This past Saturday a few of us from All Saints joined others from the diocese of the Central Gulf Coast and the diocese of Alabama in pilgrimage to Hayneville, Al., a small hamlet some thirty miles southwest of Montgomery. August 14 is the feast day on the Episcopal calendar of saints of Jonathan Myrick Daniels who on this very day in 1965 was gunned down by a part-time Lowndes County sheriff’s deputy.
Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian from Boston. He and some colleagues postponed their seminary studies to help with voter registration in Alabama which was (and some now argue still is) bitterly divided along racial lines in the social turbulence of the sixties. While working in Hayneville, he and his companions were abruptly arrested and jailed. The conditions of the Lowndes County jail were squalid: no working plumbing and no air conditioning. After three days they were mysteriously released. They walked together in the August heat around the corner to a country store for a soda. They were met at the door by a man weilding a shotgun. The killer pointed the gun at an eighteen year old college student from Tuskegee named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed her to the ground and stepped in front of the barrel. The killer pulled the trigger at point blank range and Daniels bled to death there on the front porch of the store. The killer despite eye witnesses was acquitted in the nearby Lowndes County courthouse.
The liturgy of the pilgrimage had us process behind the Cross to each site: the jail, the store, and the monument on the town square. At each station we sang songs, read the account of Jonathan Daniels martyrdom, and we prayed. The procession ended in the courthouse for a closing Eucharist, the judge’s bench from which the killer was acquitted years ago now made into an altar. There startlingly the bread and wine in our midst, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, all gathered for a family meal. There justice breaking out in a place where a great injustice was done.
Indeed the Eucharist is a cardinal symbol of justice. It is a meal to which all are invited, all are fed in equal portion and all are empowered for the way ahead….a meal does that: reconstitutes our bodies for renewed life; sacred nurture coursing in our blood; sacred power for the good of the whole. May our life blood be at one with the blood shed by our brother, and all who gave their life’s blood for a just and better way….all those who bore to their world the Salvation of Christ. Blessed Jonathan, pray for us. Pray for us as we sojourn in earth; pray that by our own blood God’s sacred and reconciling justice will be manifested in earth, once and for all.
I am sitting here thanking God for RSS as I ponder which could have possibly been better–the event or your powerfully poetic account of it.
Next year, I want to go with you.
I just wanted you to know that Jonathan’s killer, Tom Coleman, was no unemployed wild-eyed drifter. He was the brother of the then school superintendent, and the son of the former superintendent. He was part time employed as a sheriff’s deputy. He had a history of violence.
I live in Lowndes County, and my little art gallery, Annie Mae’s Place, houses the portrait of Jonathan. I was the person who organized the placing of the monument on the Hayneville Town Square and am writing the story of that effort.
Every year when y’all come to Lowndes, your presence and goodness lifts me up. Thank you.
Rob, Thanks for your comments. Count on it for next year. JF+
Barbara, Thank you for your reply. Your clarification is most helpful. In other words, Tom Coleman was a townsman, and therefore this was no “random act.” My cousin Richmond Flowers prosecuted the case. He died just last summer….small world isn’t it? How did you find my blog!? All the best, and keep the faith. JF+