I Wish You The Joy Of A Purposeful Life
Jonathan Myrick Daniels graduated from the tradition-laden (and then tradition-of-segregation-laden) Virginia Military Institute in 1961.
In what may have been one of History’s most prophetic addresses, the young valedictorian and scholar told classmates and friends:
“We have all heard graduation prophets proclaim the new birth, the new vision, the onward march. But implicit in every birth is the process of dying. It is a kind of death that we experience now. We stand poised for flight into a new world and a new vision. We do not deceive ourselves, however, that our new-found wings will bring us ideal happiness…
“My colleagues and friends, I wish you the joy of a purposeful life. I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them. I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable. These will come, with the maturity which it is now our job to acquire on far-flung fields. The only thing that we can do at this time - is to ‘greet the unseen with a cheer.’ GOODBYE.”
With impressive academic credentials and the United States fully mired in the Vietnam War (1954-1975), the recipient of VMI’s prestigious Danforth Fellowship for post-graduate studies enrolled at Harvard University, planning to continue his studies in English literature.
In high school, this son of New England Congregationalists suffered a bad fall and was hospitalized for a month – a time of reflection that resulted in his decision to join the Episcopal Church. As a VMI sophomore and perhaps influenced by the death of his father and the prolonged illness of his sister, the young scholar began to question his Episcopal faith. Nonetheless, during his first year at Harvard, while attending Easter services at Boston’s Church of the Advent, he had a conversion/spiritual experience that drew him to the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[Established in 1844, the Church of the Advent was unique in its founders’ decision to defy the then widespread custom of renting pews – allowing the wealthy to assume places of honor while servants and the poor were consigned to the back of the church. The parish charter expressed the intention “to secure to a portion of the city of Boston the ministrations of the Holy [Anglican/Episcopal] Catholic Church, and more especially to secure the same to the poor and needy, in a manner free from unnecessary expense and all ungracious circumstances.”]
In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King invited students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama for a voting rights march to the state capital in Montgomery
That same month - during his first year at the Episcopal Divinity School:
“I had come to Evening Prayer… and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence… ‘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…”
A missed bus turned what was to have been a weekend in Selma into a decision to stay in Alabama and return to Cambridge only for final exams.
Jonathan Daniels later wrote,
“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.”
With EDS exams completed, Jonathan Daniels returned to Alabama, helping to produce a list of local, state and federal agencies and resources legally available to folks in need of assistance.
On August 13, he joined others in Fort Deposit in Lowndes County – often called “Bloody Lowndes” for the way violence enforced segregation, picketing three local businesses; the following day – Saturday - they were arrested and held in the Haynesville County jail for six days - without air-conditioning, showers or toilets - because they had collectively decided to be released only when there was bail money for all.
On their release, Jonathan Daniels, Roman Catholic Father Richard Morrisroe, and two Black students – Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales – walked to Varrner’s Cash Store, about fifty yards from the jail, to buy sodas. The four were met by the unpaid, white special deputy Tom L. Coleman. With a pistol at his side and a 12-guage automatic pump shotgun in his arms, Coleman barred the way, telling them the store was closed and cursing the young women. When he leveled the shotgun at sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales, Jonathan Daniels pushed her out of the way and used his body as a shield.
Jonathan Daniels sustained the full impact of the shot and died instantly.
Father Morrisroe, who later left the active ministry, grabbed Joyce Bailey and was shot in the back as he rushed her to safety. He has never fully recovered physically and was only able to walk again after two years of therapy.
Coleman, 55, put down his shotgun, walked to the courthouse and called the state trooper commander. “I just shot two preachers,” he said. “You better get on down here”
Hours later, when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others who had been arrested with Jonathan Daniels went to look for his body, they could not find it, reported Ruby Sales. “The streets had been swept clean, and you could not tell a murder had taken place.” It required the intervention of President Lyndon Johnson and his chief civil rights aide, Lee White, for the Daniels family to be able to get their son’s body returned home.
When the local grand jury indicted Coleman on a charge of manslaughter rather than murder, Richmond Flowers, Attorney General of Alabama, called the death of Jonathan Daniels “another Ku Klux Klan murder” and attempted to take over the prosecution. He was thwarted by the trial judge.
Disfranchisement had excluded Black in Lowndes County from serving on juries and Judge T. Werth Thagard refused to wait for Father Morrisroe to recover sufficiently to be able to testify, proceeding to trial before an all-white jury. Coleman claimed self-defense and, forty days after the shooting, it took the jury less than two hours to find him not guilty; jurors shook his hand as he left the courtroom.
Attorney General Flowers later described the verdict as the "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement... now those who feel they have a license to kill, destroy and cripple have been issued that license.”
In a 1966 lawsuit - White v. Crook – filed by the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity and other religious groups, the system of excluding African-Americans from juries finally began to fall.
Dr. King declared that Jonathan Daniels had performed “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.” He noted, “Jonathan certainly had a promising life and it is still a tragedy that it was cut so short by this brutal and bestial death that few people in our time will know such fulfillment or meaning though they live to be a hundred.”
There are 22.9 million Asian Americans and 1.6 Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders across the United States, according to 2019 Census data. From the period between March 2020 through September 2021 the non-profit Asian American-Pacific Islander Equity Alliance collected reports of 10,370 “hate incidents,” including verbal harassment, refusal of service and online abuse, as well as assaults and property damage.
In April 2022, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents reached an all-time high in the United States in 2021 – 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism, the highest number of incidents since the ADL began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. That is more than seven incidents per day and a 34 percent increase over the previous year. Florida saw a fifty percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2021 compared to the previous year and the third most anti-Semitic incidents of any state in the nation – behind New York and California. Nationwide, according to the ADL, 20211 saw a 34 percent increase over the previous year. In October 2021, the American Jewish Committee reported that nearly one out of every four Jews in the United States had been subject to anti-Semitism over the past year and 39 percent of American Jews had changed their behavior in the previous twelve months – avoiding posting online or wearing items that would identify them as Jewish – in order to avoid anti-Semitic attacks.
Four Sikh elders were attacks in a one-month period – March–April 2022. Historically since 9-11, attackers are so culturally ignorant [We are being kind, because we really want to say they’re dumber than bat guano.], that they mistake Sikhs for Muslims. They are not.
Sixty-two percent of Muslims in the United States report feeling religion-based hostility and 65 percent report having felt disrespected, according to Rice University’s Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance associate director Zahra Jama. “That’s almost three times the percentage among Christians. Internalized Islamophobia is more prevalent among younger Muslims who have faced anti-Muslim tropes in popular culture, news, social media, political rhetoric, and in policy. This negatively impacts their self-image and mental health,” noted Jamal.
On Saturday, September 17, fans of the University of Oregon football team repeatedly directed the most vulgar of expletives at the squad from Brigham Young University, a Mormon affiliated school based in Provo, Utah. The UO fans and students were replaying the behaviors of University of Southern California fans last football season. Just a note: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the most quintessentially American religion in History.
Hate. Often murderous hatred is alive and flourishing in America.
Yet there is hope.
In 1997, the once-segregated Virginia Military Institute established the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award to honor the virtue of humanitarian public service and recognize individuals who have made significant personal sacrifices to protect or improve the lives of others.
In 1994, the Episcopal Church recognized Jonathan Daniels as a saint and martyr and he is honored in England’s Canterbury Cathedral as one of fifteen modern day martyrs from around the world.
When Coleman died in 1997, The New York Times reported, “Over the years, Mr. Coleman continued to play dominoes at the courthouse….”
But….
But Jonathan Daniels was killed instantly by a blast from a 12-gauge automatic pump shotgun as he protected…
No!
As he gave his life for 16-year-old Ruby Sales, who only wanted a soda after six scorching hot August days in an unairconditioned Alabama jail cell without showers or toilets.
My colleagues and friends, I wish you the joy of a purposeful life.
I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them.
I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable….
Jonathan Daniels