Jonathan Daniels: the politics of resurrection

Jonathan Daniels from New Hampshire in the US was enrolled to become a high-church Episcopal (Anglican) priest in 1965. He was 26. In a little over three weeks it will be the anniversary of his death on the 20th August 1965. A white supporter of civil rights protests in Southern USA, he was killed while shielding a black girl from a shotgun blast.

He had earlier written:

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.[link]

What I find interesting is that, rather than finding apathetic comfort in his faith, Daniels found himself liberated from all intimidation and drawn to seeking justice for those in need.

On the 18th of February, 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson - farm labourer, church deacon and Vietnam veteran - was shot in the stomach in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers while trying to protect his mother and grandfather who were being clubbed. He died 8 days later. The 18th was called Bloody Sunday for the widespread and seemingly random police violence. The entire Selma black community turned out for Jackson's funeral. Comments that the funeral march should go all the way to the state capital, Montgomery, eventually resulted in a planned protest march from Selma to Montgomery led by Rev Dr Martin Luther King. The march would be a triumphant return to Montgomery where the civil rights movement had started ten years earlier with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.[link]

Jonathan Daniels came to Selma, Alabama, in March of that year. He was one of a number of protesters bussed in to answer Rev Dr Martin Luther King's call for outside support for the Selma to Montgomery march. Missing his bus home Daniels reflected on the way a weekend visit must look to local black residents, who could not so easily come and go. The shame led he and a friend to remain more permeanantly in Selma staying with black locals, participating in protests and attempting to integrate the local Episcopalian church with tentative support of the local priest. He arranged to study privately towards ordination and take his exams at the end of semester.

On August 13, after his exams, Daniels and a group of other protesters picketed a whites-only store in Fort Deposit, Alabama. They were arrested and held for six days in unsanitary conditions in the nearby town of Hayneville.

Finally, on August 20, all the prisoners were released, without explanation and without transport back to Fort Deposit. Several of the group went to find a payphone with which to call for help, while Daniels and a few others went down the street to get a cold soft drink at Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local stores that would serve nonwhites. They were met on the front steps by an unemployed highway construction worker, Tom Coleman, who was wielding a shotgun. The man threatened the group, and finally leveled his gun at sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales out of the way and caught the full blast of the gun. He was killed instantly.
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Daniels' killer was acquitted by a jury of twelve white men, on the grounds of "self-defense" (the killer claimed Daniels had a knife, which is extremely unlikely given that no one with Daniels saw any knife, Daniels had just come out of a week in jail, and the police who investigated never found any weapon). In 1991, Jonathan Myrick Daniels was designated a martyr of the Episcopal Church, one of fifteen modern-day martyrs, and August 14 was designated as a day of remembrance for the sacrifice of Daniels and all the martyrs of the civil rights movement. Ruby Sales, the teenager whose life Daniels saved, went on to attend Episcopal Theological Seminary herself, and has gone on to work as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C. as well as founding an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.[link]

Daniels reflections on the motivation of protesters are striking also for their frankness. The fuller version of the earlier quote is:

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.
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(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.)[link]

Another quote from Daniels shows his concern that the protests not become Us and Them conflicts but seek to go deeper and find common ground, resolution and reconcilation:

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.[link]

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