Jonathon Daniels, Christian Martyr
by Jim Weingartner
[A special remembrance for August 14.]
What does Christianity require of believers encountering evil? Anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided an answer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” Bonhoeffer spoke and acted, and paid with his life. So, too, did Jonathan Daniels.
Preparing for ordination as a priest at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of Cambridge, Massachusetts in April 1965, Jonathon Daniels interrupted his studies to answer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for religious leaders to travel to Selma, Alabama, in support of Black civil rights.
In his few months in fiercely segregationist Alabama, the 26 year-old white seminarian worked for the integration of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Selma in the face of determined opposition. When he and another white activist visited St. Paul’s head usher, a local judge, they were informed that they would always be welcome, but that that “the n----- trash you bring with you will never be accepted at St. Paul’s.” Daniels’ proved the judge wrong.
His persistent witnessing in the spring and summer of 1965 helped encourage enough parishioners to walk out of services from which Blacks had been excluded to lead St. Paul’s vestry to vote in favor of welcoming worshippers regardless of race.
More difficult and dangerous was Daniels’ involvement in civil rights demonstrations in rural Lowndes County. There, Blacks constituted 80% of the population, but no Blacks were registered to vote. Already warned that he was exposing himself to great risk, Daniels replied: “I decided a long time ago that the Holy Spirit had brought me here, that I believe very firmly in the gospel and its faith, that my life is not my own, but His, and that consequently the possibility of death, whether immediate or remote, cannot be a deciding factor for me.”
He was convinced that “as a Christian, as a soldier of the cross, I was totally free–at least free to give my life if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the Kingdom no longer hidden from my blind eyes.”
On August 14, 1965, Daniels and a racially-mixed group were arrested and imprisoned in the Lowndes County jail in Haynesville for demonstrating in support of Black civil rights. Released on August 20, some of them, including Daniels, walked to a nearby store to buy soft drinks. There, they were confronted by an auxiliary deputy sheriff armed with a 12 gauge shotgun who informed them that the store was closed and that they were to leave immediately. Daniels, apparently believing that the deputy intended to shoot a 17 year-old Black female member of the group, lunged protectively in front of her, receiving the full blast of the deputy’s weapon. He died instantly. Another member of the group, a Roman Catholic priest, was shot in the back but survived.
Martin Luther King, on whose urging Daniels had placed his head in the lion’s mouth that was Alabama, wrote that “it was one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”
Jonathan Daniels, seminarian, is recognized by the Episcopal Church as a Christian martyr. August 14 is dedicated to his memory.
Jim Weingartner
View PBS documentary re Jonathan Daniels: Link
