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.)
(Note: Because
Bernard of Clairvaux is remembered on 20 August, Jonathan Daniels is remembered
on the day of his arrest, 14 August.)
Source: The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J
Schneider (Seabury Press, NY, 1967; 67-20940)
