At a Glance
Keene, VMI, and the Distance Between New Hampshire and Lowndes County
Jonathan Daniels grew up in Keene, New Hampshire — a small city in the southwestern corner of the state whose relationship to American racial history was the comfortable distance of a community that had not been required to confront the racial order in the direct terms that the South's geography imposed. His family's faith was real and his academic gifts were considerable: he graduated as valedictorian from Virginia Military Institute in 1961, the military discipline and the intellectual rigour of VMI's education complementing each other in someone who was, by all accounts, serious about both.
His entry into Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge was the first move toward a vocation that would eventually take him far beyond what either New Hampshire or VMI had prepared him for. The Episcopal Church in 1963 and 1964 was engaging — unevenly, sometimes reluctantly — with the civil rights movement and with the question of what Christian faith required of white Americans in response to the racial injustice that the movement was forcing into national consciousness. Daniels was part of a generation of seminary students for whom this question was not merely academic but personal and urgent.
The Easter vespers moment — reading Mary's Magnificat and experiencing it as politically urgent rather than merely devotionally beautiful — was the theological crystallisation of something he had been moving toward. The Magnificat's description of a God who brings down the powerful from their thrones and fills the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty is one of the most politically radical texts in Christian scripture, and Daniels's experience of reading it as a mandate for action rather than a statement of abstract theology was the experience of someone who had been educated to take texts seriously and who was now taking this one with complete seriousness. He watched Bloody Sunday on television and left for Selma.
Five Months in Alabama: What Staying Meant
Daniels's decision to stay in Alabama through the spring and summer of 1965 — obtaining permission from his seminary rather than returning for the spring semester — was what distinguished his engagement from that of the many clergy and students who came to Selma for a weekend or a week, participated in a march, and returned home. The sustained presence that he chose was the form of civil rights work that Ella Baker had always argued was most essential: not the dramatic gesture but the patient, daily, community-embedded work of building the relationships and the institutions that made the dramatic gestures possible and meaningful.
He lived with a Black family in Selma, which was itself a statement — a white man from New Hampshire sharing a home with a Black Southern family in a city where the racial order maintained absolute social separation as a matter of daily enforcement. He accompanied Black residents to government offices and voter registration appointments, providing the specific kind of presence that helped navigate the bureaucratic obstacles that disenfranchisement had constructed. He worked in the developing Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the group that Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC organisers were building in one of the most violently hostile counties in Alabama.
Lowndes County was an extreme case even by Alabama standards: a county where Black people constituted approximately eighty percent of the population and zero percent of the registered voters, where the Klan was organised and active, and where the attempt to register Black voters was met with economic retaliation, physical violence, and the credible threat of murder. Daniels worked there anyway, and his letters from Alabama during this period describe the experience with a clarity and a moral seriousness that make them among the most important primary documents of the movement's white ally experience.
The Fort Deposit Arrest, the Hayneville Jail, and the Release Into Danger
The August 14 arrest in Fort Deposit came during picketing of stores that the Lowndes County movement had identified as targets for economic pressure — the same selective buying campaign methodology that had been used across the South to leverage white business owners' economic interests against their racial commitments. The group was arrested and taken to the Hayneville jail, where they were held for six days without charges.
The release on August 20 was abrupt and unexplained — the jailers simply told them they were free to go and turned them out into the street in Hayneville on a hot August afternoon. The group had no transportation; they were in one of the most dangerous counties in Alabama; and the abruptness of their release, without warning or arrangement for their safe departure, had the quality of a setup — of people being released into conditions that those responsible for their safety knew were dangerous.
They walked to a nearby store — Varner's Cash Store — to use the phone and buy cold drinks. Tom Coleman was waiting outside or nearby. He was a part-time county deputy and a state highway engineer, a local white man who had been active in opposition to the movement's work in Lowndes County. He was armed with a shotgun.
The Moment at the Store: What Daniels Did and Why It Matters
The specific geometry of what happened at Varner's Cash Store on August 20, 1965, is known from the testimony of survivors and witnesses. Coleman confronted the group as they approached the store. He levelled his shotgun at Ruby Sales, seventeen years old, a Black civil rights worker who had been among those arrested and released. Daniels, who was next to her, pushed her out of the path of the weapon and took the blast himself. He was killed instantly. Coleman then shot Father Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest who was with the group, as he fled; Morrisroe was seriously wounded but survived.
The act of pushing Ruby Sales out of the way was not a calculation — there was no time for calculation. It was a reflex, and the reflex expressed what five months of community-embedded civil rights work in Alabama had made of Jonathan Daniels: a person for whom the protection of the specific Black people he was working alongside was not an abstraction but an immediate, physical obligation. He did not step in front of a shotgun because he had thought through the philosophy of interracial solidarity and concluded that this was what the philosophy required. He did it because Ruby Sales was about to be shot and he was next to her and he moved.
Ruby Sales has spoken about this moment throughout her subsequent career as a public theologian and social justice advocate, and her account of it — of what it meant to be alive because someone had died in your place, of what obligation that created and what understanding it demanded — is one of the most serious treatments in American public life of what the civil rights movement's deaths actually meant to the people who survived them. Daniels's death has been part of her life's theological and political thinking for sixty years.
Coleman's Acquittal and the Pattern That Never Changed
Tom Coleman was tried for manslaughter in Lowndes County in September 1965 — one month after the shooting, five months after the Voting Rights Act had been signed into law. The trial's outcome was consistent with every other trial for the murder of civil rights workers in Alabama during this era: an all-white jury, ninety minutes of deliberation, not guilty. Coleman was never prosecuted for the shooting of Father Morrisroe. He continued to live and work in Lowndes County. He died in 1997.
The acquittal was not surprising to anyone who understood how Alabama's justice system worked. The same apparatus that had acquitted the killers of Emmett Till, the killers of the four girls in Birmingham, the killers of Viola Liuzzo, and every other civil rights murder perpetrator who went to trial in this period was applied to Coleman's case and produced the same result. What made the Daniels case somewhat different was the presence of Father Morrisroe — a second white victim who survived — and the specific visibility that the Episcopal Church's subsequent engagement with Daniels's legacy gave to the case.
The Episcopal Church's Canonisation and Ruby Sales's Life
The Episcopal Church canonised Jonathan Daniels as a martyr in 1994 — twenty-nine years after his death — adding him to its calendar of saints and establishing August 14 (the date of his arrest) as his feast day. The canonisation was a formal recognition by the institution he had been serving that what he had done was not merely courageous or commendable but holy — that his willingness to put his body between a weapon and a Black teenager in Alabama was an expression of Christian faith at its most complete and most costly.
Ruby Sales, whose life Daniels's death had saved, became a public theologian, founding the SpiritHouse Project in Washington D.C. and working for decades on issues of racial justice, economic equality, and the spiritual dimensions of social transformation. Her theological work has engaged consistently with the question of what it means to be alive because someone else died in your place — the specific theological and ethical weight of that experience, and the obligations it creates. Her presence in public life is, among other things, a form of continued witness to what happened at Varner's Cash Store on August 20, 1965, and to the person who made her continued existence possible.
Daniels was twenty-six years old when he died. He had been in Alabama for five months. He had come because a text in a vespers service had made political inaction feel like spiritual betrayal, and he had stayed because leaving felt like the same thing. The tradition that produced him — the best of the Episcopal Church's social gospel, the movement's vision of interracial solidarity as something that required not gestures but presence, not sympathy but risk — produced in him one of the clearest examples of what it looked like when that vision was fully lived. He is remembered in New Hampshire and in Alabama, in the Episcopal Church's calendar and in Ruby Sales's work, and in the specific ongoing life of the person he died to protect.