notion of psychological warfare, turning one Black person against another.

And you know there was a lot of singing going on. People were afraid, and the singing had a lot to do with just maintaining our courage, giving us something to hold on to, and stand in. But, I have to say despite those tortuous conditions, it didn't feel like we were being tortured ... it was because of the spirit of just being there and standing up for something you believed in. And for those young people — and even for myself — I had never been arrested, so that was a powerful moment that even their threats couldn't defeat. And that was really based on the power of the people to really take one space that had been something else and to turn it into something positive and transformative. And that therefore it no longer belonged — even though the white Sheriff and other people thought it still belonged to them — in a way it didn't anymore (Hayneville 1-3).

Despite suffering in Alabama’s summer heat, Daniels refused to be bailed out before the others. He wrote a 60th-birthday message to his mother: “The food is vile. And we aren’t allowed to bathe. Phew…. As you can imagine, I’ll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.” That drink would go forever unmixed (Troy 5).

On Saturday, August 21, the day after Carmichael and Scott Smith are bailed out, the guards suddenly announce that everybody is being released without having to post bond.

Of course we were suspicious of this. No one from SNCC had been in touch with us. We had not been told that bail had been raised; we had no information from anyone, and we thought, this doesn't sound right. But they forced us out of the jail at gunpoint. Being forced out of jail at gunpoint — you know something worse might be waiting for you outside, so you sort of hang on to that jail. Well, we did. We were standing around outside the jail and they forced us off the property onto the blacktop, one of the county roads, again at gunpoint. …

The suddenly released prisoners are tense. They have no base in Hayneville and for some reason no other Blacks are in sight. Willie Vaughn is sent looking for a Black home with a phone, but few Afro-Americans have telephone service and many are afraid to even answer their door. Nearby is the small white-owned Cash Store where Movement people have bought snacks in the past during voter registration days. After a week in a hot, fetid cell, eating foul jail food and drinking tainted water some want to slake their thirst with a cold soda. SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet (Ambush 1-2).

Works cited:

“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965daniels

Bell, Mike. “Jonathan Daniels, Forgotten Hero of the Civil Rights Movement.” Plough. Web. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/discipleship/jonathan-daniels-forgotten-hero-of-the-civil-rights-movement

“In the Hayneville Jail.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965daniels

“Picketing Fort Deposit.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965daniels

Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2015/08/13/remembering-jonathan-daniels-50-years-after-his-martyrdom/

Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonathan-daniels-the-forgotten-civil-rights-preacher-killed-by-a-cop-in-alabama