This week we pause to remember Jonathan Myrick Daniels, civil rights activist and Episcopal seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School, who sacrificed his life in the service of voting rights marchers in Selma. He defended Ruby Sales, shielding her from death in an altercation with law enforcement on August 20, 1965.
Daniels was responding to Martin Luther King’s call for clergy of all faiths to support voting rights and the integration of churches. He first attended the Selma to Montgomery March and returned to Selma to assist in a voter-registration project in Lowndes County. Daniels explained his return to Selma in this way: “something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back. 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.”
The Episcopal Church honors Daniels on August 14th. He is recognized as a martyr and was added to the observances of Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1999. August 14, 1965, was the day he and the other activists were arrested in Fort Deposit, Alabama for protests calling for the integration of public places and voting rights (six days before his assassination).
Daniels attended the Virginia Military Institute, and they have paid tribute to him by establishing the Jonathan M. Daniels Humanitarian Award. A documentary, “Here Am I, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels,” is available for viewing here.
Ruby Sales, public theologian, activist, social critic, and founder of Spirit House Project has spoken about her experiences from the 60s onward in various forums. The Washington National Cathedral’s Dean hosted her on October 11, 2015, in a conversation recorded as The Legacy of Jonathan Daniels with Ruby Sales.
–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church August 2024