Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "jonathan-daniels"
Civil Rights Events -- SCOPE Project -- Everything Different, Nothing Granted
On Saturday, June 19, the volunteers begin dispersing to the 50 or so counties in Alabama, Georgia, North & South Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, where they will work for the next ten weeks. In some cases, the locations of SCOPE projects fluctuate over the course of the summer. Most are in rural counties, a few are in towns like Selma Alabama, Albany Georgia, Orangeburg and Charleston South Carolina.
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As SCOPE begins working across the South, Hubert Humphrey's promise has failed to materialize, the Voting Rights Act is still stalled in the Senate by a southern filibuster. This means that county voter Registrars — all white, of course — can still use their power to prevent Blacks from registering just as they have for generations past. SCLC has provided little training and few materials for this contingency
The day to day experiences of SCOPE workers parallel those of other summer volunteers from previous years in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Southwest Georgia. Tired from their journey, the northerners reach their counties late in the day or after dark, usually arriving at a church if one has opened its doors to the Movement or the home of a local leader if not. There they are sorted out to the places they will stay — the home of a Black family if they're lucky, a group "freedom house" or church basement if not.
The volunteers are honored and welcomed by the Black folk who first greet them. Often those put up in homes are offered the parent's own bed. Usually the volunteers manage to decline that privilege and sleep on couches, the floor in sleeping bags, or share a bed with the children. Food, much of it unfamiliar — collard greens, corn bread, grits, okra, gravy-biscuits, pan-fried chicken — is offered and shared as a bond of friendship, trust, and acceptance. It is only later that the northerners begin to realize that this warm embrace comes only from the most courageous members of the community, other local Blacks hesitate to talk with them, and many are afraid to even be seen in their company. Unlike so many of the adults, however, most Black teenagers are eager supporters of "the Movement." Some Black college and high school students sign up as local SCOPE volunteers, more would do so if not prevented by their parents, or forced to work long hours at low-wage jobs to save money for their next semester of college.
Some of the homes where volunteers stay are well-built and have phones, refrigerators, indoor toilets, and even showers — but many do not. Living rural, living poor, requires a sharp adjustment for some northerners — sleeping three or four to a creaking bed with a sagging mattress, outhouses, water from a handle-pump, showers made out of tin cans with holes punched in the bottom, cockroaches so large you can hear them skittering across the floor at night, mice beneath the weathered floorboards, hens scratching in the packed-earth yard.
Canvassing door to door by teams of northern and local volunteers begins in the hot, muggy heat — proselytizing the gospel of freedom one porch and front-room at a time — come to a meeting, the importance of voting, a better life for your children, voter registration procedure. The work is hard, the going slow. Many are still afraid — and justifiably so. Defying generations of white-supremacy can — and often has — led to being fired, or evicted, or suffering various forms of violent retaliation.
Within hours, or at most a day or two, the northerners are accosted by cops and sheriffs who identify, harass, and threaten them. For many middle-class college kids being treated as an enemy by the uniformed guardians of "law and order" is something new — and frightening. So too are their encounters with Southern whites, some of whom berate them, curse them, threaten them, and demand that they leave. Before coming south, few volunteers have ever been subjected to a white hate-stare — an unnerving experience — but one they learn to deal with as have "uppity" Blacks for generations (SCOPE-ing 1-3).
Upon his arrival in Williamston, North Carolina, June 23, Dartmouth University freshman Peter Buck witnessed police harassment. Soon after his arrival he wrote:
Tonight we went up to a real wild prayer meeting at Mt. Zion Holiness Church.
Police have been coming by at night trying to bait us out. Yesterday they tried to pick up Joe on a vagrancy charge, but we all took the trouble to keep money on us. The cop resorted to profanity and threatened bad things if he caught Joe out in the county alone. Today a couple car loads of red necks came by and talked to the boys out front. Told them how good they were to their negroes (Buck 8).
Lessons are learned. Northerners discover they have to talk slower and listen harder to unfamiliar southern accents. In towns, it's usually easy to identify where Blacks live because their streets are unpaved and often behind the railroad tracks or in some other undesirable area. In the rural farmland, piney forests, and mosquito swamps it's harder because all the roads are dusty (or muddy) and the shacks of poor whites — who are usually hostile — look little different from those of Blacks.
…
Sometimes no one is at home, other times someone is home, but they're afraid to come to the door lest snitches report to employers, landlords and sheriffs that they talked to "race-mixing agitators." Often the bewildering complexities of race and fear complicate encounters between white northerners and Black southerners. Some folk are afraid not to talk to the white volunteers because saying "no" to a white person, any white person, violates engrained codes of social subservience. So white northerners have to find a delicate balance between urging Movement participation and avoiding traditional patterns of white dominance — not an easy task. More lessons are learned — Listen! Listen! Listen! Hear what folk are saying, understand the difference between a "Yes, I'll come to the meeting" of real agreement, and the "Yes, I'll register" said only to appease these white strangers so they'll go away.
Volunteers — both white and Black — learn that conversations are the heart and soul of organizing. Soon they come to understand that real teaching is not lecturing, but sharing — both ways. Many of the Black men and women the volunteers meet have been kept ignorant of even the most basic elements of democracy: what voting is, what registering is, what political offices are and why they're important — but they are well-schooled in the realities of race, exploitation and power, brutal realities that often stun white northerners but are familiar outrages to Black volunteers, northern and southern alike (SCOPE—ing 4).
Brandeis University volunteer Lynn Goldsmith Goldberg described what she witnessed on voter registration day, July 12, in St. Matthews, Calhoun County, South Carolina.
At two o'clock I began helping inside the registration room. The registrars found we were more help than bother, and we began the exhausting job of laboring with the people over the ridiculous form. Many people could barely write, and labored over each blank as we told them what to write; sometimes letter by letter. It was sweltering in the room as the sun came out. I was about to faint as five o'clock approached. The registrars were nice enough to finish with all the people who were in the room at five. Anyhow, about sixty people were turned away at the end. The last people who go through at quarter to six had come at about noon. People waited about six hours and were not registered. I felt very distressed as these brave people, most of them hardly knowing what was going on, standing in that heat so patiently. I couldn't believe them. They want so little, and no one will give it to them. I wanted to cry. What poor, poor people (Goldberg 10).
Larry Butler, working in Barbour County, Alabama, had a similar reaction. A student from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, Butler wrote about the first voter registration day that he witnessed.
Our first registration day in Clayton was a success; we had between 200-250
people there to register. About 90 were processed and 21 were registered. The old
literacy test disqualified all but the well educated from registering. A special ―treat for
us while in Clayton was the presence of Gov. Wallace who watched us all afternoon from
an auto body shop. The SCOPE workers were aglow. We were in the Governor‘s home
town working for the fall of his kind of government and he was there to witness the
crumbling of white supremacy at his home. He made one comment the whole time---
―That‘s the best dressed group of civil rights workers I‘ve ever seen. In Eufaula, about
150 persons showed up, 92 were processed and 16 were registered. It went like that for
the rest of the week. In all, about 112 people were registered that week. It was a battle
for that number considering the test and that everyone waited for many long hours.
White men from town came and sat in the jury box and mocked us, made cruel jokes as
children and men, who have never grown up, are prone to do. One old man, 74 years old,
got there very early and was one of the first to go to the registrars‘ table. He worked on
his test from 9:00 in the morning until 4:15, no lunch and no breaks. The registrars
treated him as they would have a cute child or a playful puppy. He took their attitude in
good humor, submitted to their disrespect for his age and also passed his test. One more
black man was registered and the next time the joke would be on the registrars.
The only trouble that week was a man who tried to run us over with a truck (Butler 5).
And soon northern volunteers are experiencing those brutal realities for themselves. Churches, offices, and schools associated with the SCOPE project are bombed and burned. So too are the homes and businesses of local activists. Some summer volunteers, northern and local, are arrested, some for engaging in constitutionally-protected free speech such as passing out leaflets or picketing, some for behavior made lawful by the Civil Rights Act, some on trumped up charges such as "vagrancy." In a number of places, northern and local activists are beaten by white thugs, or chased, or shot at. Fortunately, over the summer of '65 there is only one Movement-related murder — the Assassination of Jonathan Daniels on a SNCC project in Lowndes County Alabama. But fear — fear of arrest, fear of danger, fear of sudden unexpected violence, is constant, pervasive, and exhausting (SCOPE-ing 5).
Lynn Goldberg’s arrest occurred August 2. She wrote:
We were arrested today. I was not scared. I cried when a two ton policeman stood on Al's neck while hauling another limp body (Lenny's). I am hoarse from singing and yelling.
Why were we arrested — no charge. We were pulled from the courthouse.
Yesterday Orangeburg had a record registration day — so did we! — they registered 350 people and had three registrars (even a fourth). They were allowed to use the courtroom — so everyone could sit down. It was cool, quick, and comfortable.
Today was another registration day. Mary Ann and Alan went down to help since we didn't have extra days. At three the rest of us got a call — come down by four. There had been only two registrars, and one left because he didn't want to register any more niggars'. People were being asked to read. Those bastards!! No — we won't put up with it. At five we would stay. Calhoun was asked to support the sit-in — of course we would.
We talked to the people, telling them to stay. We sang songs and marched around the courtroom when the officials left. We opened the windows and let the city hear us. There were posters with slogans — they went up on the windows. All the adults left except three because they couldn't be arrested. Our decision meeting was short we would stay 'til 9:00 tomorrow, or be arrested. …
Sheriff Dukes came in. Suddenly, on both sides of the room husky men in uniform poured in. they stood on each side as we announced our decision. They rushed on us as we sat and sang, jumping over the seats. …
I was picked up and thrown. Then I was grabbed and dragged outside. As I passed Earl he encouraged me to try to walk. In front of me John and Al were dragged by the hands down the stairs and thrown into the car in a heap. My picture was taken. Al's hands were bent til they almost broke. Dozens of cars pulled up to the courthouse, with all of us singing. We were piled, pushed and thrown into the jail. Then we were split, and some of us were led around another way. We stood and sang songs while we waited for them to get our names. Fifteen girls are together in a revolting dirty cell with three beds. There is a toilet in the room that is disgusting. Also a sink and bathtub. We were finger printed and photographed. Juveniles were led out if they wanted. … (Goldberg 11-12).
In some of the most dangerous areas, local Blacks armed with rifles and shotguns guard the SCOPE volunteers as they sleep at night. Some volunteers initially question this departure from strict Gandhian nonviolence, but SCLC leaders and staff make it clear that while participants in public Freedom Movement activities must be nonviolent — and everything northern volunteers do is in essence a public activity — nonviolence as a way of life for southern Blacks is a personal choice — and so is self-defense of home and community from attack by night-raiding Klansmen (SCOPE—ing 5).
SCOPE policy at the beginning of the Summer is to concentrate on voter registration & political organization — and avoid direct action protests. Though many northern volunteers are eager to participate in marches and sit-ins, doing so diverts from SCOPE's primary objectives. Moreover, protests often provoke an increase in retaliatory white violence and cause police to mobilize around town centers both of which could deter people from going to the courthouse to register. And demonstrations will certainly result in arrests and expensive bail bonds that drain money needed for registration and organizing work. But with the Voting Rights Act still stalled by southern filibuster in the Senate, registration efforts show scant result. Frustrated at lack of visible success, some volunteers — local as well as northern — argue that direct action to protest continued denial of voting rights, to demand immediate passage of the Act, or to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will inspire and encourage registration efforts, not detract from them.
In a number of locales, the ban on direct action is either lifted by SCOPE Director Hosea Williams or simply ignored by those on the ground. When SCOPE volunteers are arrested and beaten in Taliaferro County GA, SCLC leaders organize picket lines, marches, and a boycott of white merchants. In Crenshaw County AL, local Black students volunteering with SCOPE convince the project to implement the Civil Rights Act, and a white mob attacks them when they sit-in at a local cafe. After two churches are burned and Blacks are fired and evicted for trying to register in Hale County AL, 500 are arrested on a mass march to protest continued use of the so-called "literacy test."
After four weeks in Americus Georgia where the Washington State University SCOPE team has been assigned and SNCC has been organizing since 1963, only 45 new voters are registered. On July 20, four Black women are arrested for standing in a "white-only" voting line during a local election. Benjamin Van Clark and Willie Bolden, two of Hosea Williams' field leaders from the Savannah Movement, are sent from Atlanta to organize and lead protests. Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC issue a set of demands: release of those arrested, longer registration hours, Afro-American voter Registrars, formation of a biracial committee to discuss race issues in Americus, and that a new election be called because separate voting lines are inherently unconstitutional. The white power-structure remains adamant, and a boycott of white-owned stores commences. Under pressure, the county agrees to hire a few Afro-American clerks to register voters. Within two days 647 Blacks are added to the rolls. Within a week there are 1,500 new Black voters in Sumter County GA.
Sussex County in Southeast Virginia is rural, poor, and small (total population 12,000). Blacks outnumber whites two to one. The voter registration office is open only two hours per month. The SCOPE project requests that hours be extended — request denied. They circulate and submit a petition signed by those who want to register — petition denied. More than 100 Blacks march in protest to the courthouse and daily picketing commences. On the one day the office is open, more than 140 line up to be registered, but few are processed and fewer added to the rolls. A delegation drives up to Washington and meets with Justice Department officials. Under threat of federal registrars, additional hours are added (Direct 1-2).
Larry Butler’s SCOPE group decided to resort to direct action.
The SCOPE workers became frustrated. All their energy was spent in canvassing and mass meetings. Little was being accomplished and we were becoming a Boy Scout chapter whose special project was voter registration. Many people were afraid of the workers because we were white and the old fashion attitude of ―Yas sir, Mr. Charlie was evident. Often in our canvassing we ran across old people in the backwoods who had heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, but thought he was the United States President. Freedom had not come to Barbour County, only civil right workers had.
We knew something was wrong and we were bored and disappointed. … (Butler 6).
The Voting Rights Act does not become law until August 6, 1965. So for seven long weeks SCOPE projects must try to register voters under the old "literacy test" system specifically designed to deny Black voting rights. It's slow going. Before the March to Montgomery, attempting to register at the courthouse was essentially an act of protest. It was a demand for federal enforcement of the Constitution and a cry to the nation for justice. But now that the Voting Act is on the verge of passage, few Blacks are willing to endure the danger and humiliation of applying to register knowing they will most likely fail, when if they just wait until the new law takes effect they can actually succeed. Nevertheless, dedicated SCOPE activists — local and outside both — manage to ensure that there's a line of applicants waiting at the courthouse on each registration day.
In Selma Alabama, which is still under a federal injunction, 1470 applicants go to the court house between June 20 and August 6 — but only 56 are actually registered (4%). In Crenshaw County Alabama, on the nine days the registration office is open before the Voting Rights Act is passed, 318 Blacks go to the courthouse to register, 242 are "processed," but only 58 are actually registered (18%). In Hale County Alabama where more than two-thirds of the population are Black, it's the same old story, voter applicants are fired and evicted, churches are burned, and almost no one is actually registered.
After the Voting Rights Act is signed into law on August 6, some county Registrars comply with it, and in those places SCOPE manages to register a good number of Black voters during the project's last three weeks. But elsewhere, particularly in the Deep South, white resistance to both the spirit and letter of the Act is adamant and Registrars continue to use their power to deny Afro-American voting rights (Voter 1-2)
Racists in St. Matthews, South Carolina, act out their anger. Lynn Goldberg revealed the following August 18 diary entry.
Some time between 8:00 and 9:00, when no on was home — our house had been shot at with a shotgun. Ulp! I was suddenly nervous. I ran back to the other SCOPE house and told Earl. He did not believe it had been a shotgun. However he hurried and offered to accompany us home. Three cars went to St. Matthews, filled with people.
What a sight! A hole about a foot in diameter was in the front picture window. The whole glass was cracked in all directions. The shade was drawn, and splattered with shot holes. But that was nothing — the inside was utterly unbelievable. Shattered glass was strewn over every inch of the room. Not a place was left uncovered. The back wall was dotted with holes. The whole place was a shambles. Everyone stood around — amazed.
The police had been by and looked things over. They said they would return with the sheriff in the morning. F.B.I. was contacted, and also U.P.I. We called Chief Strom for protection during the night. Matthew Perry was also informed of everything. It was still scary. Earl and the Orangeburg kids left us making precautions for night. Our beds were moved and windows blocked. Pleasant dreams (Goldberg 13-14).
In most Alabama counties, for example, registration continues to be limited to two days per month. August 16 is the first Alabama registration day after the Act goes into effect (and for most SCOPE volunteers returning to college in the Fall it's the last registration day they will see before leaving Alabama). Some 600 applicants line up to register at the Barbour County courthouse, but only 265 are processed and few are actually registered. In Butler County 568 line up, but only 107 are registered. In other states it's not much different. In North Carolina, the voter registration offices in counties with large Black populations simply close down until October. Georgia and South Carolina also continue to deny voting rights in predominantly Black rural areas.
The new law empowers Washington to send federal Registrars (called "examiners") to non-complying counties. Despite a widespread pattern of continued denial of Black voting rights, the Department of Justice assigns Registrars to only six of Alabama's 24 Black Belt counties. None are sent to any of the other SCOPE states. In the few places where federal Registrars do operate they are effective and Black voters are added to the rolls in large numbers.
…
Dr. King demands that federal registrars be sent to every county covered by the new Act. Attorney General Katzenbach refuses. Instead he lauds what he claims is widespread "voluntary compliance" with the law by white officials, and he attributes the slow increase in Black voters to lack of local registration campaigns. SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and NAACP registration workers toiling in the field see little evidence of "voluntary compliance" in the deep South, and most of them are convinced that Washington is dragging its feet in a forlorn effort to somehow appease southern whites and keep them loyal to the Democratic Party. As of August 1966, a full year after the Act goes into force, federal registrars have been sent into less than one-fifth of the southern counties that need them.
…
SCOPE's reported registration statistics are therefore to some degree estimates. By the end of the summer, at the high-end an estimated 70,000 Blacks attempted to register in the six states where there are SCOPE projects. Of that number, a bit under 50,000 succeeded (mostly during the three weeks after the Voting Rights Act goes into effect). Other estimates report somewhat lower numbers, particularly the number of new voters added to the rolls. Regardless of how many actually got registered, there are several hundred thousand Blacks of voting age in the counties where SCOPE has projects, and while 50,000 new voters is a good start, a start is all it is (Voter 3-5).
Throughout the remainder of 1965, and then 1966, the Johnson administration continues to drag its heels, refusing to supply federal registrars to places that clearly need them. Registrars are only sent into those counties that practice the most extreme — and overt — methods of denying voting rights to Afro-Americans. The locales that use more subtle and covert forms of resistance are able to avoid direct federal intervention and therefore delay, retard and minimize Black electoral power. But if Washington hopes that appeasement will keep southern whites loyal to the Democratic Party those dreams are dashed as the majority of white Democrats become white Republicans.
But slowly, as Black voting strength grows to the point where they can begin to swing close elections, and then eventually elect Black candidates in towns and counties with Afro-American majorities, overt white resistance to the Voting Rights Act begins to fade and politicians of all races seek Black votes — even George Wallace the (formerly) arch-segregationist Governor of Alabama, who by the 1980s is not only campaigning for Black votes but actually getting them when he runs as a Democrat against a right-wing Republican.
The results of SCOPE's community organization and political education efforts vary from place to place. SCLC's SCOPE volunteers support existing — or help local leaders organize new — voter leagues and improvement associations across the South. Like similar efforts by CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP, some of these local groups falter and die, others struggle on, and some thrive, providing an organizational form for Black political power for decades to come (Going 1-2).
Works cited:
Buck, Peter. “Transcript: Journal of a SCOPE Volunteer.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/buck65.htm
Butler, Larry. “A Short History of the Freedom Movement in
Barbour County, Alabama.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/buck65.htm
“Direct Action.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Going Forward.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Goldberg, Lynn Goldsmith. “Diary of a Young Civil Rights Worker.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/goldberg.htm
“SCOPE-ing.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Voter Registration.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
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As SCOPE begins working across the South, Hubert Humphrey's promise has failed to materialize, the Voting Rights Act is still stalled in the Senate by a southern filibuster. This means that county voter Registrars — all white, of course — can still use their power to prevent Blacks from registering just as they have for generations past. SCLC has provided little training and few materials for this contingency
The day to day experiences of SCOPE workers parallel those of other summer volunteers from previous years in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Southwest Georgia. Tired from their journey, the northerners reach their counties late in the day or after dark, usually arriving at a church if one has opened its doors to the Movement or the home of a local leader if not. There they are sorted out to the places they will stay — the home of a Black family if they're lucky, a group "freedom house" or church basement if not.
The volunteers are honored and welcomed by the Black folk who first greet them. Often those put up in homes are offered the parent's own bed. Usually the volunteers manage to decline that privilege and sleep on couches, the floor in sleeping bags, or share a bed with the children. Food, much of it unfamiliar — collard greens, corn bread, grits, okra, gravy-biscuits, pan-fried chicken — is offered and shared as a bond of friendship, trust, and acceptance. It is only later that the northerners begin to realize that this warm embrace comes only from the most courageous members of the community, other local Blacks hesitate to talk with them, and many are afraid to even be seen in their company. Unlike so many of the adults, however, most Black teenagers are eager supporters of "the Movement." Some Black college and high school students sign up as local SCOPE volunteers, more would do so if not prevented by their parents, or forced to work long hours at low-wage jobs to save money for their next semester of college.
Some of the homes where volunteers stay are well-built and have phones, refrigerators, indoor toilets, and even showers — but many do not. Living rural, living poor, requires a sharp adjustment for some northerners — sleeping three or four to a creaking bed with a sagging mattress, outhouses, water from a handle-pump, showers made out of tin cans with holes punched in the bottom, cockroaches so large you can hear them skittering across the floor at night, mice beneath the weathered floorboards, hens scratching in the packed-earth yard.
Canvassing door to door by teams of northern and local volunteers begins in the hot, muggy heat — proselytizing the gospel of freedom one porch and front-room at a time — come to a meeting, the importance of voting, a better life for your children, voter registration procedure. The work is hard, the going slow. Many are still afraid — and justifiably so. Defying generations of white-supremacy can — and often has — led to being fired, or evicted, or suffering various forms of violent retaliation.
Within hours, or at most a day or two, the northerners are accosted by cops and sheriffs who identify, harass, and threaten them. For many middle-class college kids being treated as an enemy by the uniformed guardians of "law and order" is something new — and frightening. So too are their encounters with Southern whites, some of whom berate them, curse them, threaten them, and demand that they leave. Before coming south, few volunteers have ever been subjected to a white hate-stare — an unnerving experience — but one they learn to deal with as have "uppity" Blacks for generations (SCOPE-ing 1-3).
Upon his arrival in Williamston, North Carolina, June 23, Dartmouth University freshman Peter Buck witnessed police harassment. Soon after his arrival he wrote:
Tonight we went up to a real wild prayer meeting at Mt. Zion Holiness Church.
Police have been coming by at night trying to bait us out. Yesterday they tried to pick up Joe on a vagrancy charge, but we all took the trouble to keep money on us. The cop resorted to profanity and threatened bad things if he caught Joe out in the county alone. Today a couple car loads of red necks came by and talked to the boys out front. Told them how good they were to their negroes (Buck 8).
Lessons are learned. Northerners discover they have to talk slower and listen harder to unfamiliar southern accents. In towns, it's usually easy to identify where Blacks live because their streets are unpaved and often behind the railroad tracks or in some other undesirable area. In the rural farmland, piney forests, and mosquito swamps it's harder because all the roads are dusty (or muddy) and the shacks of poor whites — who are usually hostile — look little different from those of Blacks.
…
Sometimes no one is at home, other times someone is home, but they're afraid to come to the door lest snitches report to employers, landlords and sheriffs that they talked to "race-mixing agitators." Often the bewildering complexities of race and fear complicate encounters between white northerners and Black southerners. Some folk are afraid not to talk to the white volunteers because saying "no" to a white person, any white person, violates engrained codes of social subservience. So white northerners have to find a delicate balance between urging Movement participation and avoiding traditional patterns of white dominance — not an easy task. More lessons are learned — Listen! Listen! Listen! Hear what folk are saying, understand the difference between a "Yes, I'll come to the meeting" of real agreement, and the "Yes, I'll register" said only to appease these white strangers so they'll go away.
Volunteers — both white and Black — learn that conversations are the heart and soul of organizing. Soon they come to understand that real teaching is not lecturing, but sharing — both ways. Many of the Black men and women the volunteers meet have been kept ignorant of even the most basic elements of democracy: what voting is, what registering is, what political offices are and why they're important — but they are well-schooled in the realities of race, exploitation and power, brutal realities that often stun white northerners but are familiar outrages to Black volunteers, northern and southern alike (SCOPE—ing 4).
Brandeis University volunteer Lynn Goldsmith Goldberg described what she witnessed on voter registration day, July 12, in St. Matthews, Calhoun County, South Carolina.
At two o'clock I began helping inside the registration room. The registrars found we were more help than bother, and we began the exhausting job of laboring with the people over the ridiculous form. Many people could barely write, and labored over each blank as we told them what to write; sometimes letter by letter. It was sweltering in the room as the sun came out. I was about to faint as five o'clock approached. The registrars were nice enough to finish with all the people who were in the room at five. Anyhow, about sixty people were turned away at the end. The last people who go through at quarter to six had come at about noon. People waited about six hours and were not registered. I felt very distressed as these brave people, most of them hardly knowing what was going on, standing in that heat so patiently. I couldn't believe them. They want so little, and no one will give it to them. I wanted to cry. What poor, poor people (Goldberg 10).
Larry Butler, working in Barbour County, Alabama, had a similar reaction. A student from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, Butler wrote about the first voter registration day that he witnessed.
Our first registration day in Clayton was a success; we had between 200-250
people there to register. About 90 were processed and 21 were registered. The old
literacy test disqualified all but the well educated from registering. A special ―treat for
us while in Clayton was the presence of Gov. Wallace who watched us all afternoon from
an auto body shop. The SCOPE workers were aglow. We were in the Governor‘s home
town working for the fall of his kind of government and he was there to witness the
crumbling of white supremacy at his home. He made one comment the whole time---
―That‘s the best dressed group of civil rights workers I‘ve ever seen. In Eufaula, about
150 persons showed up, 92 were processed and 16 were registered. It went like that for
the rest of the week. In all, about 112 people were registered that week. It was a battle
for that number considering the test and that everyone waited for many long hours.
White men from town came and sat in the jury box and mocked us, made cruel jokes as
children and men, who have never grown up, are prone to do. One old man, 74 years old,
got there very early and was one of the first to go to the registrars‘ table. He worked on
his test from 9:00 in the morning until 4:15, no lunch and no breaks. The registrars
treated him as they would have a cute child or a playful puppy. He took their attitude in
good humor, submitted to their disrespect for his age and also passed his test. One more
black man was registered and the next time the joke would be on the registrars.
The only trouble that week was a man who tried to run us over with a truck (Butler 5).
And soon northern volunteers are experiencing those brutal realities for themselves. Churches, offices, and schools associated with the SCOPE project are bombed and burned. So too are the homes and businesses of local activists. Some summer volunteers, northern and local, are arrested, some for engaging in constitutionally-protected free speech such as passing out leaflets or picketing, some for behavior made lawful by the Civil Rights Act, some on trumped up charges such as "vagrancy." In a number of places, northern and local activists are beaten by white thugs, or chased, or shot at. Fortunately, over the summer of '65 there is only one Movement-related murder — the Assassination of Jonathan Daniels on a SNCC project in Lowndes County Alabama. But fear — fear of arrest, fear of danger, fear of sudden unexpected violence, is constant, pervasive, and exhausting (SCOPE-ing 5).
Lynn Goldberg’s arrest occurred August 2. She wrote:
We were arrested today. I was not scared. I cried when a two ton policeman stood on Al's neck while hauling another limp body (Lenny's). I am hoarse from singing and yelling.
Why were we arrested — no charge. We were pulled from the courthouse.
Yesterday Orangeburg had a record registration day — so did we! — they registered 350 people and had three registrars (even a fourth). They were allowed to use the courtroom — so everyone could sit down. It was cool, quick, and comfortable.
Today was another registration day. Mary Ann and Alan went down to help since we didn't have extra days. At three the rest of us got a call — come down by four. There had been only two registrars, and one left because he didn't want to register any more niggars'. People were being asked to read. Those bastards!! No — we won't put up with it. At five we would stay. Calhoun was asked to support the sit-in — of course we would.
We talked to the people, telling them to stay. We sang songs and marched around the courtroom when the officials left. We opened the windows and let the city hear us. There were posters with slogans — they went up on the windows. All the adults left except three because they couldn't be arrested. Our decision meeting was short we would stay 'til 9:00 tomorrow, or be arrested. …
Sheriff Dukes came in. Suddenly, on both sides of the room husky men in uniform poured in. they stood on each side as we announced our decision. They rushed on us as we sat and sang, jumping over the seats. …
I was picked up and thrown. Then I was grabbed and dragged outside. As I passed Earl he encouraged me to try to walk. In front of me John and Al were dragged by the hands down the stairs and thrown into the car in a heap. My picture was taken. Al's hands were bent til they almost broke. Dozens of cars pulled up to the courthouse, with all of us singing. We were piled, pushed and thrown into the jail. Then we were split, and some of us were led around another way. We stood and sang songs while we waited for them to get our names. Fifteen girls are together in a revolting dirty cell with three beds. There is a toilet in the room that is disgusting. Also a sink and bathtub. We were finger printed and photographed. Juveniles were led out if they wanted. … (Goldberg 11-12).
In some of the most dangerous areas, local Blacks armed with rifles and shotguns guard the SCOPE volunteers as they sleep at night. Some volunteers initially question this departure from strict Gandhian nonviolence, but SCLC leaders and staff make it clear that while participants in public Freedom Movement activities must be nonviolent — and everything northern volunteers do is in essence a public activity — nonviolence as a way of life for southern Blacks is a personal choice — and so is self-defense of home and community from attack by night-raiding Klansmen (SCOPE—ing 5).
SCOPE policy at the beginning of the Summer is to concentrate on voter registration & political organization — and avoid direct action protests. Though many northern volunteers are eager to participate in marches and sit-ins, doing so diverts from SCOPE's primary objectives. Moreover, protests often provoke an increase in retaliatory white violence and cause police to mobilize around town centers both of which could deter people from going to the courthouse to register. And demonstrations will certainly result in arrests and expensive bail bonds that drain money needed for registration and organizing work. But with the Voting Rights Act still stalled by southern filibuster in the Senate, registration efforts show scant result. Frustrated at lack of visible success, some volunteers — local as well as northern — argue that direct action to protest continued denial of voting rights, to demand immediate passage of the Act, or to implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will inspire and encourage registration efforts, not detract from them.
In a number of locales, the ban on direct action is either lifted by SCOPE Director Hosea Williams or simply ignored by those on the ground. When SCOPE volunteers are arrested and beaten in Taliaferro County GA, SCLC leaders organize picket lines, marches, and a boycott of white merchants. In Crenshaw County AL, local Black students volunteering with SCOPE convince the project to implement the Civil Rights Act, and a white mob attacks them when they sit-in at a local cafe. After two churches are burned and Blacks are fired and evicted for trying to register in Hale County AL, 500 are arrested on a mass march to protest continued use of the so-called "literacy test."
After four weeks in Americus Georgia where the Washington State University SCOPE team has been assigned and SNCC has been organizing since 1963, only 45 new voters are registered. On July 20, four Black women are arrested for standing in a "white-only" voting line during a local election. Benjamin Van Clark and Willie Bolden, two of Hosea Williams' field leaders from the Savannah Movement, are sent from Atlanta to organize and lead protests. Hosea Williams of SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC issue a set of demands: release of those arrested, longer registration hours, Afro-American voter Registrars, formation of a biracial committee to discuss race issues in Americus, and that a new election be called because separate voting lines are inherently unconstitutional. The white power-structure remains adamant, and a boycott of white-owned stores commences. Under pressure, the county agrees to hire a few Afro-American clerks to register voters. Within two days 647 Blacks are added to the rolls. Within a week there are 1,500 new Black voters in Sumter County GA.
Sussex County in Southeast Virginia is rural, poor, and small (total population 12,000). Blacks outnumber whites two to one. The voter registration office is open only two hours per month. The SCOPE project requests that hours be extended — request denied. They circulate and submit a petition signed by those who want to register — petition denied. More than 100 Blacks march in protest to the courthouse and daily picketing commences. On the one day the office is open, more than 140 line up to be registered, but few are processed and fewer added to the rolls. A delegation drives up to Washington and meets with Justice Department officials. Under threat of federal registrars, additional hours are added (Direct 1-2).
Larry Butler’s SCOPE group decided to resort to direct action.
The SCOPE workers became frustrated. All their energy was spent in canvassing and mass meetings. Little was being accomplished and we were becoming a Boy Scout chapter whose special project was voter registration. Many people were afraid of the workers because we were white and the old fashion attitude of ―Yas sir, Mr. Charlie was evident. Often in our canvassing we ran across old people in the backwoods who had heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, but thought he was the United States President. Freedom had not come to Barbour County, only civil right workers had.
We knew something was wrong and we were bored and disappointed. … (Butler 6).
The Voting Rights Act does not become law until August 6, 1965. So for seven long weeks SCOPE projects must try to register voters under the old "literacy test" system specifically designed to deny Black voting rights. It's slow going. Before the March to Montgomery, attempting to register at the courthouse was essentially an act of protest. It was a demand for federal enforcement of the Constitution and a cry to the nation for justice. But now that the Voting Act is on the verge of passage, few Blacks are willing to endure the danger and humiliation of applying to register knowing they will most likely fail, when if they just wait until the new law takes effect they can actually succeed. Nevertheless, dedicated SCOPE activists — local and outside both — manage to ensure that there's a line of applicants waiting at the courthouse on each registration day.
In Selma Alabama, which is still under a federal injunction, 1470 applicants go to the court house between June 20 and August 6 — but only 56 are actually registered (4%). In Crenshaw County Alabama, on the nine days the registration office is open before the Voting Rights Act is passed, 318 Blacks go to the courthouse to register, 242 are "processed," but only 58 are actually registered (18%). In Hale County Alabama where more than two-thirds of the population are Black, it's the same old story, voter applicants are fired and evicted, churches are burned, and almost no one is actually registered.
After the Voting Rights Act is signed into law on August 6, some county Registrars comply with it, and in those places SCOPE manages to register a good number of Black voters during the project's last three weeks. But elsewhere, particularly in the Deep South, white resistance to both the spirit and letter of the Act is adamant and Registrars continue to use their power to deny Afro-American voting rights (Voter 1-2)
Racists in St. Matthews, South Carolina, act out their anger. Lynn Goldberg revealed the following August 18 diary entry.
Some time between 8:00 and 9:00, when no on was home — our house had been shot at with a shotgun. Ulp! I was suddenly nervous. I ran back to the other SCOPE house and told Earl. He did not believe it had been a shotgun. However he hurried and offered to accompany us home. Three cars went to St. Matthews, filled with people.
What a sight! A hole about a foot in diameter was in the front picture window. The whole glass was cracked in all directions. The shade was drawn, and splattered with shot holes. But that was nothing — the inside was utterly unbelievable. Shattered glass was strewn over every inch of the room. Not a place was left uncovered. The back wall was dotted with holes. The whole place was a shambles. Everyone stood around — amazed.
The police had been by and looked things over. They said they would return with the sheriff in the morning. F.B.I. was contacted, and also U.P.I. We called Chief Strom for protection during the night. Matthew Perry was also informed of everything. It was still scary. Earl and the Orangeburg kids left us making precautions for night. Our beds were moved and windows blocked. Pleasant dreams (Goldberg 13-14).
In most Alabama counties, for example, registration continues to be limited to two days per month. August 16 is the first Alabama registration day after the Act goes into effect (and for most SCOPE volunteers returning to college in the Fall it's the last registration day they will see before leaving Alabama). Some 600 applicants line up to register at the Barbour County courthouse, but only 265 are processed and few are actually registered. In Butler County 568 line up, but only 107 are registered. In other states it's not much different. In North Carolina, the voter registration offices in counties with large Black populations simply close down until October. Georgia and South Carolina also continue to deny voting rights in predominantly Black rural areas.
The new law empowers Washington to send federal Registrars (called "examiners") to non-complying counties. Despite a widespread pattern of continued denial of Black voting rights, the Department of Justice assigns Registrars to only six of Alabama's 24 Black Belt counties. None are sent to any of the other SCOPE states. In the few places where federal Registrars do operate they are effective and Black voters are added to the rolls in large numbers.
…
Dr. King demands that federal registrars be sent to every county covered by the new Act. Attorney General Katzenbach refuses. Instead he lauds what he claims is widespread "voluntary compliance" with the law by white officials, and he attributes the slow increase in Black voters to lack of local registration campaigns. SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and NAACP registration workers toiling in the field see little evidence of "voluntary compliance" in the deep South, and most of them are convinced that Washington is dragging its feet in a forlorn effort to somehow appease southern whites and keep them loyal to the Democratic Party. As of August 1966, a full year after the Act goes into force, federal registrars have been sent into less than one-fifth of the southern counties that need them.
…
SCOPE's reported registration statistics are therefore to some degree estimates. By the end of the summer, at the high-end an estimated 70,000 Blacks attempted to register in the six states where there are SCOPE projects. Of that number, a bit under 50,000 succeeded (mostly during the three weeks after the Voting Rights Act goes into effect). Other estimates report somewhat lower numbers, particularly the number of new voters added to the rolls. Regardless of how many actually got registered, there are several hundred thousand Blacks of voting age in the counties where SCOPE has projects, and while 50,000 new voters is a good start, a start is all it is (Voter 3-5).
Throughout the remainder of 1965, and then 1966, the Johnson administration continues to drag its heels, refusing to supply federal registrars to places that clearly need them. Registrars are only sent into those counties that practice the most extreme — and overt — methods of denying voting rights to Afro-Americans. The locales that use more subtle and covert forms of resistance are able to avoid direct federal intervention and therefore delay, retard and minimize Black electoral power. But if Washington hopes that appeasement will keep southern whites loyal to the Democratic Party those dreams are dashed as the majority of white Democrats become white Republicans.
But slowly, as Black voting strength grows to the point where they can begin to swing close elections, and then eventually elect Black candidates in towns and counties with Afro-American majorities, overt white resistance to the Voting Rights Act begins to fade and politicians of all races seek Black votes — even George Wallace the (formerly) arch-segregationist Governor of Alabama, who by the 1980s is not only campaigning for Black votes but actually getting them when he runs as a Democrat against a right-wing Republican.
The results of SCOPE's community organization and political education efforts vary from place to place. SCLC's SCOPE volunteers support existing — or help local leaders organize new — voter leagues and improvement associations across the South. Like similar efforts by CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP, some of these local groups falter and die, others struggle on, and some thrive, providing an organizational form for Black political power for decades to come (Going 1-2).
Works cited:
Buck, Peter. “Transcript: Journal of a SCOPE Volunteer.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/buck65.htm
Butler, Larry. “A Short History of the Freedom Movement in
Barbour County, Alabama.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/buck65.htm
“Direct Action.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Going Forward.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Goldberg, Lynn Goldsmith. “Diary of a Young Civil Rights Worker.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/goldberg.htm
“SCOPE-ing.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Voter Registration.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Civil Rights Events -- After the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- The Murder of Jonathan Daniels -- Part One
The murder in cold blood and in broad daylight of a religious leader is horrifying enough. Especially in America, we associate our preachers with words not swords and expect them to be immune from violence. But merely a half-century ago, someone could brazenly kill an Episcopalian seminarian and shoot a Catholic priest without being punished. It happened, in August 1965, in racist Alabama (Troy 1).
On Saturday morning, August 14, a long line of Blacks wait patiently in sweltering heat at the tiny Fort Deposit Alabama post office where federal examiners are registering voters in compliance with the recently passed Voting Rights Act. Fort Deposit is a Klan stronghold and angry white thugs mingle with local cops to harass and intimidate. For some rural Blacks standing in line, this is the first time they've ever dared venture into Fort Deposit because of its long history of racist violence. Now their only protection is a small contingent of FBI agents present to record violations of the Act.
Under the shade of a nearby tree, a small band of 25 or so teenagers are hand-lettering picket signs. Ever since the Movement first came to Fort Deposit a week earlier in the form of a mass meeting, they have been working up their courage to take a stand for freedom by defying segregation. Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act more than a year earlier, the town grocery store is still segregated. They and their parents are barred from entering, they must make their purchases through a back window without examining the goods or seeing the posted prices. The amounts they are charged are often more than what white customers pay and vary from person to person and day to day according to the whim of the white owner.
SNCC field secretary Jimmy Rogers and other SNCC organizers try to talk them out of demonstrating. A protest will be terribly dangerous and if white violence breaks out it might prevent the adults from registering. A pair of FBI agents warn them that white men are gathering in an angry crowd, and they, the agents, can only "observe," they can provide no protection at all. The Black teenagers are not intimidated. "I don't want to scare the older people away from voter registration, but we need this," says one (Picketing 1-2).
Many [of the students] had been involved in an unsuccessful boycott earlier in the year of their segregated black high school after its superintendent refused to consider a list of demands aimed at improving their education. And the county school board blocked their attempt to integrate the all-white high school in Hayneville about 18 miles away. They wanted to find a niche in the civil right movement in Lowndes County, often called “Bloody Lowndes” for the way violence enforced segregation.
Just eight days earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the historic Voting Rights Act. Most of the young organizers who gathered on Aug. 14 were too young to vote, but they wanted to be part of the movement so they proposed the protest against businesses in Fort Deposit (Schjonberg 1-2).
The SNCC organizers are torn. Their prestige among Black youth is enormous. If they forbid the demonstration the teenagers will reluctantly obey. But should they block the protest? Or should they support the young militants, some of whom are the same age they themselves were when they first defied adult caution and took their own stands.
…
Project Director Stokely Carmichael finally accedes to the young militants insistence on defying white racism with direct action, but only on condition that they pledge commitment to nonviolence. "If that's what you want to do, he tells them, "don't take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil." Purses and pockets are emptied of nail files and knives. Jimmy Rogers and some of the other experienced SNCC veterans are assigned to join them. Assuming all protesters will be arrested, SNCC members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod make lists of names and family contacts.
A car from Selma arrives with freedom school teacher Gloria Larry House and two white supporters, Father Richard Morrisroe and seminary student Jonathan Daniels. Tuskegee student and volunteer organizer Ruby Sales later recalled:
One of the things that we were very conscious of is that, sometimes in that kind of situation, white presence would incite local white people to violence. So there was some concern about what that meant, ... to jeopardize the local black people. The other question was who should be in the forefront of the movement. People like myself thought it should be the people themselves in Lowndes County, the local black people, who should be in the forefront. I had some serious concerns about what it meant to allow white people to come into the county and what kind of relationship that set up in an area where black people had historically deferred to white people, and whether or not that was in some real ways creating the very situation that we were struggling very hard to change. More fundamentally, I was very afraid of unleashing uncontrolled violence because of Lowndes County's history ... and the fact that since I had been in the county I had encountered more than one violent incident ... but ultimately it was decided that the movement was an open place and should provide an opportunity for anyone who wanted to come and struggle against racism to be part of the struggle" (Picketing 2-3).
Born in 1939 in Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan [Daniels] had deep roots in New England. He was a typical kid: going to music camp, attending church, falling in love, and enjoying the company of a steadfast group of friends who still remember him with laughter and fondness. He was not a perfect child by any means. He smoked, stayed out too late, and snuck a beer now and then.
But Jonathan showed a contemplative side as well. His reading list included Camus, Kierkegaard, church fathers, and in an article for his high school paper he lamented young people’s disconnect with the spiritual world. His favorite book, The Chain, portrays an Episcopal Priest who stands with the marginalized in his town and loses his life in the process. After high school Jonathan attended the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he thrived under the rigorous academic and physical discipline.
Graduation found Jonathan at a cross roads. Although he wished his classmates “the joy of a purposeful life” in his valedictory address, his own life lacked such purpose. His father had died two years before, and there was pressure on him to return home to support his mother and sister. He decided, however, to pursue a graduate degree in English at Harvard University. After a year of study he realized that Harvard was not for him, just when Harvard had decided that he needed to seek his degree elsewhere.
And then he had an epiphany. He never shared what he experienced during the 1962 Easter Sunday services at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill, but it changed his life forever. He later called it a “reconversion”; after an on again off again relationship with the church, he had come home. Within a year he was enrolled in seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jon’s textbook margins were well marked with his thoughts and reactions, but he learned his most important lessons from fieldwork in inner city Providence, Rhode Island, where his eyes were opened to the realities of poverty and injustice.
… In March 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King called on American clergy for assistance after the brutal attack on activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. At first Jonathan was not sure – “could I spare the time? Did I want to spare the time? Did He want . . . ?”– but after evening chapel he resolved to go south (Bell 1-3).
Daniels and fellow seminarian Judith Upham … had come to Alabama in March … They arrived on a Thursday, intending to be home in Cambridge in time for classes Monday morning. They stayed nearly a week and returned with the conviction that they were called to return to Alabama as witness to the ongoing struggle for equal rights.
“Something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back,” Daniels once wrote. “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.”
Daniels and Upham returned the following week to spend the semester. “Sometimes we take to the streets, sometimes we yawn through interminable meetings … Sometime we confront the posse, sometimes we hold a child,” Daniels wrote, describing their daily work.
He said Selma in 1965 was like the entire world, ambiguous and filled with doubt and fear. Into that world must come saints, he said. And Selma “needs the life and witness of militant saints” (Schjonberg 3-4).
While managing to complete his seminary coursework, he plunged into what he called “living theology”: he helped with voter registration, photographed segregated conditions, worked to integrate a church, and lived with local families. Rachel West Nelson, whose family Jonathan stayed with, remembered that “he was part of our family. . . . In a way, he was a part of every black family in Selma in those days” (Bell 4).
When Daniels wanted to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes County, the group refused, according to legendary SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael.
“We had no base in Lowndes County, so there was no way to protect him, and if he were working with us, he would be clearly a target of the Ku Klux Klan and our work then would be just protecting him rather than doing our work,” Carmichael recalled during a 1988 interview that was a followup to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. Daniels accused him of being racist, he added.
Daniels, instead, joined some Lowndes County work being done by the Southern Leadership Christian Conference, whose first president was King. Meanwhile, Carmichael and Daniels got to know and like each other that summer. Carmichael later said he came to realize that Daniels was “more interested in lasting solutions rather than the temporary ones” (Schjonberg 5-6).
Bloody Lowndes’s … violent bigotry shocked the earnest, decent New Hampshire native, who wasn’t naïve, having proved himself tough enough to graduate as valedictorian of Virginia Military Institute. In an article published posthumously, he described his travels in the land of “whites only.” One night, buying coffee at a truck stop, he encountered a sign: “ALL CASH RECEIVED FROM SALES TO NIGGERS WILL BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE UNITED KLANS OF AMERICA.” Sickened, he recalled, the “nausea rising swiftly and savagely…. It was lousy coffee. But worse than chicory was the taste of black men’s blood.”
Another day, while in Selma’s post office “a redneck turned and stared: at my seminarian’s collar, at my ESCRU button.” The man exclaimed: “Why, he’s a white niggah.” As everyone stared at Daniels, “deep within me rose an affirmation and a tenderness and a joy that wanted to shout. ‘Yes!’” Daniels called this, “the highest honor, the most precious distinction I have ever received. It is one that I do not deserve—and cannot ever earn. As I type now, my hands are hopelessly white.” But, he added, “my heart is black.”
This was the poetic and pious voice of Jonathan Daniels, humbled by his privilege, by his black friends’ suffering, and by the efforts required “to confront a people with the challenge of freedom and a nation with its conscience.” Hurt by the racism otherwise good people expressed, despairing, with King, of “the neutralists who cautiously seek to calm troubled waters,” Daniels concluded that our crazy world “needs the life and witness of militant Saints” (Troy 1-3).
August 14 – Jonathan Daniels joins the 30, mostly student protesters. They walk to Fort Deposit's miniscule "downtown" in three groups of 10 (so as not to be arrested for "parading") and begin to picket McGough's Grocery with their hand-made signs carrying slogans like "No More Back Doors" and "Wake Up! This is Not Primitive Time." Fifty hostile Klansmen armed with clubs and guns quickly close in on them. A deputy sheriff shouts that they're all under arrest (the protesters, of course, not the KKK). "For what?" asks Jimmy Rogers. "For resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood."
Some of the protesters manage to evade arrest, but 20 are forced into a waiting garbage truck. In addition to local youth, among those arrested are SNCC members Jimmy Rogers, Willie Vaughn, Scott B. Smith, and Stokely Carmichael, freedom school teacher Gloria House, Tuskegee student Ruby Sales, and Father Morrisroe and Jonathan Daniels. The two whites are particularly singled out by the cops for special abuse (Picketing 3).
The arrestees are taken to the new county jail in Hayneville. Bail bonds are set high, far more than SNCC can scrape up (Hayneville 1). Daniels shared a cell with Carmichael … The group spent six hot August days in the jail without air conditioning. There were no showers and no toilets. Daniels led the group in hymn singing and prayers, boosting morale and combating the bleakness of the situation (Schjonberg 7).
Stokely and Scott B. are bailed out [August 20] to continue organizing and to arrange lawyers and bond for the others. The remaining prisoners agree they will all remain together, no one else will bail out until everyone can be freed. Seventeen year old Tuskegee student and SNCC volunteer Ruby Sales lies about her age so they won't incarcerate her as a juvenile delinquent without trial (as Mississippi did to Brenda Travis and Florida did to the "St. Augustine Four"). As usual, women prisoners are separated from the men. There are four women in the filthy, cramped, roach and lice-infested cell: Joyce Bailey and Ms. Logan from Fort Deposit, Gloria House, and Ruby Sales who later recalled:
You know, growing up in the South, — or growing up in America — only "bad" women went to jail. That was the last thing your mama raised you to do was to find your butt in jail. There I was in this place that my mother had told me only bad women went to. So that was a really important moment, the transformation of that space. It moved from being a space of disgrace to being a space of honor to be there.
Now you have to understand what it means for four Black women — it was terrifying, psychologically terrifying because they engaged in psychological warfare. By telling the women that if we didn't stop singing that they were going to make the Black trustees — the Black prisoners — come into the cell with us and rape us. And they threatened that they would have the Black prisoners beat the men. So [they used] this whole notion of psychological warfare, turning one Black person against another.
And you know there was a lot of singing going on. People were afraid, and the singing had a lot to do with just maintaining our courage, giving us something to hold on to, and stand in. But, I have to say despite those tortuous conditions, it didn't feel like we were being tortured ... it was because of the spirit of just being there and standing up for something you believed in. And for those young people — and even for myself — I had never been arrested, so that was a powerful moment that even their threats couldn't defeat. And that was really based on the power of the people to really take one space that had been something else and to turn it into something positive and transformative. And that therefore it no longer belonged — even though the white Sheriff and other people thought it still belonged to them — in a way it didn't anymore (Hayneville 1-3).
Despite suffering in Alabama’s summer heat, Daniels refused to be bailed out before the others. He wrote a 60th-birthday message to his mother: “The food is vile. And we aren’t allowed to bathe. Phew…. As you can imagine, I’ll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.” That drink would go forever unmixed (Troy 5).
On Saturday, August 21, the day after Carmichael and Scott Smith are bailed out, the guards suddenly announce that everybody is being released without having to post bond.
Of course we were suspicious of this. No one from SNCC had been in touch with us. We had not been told that bail had been raised; we had no information from anyone, and we thought, this doesn't sound right. But they forced us out of the jail at gunpoint. Being forced out of jail at gunpoint — you know something worse might be waiting for you outside, so you sort of hang on to that jail. Well, we did. We were standing around outside the jail and they forced us off the property onto the blacktop, one of the county roads, again at gunpoint. …
The suddenly released prisoners are tense. They have no base in Hayneville and for some reason no other Blacks are in sight. Willie Vaughn is sent looking for a Black home with a phone, but few Afro-Americans have telephone service and many are afraid to even answer their door. Nearby is the small white-owned Cash Store where Movement people have bought snacks in the past during voter registration days. After a week in a hot, fetid cell, eating foul jail food and drinking tainted water some want to slake their thirst with a cold soda. SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet (Ambush 1-2).
Works cited:
“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Bell, Mike. “Jonathan Daniels, Forgotten Hero of the Civil Rights Movement.” Plough. Web. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/fait...
“In the Hayneville Jail.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Picketing Fort Deposit.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/...
Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonatha...
On Saturday morning, August 14, a long line of Blacks wait patiently in sweltering heat at the tiny Fort Deposit Alabama post office where federal examiners are registering voters in compliance with the recently passed Voting Rights Act. Fort Deposit is a Klan stronghold and angry white thugs mingle with local cops to harass and intimidate. For some rural Blacks standing in line, this is the first time they've ever dared venture into Fort Deposit because of its long history of racist violence. Now their only protection is a small contingent of FBI agents present to record violations of the Act.
Under the shade of a nearby tree, a small band of 25 or so teenagers are hand-lettering picket signs. Ever since the Movement first came to Fort Deposit a week earlier in the form of a mass meeting, they have been working up their courage to take a stand for freedom by defying segregation. Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act more than a year earlier, the town grocery store is still segregated. They and their parents are barred from entering, they must make their purchases through a back window without examining the goods or seeing the posted prices. The amounts they are charged are often more than what white customers pay and vary from person to person and day to day according to the whim of the white owner.
SNCC field secretary Jimmy Rogers and other SNCC organizers try to talk them out of demonstrating. A protest will be terribly dangerous and if white violence breaks out it might prevent the adults from registering. A pair of FBI agents warn them that white men are gathering in an angry crowd, and they, the agents, can only "observe," they can provide no protection at all. The Black teenagers are not intimidated. "I don't want to scare the older people away from voter registration, but we need this," says one (Picketing 1-2).
Many [of the students] had been involved in an unsuccessful boycott earlier in the year of their segregated black high school after its superintendent refused to consider a list of demands aimed at improving their education. And the county school board blocked their attempt to integrate the all-white high school in Hayneville about 18 miles away. They wanted to find a niche in the civil right movement in Lowndes County, often called “Bloody Lowndes” for the way violence enforced segregation.
Just eight days earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the historic Voting Rights Act. Most of the young organizers who gathered on Aug. 14 were too young to vote, but they wanted to be part of the movement so they proposed the protest against businesses in Fort Deposit (Schjonberg 1-2).
The SNCC organizers are torn. Their prestige among Black youth is enormous. If they forbid the demonstration the teenagers will reluctantly obey. But should they block the protest? Or should they support the young militants, some of whom are the same age they themselves were when they first defied adult caution and took their own stands.
…
Project Director Stokely Carmichael finally accedes to the young militants insistence on defying white racism with direct action, but only on condition that they pledge commitment to nonviolence. "If that's what you want to do, he tells them, "don't take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil." Purses and pockets are emptied of nail files and knives. Jimmy Rogers and some of the other experienced SNCC veterans are assigned to join them. Assuming all protesters will be arrested, SNCC members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod make lists of names and family contacts.
A car from Selma arrives with freedom school teacher Gloria Larry House and two white supporters, Father Richard Morrisroe and seminary student Jonathan Daniels. Tuskegee student and volunteer organizer Ruby Sales later recalled:
One of the things that we were very conscious of is that, sometimes in that kind of situation, white presence would incite local white people to violence. So there was some concern about what that meant, ... to jeopardize the local black people. The other question was who should be in the forefront of the movement. People like myself thought it should be the people themselves in Lowndes County, the local black people, who should be in the forefront. I had some serious concerns about what it meant to allow white people to come into the county and what kind of relationship that set up in an area where black people had historically deferred to white people, and whether or not that was in some real ways creating the very situation that we were struggling very hard to change. More fundamentally, I was very afraid of unleashing uncontrolled violence because of Lowndes County's history ... and the fact that since I had been in the county I had encountered more than one violent incident ... but ultimately it was decided that the movement was an open place and should provide an opportunity for anyone who wanted to come and struggle against racism to be part of the struggle" (Picketing 2-3).
Born in 1939 in Keene, New Hampshire, Jonathan [Daniels] had deep roots in New England. He was a typical kid: going to music camp, attending church, falling in love, and enjoying the company of a steadfast group of friends who still remember him with laughter and fondness. He was not a perfect child by any means. He smoked, stayed out too late, and snuck a beer now and then.
But Jonathan showed a contemplative side as well. His reading list included Camus, Kierkegaard, church fathers, and in an article for his high school paper he lamented young people’s disconnect with the spiritual world. His favorite book, The Chain, portrays an Episcopal Priest who stands with the marginalized in his town and loses his life in the process. After high school Jonathan attended the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he thrived under the rigorous academic and physical discipline.
Graduation found Jonathan at a cross roads. Although he wished his classmates “the joy of a purposeful life” in his valedictory address, his own life lacked such purpose. His father had died two years before, and there was pressure on him to return home to support his mother and sister. He decided, however, to pursue a graduate degree in English at Harvard University. After a year of study he realized that Harvard was not for him, just when Harvard had decided that he needed to seek his degree elsewhere.
And then he had an epiphany. He never shared what he experienced during the 1962 Easter Sunday services at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill, but it changed his life forever. He later called it a “reconversion”; after an on again off again relationship with the church, he had come home. Within a year he was enrolled in seminary at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jon’s textbook margins were well marked with his thoughts and reactions, but he learned his most important lessons from fieldwork in inner city Providence, Rhode Island, where his eyes were opened to the realities of poverty and injustice.
… In March 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King called on American clergy for assistance after the brutal attack on activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. At first Jonathan was not sure – “could I spare the time? Did I want to spare the time? Did He want . . . ?”– but after evening chapel he resolved to go south (Bell 1-3).
Daniels and fellow seminarian Judith Upham … had come to Alabama in March … They arrived on a Thursday, intending to be home in Cambridge in time for classes Monday morning. They stayed nearly a week and returned with the conviction that they were called to return to Alabama as witness to the ongoing struggle for equal rights.
“Something had happened to me in Selma, which meant I had to come back,” Daniels once wrote. “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.”
Daniels and Upham returned the following week to spend the semester. “Sometimes we take to the streets, sometimes we yawn through interminable meetings … Sometime we confront the posse, sometimes we hold a child,” Daniels wrote, describing their daily work.
He said Selma in 1965 was like the entire world, ambiguous and filled with doubt and fear. Into that world must come saints, he said. And Selma “needs the life and witness of militant saints” (Schjonberg 3-4).
While managing to complete his seminary coursework, he plunged into what he called “living theology”: he helped with voter registration, photographed segregated conditions, worked to integrate a church, and lived with local families. Rachel West Nelson, whose family Jonathan stayed with, remembered that “he was part of our family. . . . In a way, he was a part of every black family in Selma in those days” (Bell 4).
When Daniels wanted to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes County, the group refused, according to legendary SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael.
“We had no base in Lowndes County, so there was no way to protect him, and if he were working with us, he would be clearly a target of the Ku Klux Klan and our work then would be just protecting him rather than doing our work,” Carmichael recalled during a 1988 interview that was a followup to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. Daniels accused him of being racist, he added.
Daniels, instead, joined some Lowndes County work being done by the Southern Leadership Christian Conference, whose first president was King. Meanwhile, Carmichael and Daniels got to know and like each other that summer. Carmichael later said he came to realize that Daniels was “more interested in lasting solutions rather than the temporary ones” (Schjonberg 5-6).
Bloody Lowndes’s … violent bigotry shocked the earnest, decent New Hampshire native, who wasn’t naïve, having proved himself tough enough to graduate as valedictorian of Virginia Military Institute. In an article published posthumously, he described his travels in the land of “whites only.” One night, buying coffee at a truck stop, he encountered a sign: “ALL CASH RECEIVED FROM SALES TO NIGGERS WILL BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE UNITED KLANS OF AMERICA.” Sickened, he recalled, the “nausea rising swiftly and savagely…. It was lousy coffee. But worse than chicory was the taste of black men’s blood.”
Another day, while in Selma’s post office “a redneck turned and stared: at my seminarian’s collar, at my ESCRU button.” The man exclaimed: “Why, he’s a white niggah.” As everyone stared at Daniels, “deep within me rose an affirmation and a tenderness and a joy that wanted to shout. ‘Yes!’” Daniels called this, “the highest honor, the most precious distinction I have ever received. It is one that I do not deserve—and cannot ever earn. As I type now, my hands are hopelessly white.” But, he added, “my heart is black.”
This was the poetic and pious voice of Jonathan Daniels, humbled by his privilege, by his black friends’ suffering, and by the efforts required “to confront a people with the challenge of freedom and a nation with its conscience.” Hurt by the racism otherwise good people expressed, despairing, with King, of “the neutralists who cautiously seek to calm troubled waters,” Daniels concluded that our crazy world “needs the life and witness of militant Saints” (Troy 1-3).
August 14 – Jonathan Daniels joins the 30, mostly student protesters. They walk to Fort Deposit's miniscule "downtown" in three groups of 10 (so as not to be arrested for "parading") and begin to picket McGough's Grocery with their hand-made signs carrying slogans like "No More Back Doors" and "Wake Up! This is Not Primitive Time." Fifty hostile Klansmen armed with clubs and guns quickly close in on them. A deputy sheriff shouts that they're all under arrest (the protesters, of course, not the KKK). "For what?" asks Jimmy Rogers. "For resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood."
Some of the protesters manage to evade arrest, but 20 are forced into a waiting garbage truck. In addition to local youth, among those arrested are SNCC members Jimmy Rogers, Willie Vaughn, Scott B. Smith, and Stokely Carmichael, freedom school teacher Gloria House, Tuskegee student Ruby Sales, and Father Morrisroe and Jonathan Daniels. The two whites are particularly singled out by the cops for special abuse (Picketing 3).
The arrestees are taken to the new county jail in Hayneville. Bail bonds are set high, far more than SNCC can scrape up (Hayneville 1). Daniels shared a cell with Carmichael … The group spent six hot August days in the jail without air conditioning. There were no showers and no toilets. Daniels led the group in hymn singing and prayers, boosting morale and combating the bleakness of the situation (Schjonberg 7).
Stokely and Scott B. are bailed out [August 20] to continue organizing and to arrange lawyers and bond for the others. The remaining prisoners agree they will all remain together, no one else will bail out until everyone can be freed. Seventeen year old Tuskegee student and SNCC volunteer Ruby Sales lies about her age so they won't incarcerate her as a juvenile delinquent without trial (as Mississippi did to Brenda Travis and Florida did to the "St. Augustine Four"). As usual, women prisoners are separated from the men. There are four women in the filthy, cramped, roach and lice-infested cell: Joyce Bailey and Ms. Logan from Fort Deposit, Gloria House, and Ruby Sales who later recalled:
You know, growing up in the South, — or growing up in America — only "bad" women went to jail. That was the last thing your mama raised you to do was to find your butt in jail. There I was in this place that my mother had told me only bad women went to. So that was a really important moment, the transformation of that space. It moved from being a space of disgrace to being a space of honor to be there.
Now you have to understand what it means for four Black women — it was terrifying, psychologically terrifying because they engaged in psychological warfare. By telling the women that if we didn't stop singing that they were going to make the Black trustees — the Black prisoners — come into the cell with us and rape us. And they threatened that they would have the Black prisoners beat the men. So [they used] this whole notion of psychological warfare, turning one Black person against another.
And you know there was a lot of singing going on. People were afraid, and the singing had a lot to do with just maintaining our courage, giving us something to hold on to, and stand in. But, I have to say despite those tortuous conditions, it didn't feel like we were being tortured ... it was because of the spirit of just being there and standing up for something you believed in. And for those young people — and even for myself — I had never been arrested, so that was a powerful moment that even their threats couldn't defeat. And that was really based on the power of the people to really take one space that had been something else and to turn it into something positive and transformative. And that therefore it no longer belonged — even though the white Sheriff and other people thought it still belonged to them — in a way it didn't anymore (Hayneville 1-3).
Despite suffering in Alabama’s summer heat, Daniels refused to be bailed out before the others. He wrote a 60th-birthday message to his mother: “The food is vile. And we aren’t allowed to bathe. Phew…. As you can imagine, I’ll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.” That drink would go forever unmixed (Troy 5).
On Saturday, August 21, the day after Carmichael and Scott Smith are bailed out, the guards suddenly announce that everybody is being released without having to post bond.
Of course we were suspicious of this. No one from SNCC had been in touch with us. We had not been told that bail had been raised; we had no information from anyone, and we thought, this doesn't sound right. But they forced us out of the jail at gunpoint. Being forced out of jail at gunpoint — you know something worse might be waiting for you outside, so you sort of hang on to that jail. Well, we did. We were standing around outside the jail and they forced us off the property onto the blacktop, one of the county roads, again at gunpoint. …
The suddenly released prisoners are tense. They have no base in Hayneville and for some reason no other Blacks are in sight. Willie Vaughn is sent looking for a Black home with a phone, but few Afro-Americans have telephone service and many are afraid to even answer their door. Nearby is the small white-owned Cash Store where Movement people have bought snacks in the past during voter registration days. After a week in a hot, fetid cell, eating foul jail food and drinking tainted water some want to slake their thirst with a cold soda. SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet (Ambush 1-2).
Works cited:
“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Bell, Mike. “Jonathan Daniels, Forgotten Hero of the Civil Rights Movement.” Plough. Web. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/fait...
“In the Hayneville Jail.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
“Picketing Fort Deposit.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/...
Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonatha...
Civil Rights Events -- After the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- The Murder of Jonathan Daniels -- Part Two
The suddenly released prisoners are tense. … SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet. Ruby Sales recalls:
It was afternoon. And the street was very eerie. There was a quietness over that downtown area that made us feel really, really eerie. ... What really prevailed that day was that we were thirsty and needed — wanted something to drink. And so we decided that everybody shouldn't go to the store just Morrisroe, Daniels, me, and Joyce Bailey. ... As we approached the store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman. At that time I didn't know his name; I found that out later. I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But my mind kind of blanked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
[Daniels yanks Ruby out of the line of fire.] Jonathan was behind me and I felt a tug. The next thing I knew there was this blast, and I had fallen down. I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I heard another shot go off and I looked down and I was covered with blood. I didn't realize that Jonathan had been shot at that point. I thought I was the one who had been shot.
Morrisroe was running with Joyce Bailey ... he's holding her hand and he's not letting it go for nothing. And he's running with her, and he did not let go of her hands until he was shot in the back, and she kept running and he fell. ... I made a decision that I would just lie there, and maybe if I lie there, then Coleman would think that I was dead and then I could get help for the other people. He walked over me and kicked me and in his blind rage he thought I was dead.
Joyce Bailey had escaped and she ran back around the store to the side near an old abandoned car. ... very close to where I had fallen. And to her credit she did not leave until she could determine who was alive and who was dead. So she started calling my name, "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby." I heard her and I got up. I didn't stand up, I crawled, literally on my knees, to the side of the car where she was, and when I got to her, she picked me up and we began to run and Coleman realized that I wasn't dead. At that point, he started shooting and yelling things, ... because you have to understand that this man's rage was not depleted. [He] is over Morrisroe's body, standing guard over this body, because [Morrisroe] is calling for water and he'll be damned if he's gonna let anybody give him water. Jimmy Rogers comes over and tries to give Father Morrisroe water, and the man threatens to blow his brains out. So he is not finished. He is on a rampage.
It was a setup. They turned us out of jail knowing that somebody was going to go to that store. It was a setup (Ambush 1-3).
The rest of the group scattered and ran, knocking on doors as they passed homes. “Nobody would let us in; people were so terrified,” Sales said (Schjonberg 7).
Thomas Coleman, a 55-year-old road-construction supervisor, part-time deputy sheriff, and a member of one of the oldest white families in Lowndes County then strolled to the county courthouse where his sister is Superintendent of Schools and calls his friend Al Lingo, head of the State Troopers in Montgomery. "I just shot two preachers. You better get on down here" (Ambush 3).
A black doctor with combat experience saved Father Morrisroe’s life, removing his lung and spleen in an 11-hour operation. It took two years before Morrisroe could walk again—and he still feels pain daily (Troy 6).
When other SNCC workers went to look for Daniels’ body, they could not find it, Sales said. “The streets had been swept clean, and you could not tell a murder had taken place.”
Meanwhile, back in Keene that morning, Daniels’ mother, Constance, did not know that her son had even been in jail. She worried when the day’s mail did not include a birthday card for her from Daniels, who never forgot such things. Aug. 20 was her 60th birthday.
Two months before his murder, Daniels wrote this about living with and advocating with blacks in what was known as the so-called Alabama Black Belt: “I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I have truly been 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.”
President Johnson ordered a federal investigation of the shooting. The next day, his chief civil rights aide, Lee White, told Johnson that Daniels’ mother was having a hard time getting her son’s body returned from Alabama. Johnson told White to handle the transportation of Daniels’ corpse.
Carmichael traveled to Keene for Daniels’ funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, the parish that sponsored Daniels for ordination. Carmichael and a group of mourners sang a tearful We Shall Overcome at Daniels’ grave near his father’s at the edge of the Monadnock View Cemetery.
King called Daniels’ death “brutal and bestial,” but said that he had performed “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”
Alice West, with whom Daniels and Upham lived in Selma, said that Daniels had been a part of her family. “We all loved him and trusted him,” she told a website for veterans of the civil rights movement. “He taught my family all about the wonders of God’s love. His death took a toll on my family as well as all the black people in Selma, Alabama” (Schjonberg 7-9).
In less than 12 hours Coleman is released on minimal bail. An all-white Lowndes County grand jury charges Coleman with manslaughter rather than murder. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a racial "moderate" and a political foe of both George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, calls the manslaughter charge "shocking," and assumes charge of the prosecution. But as the trial date approaches, a flood of death threats dissuades Flowers from personally showing up in Lowndes County. He sends a deputy to Hayneville rather than appear in court himself.
The short trial takes place on Wednesday, September 29, little more than a month after the shooting. The Hayneville courthouse is crowded with Coleman's friends and supporters, among them Imperial Klan Wizard Robert Shelton, Grand Dragon Robert Creed, and the three Klansmen who murdered Viola Liuzzo. Circuit Judge Werth Thagard denies the motion from Flower's deputy to raise the charge to murder, denies the motion to change the trial venue out of Lowndes County, and denies the motion to delay the case until Father Morrisroe is recovered enough from his wounds to testify (since the jury trying Coleman will be made up entirely of white men, Flowers considers Morrisroe, the only surviving white witness, crucial to his case). Thagard then removes Flower's deputy and assigns local prosecutor Arthur Gamble — a personal friend of Coleman — to handle the prosecution.
Coleman admits he brought his loaded shotgun to the store that day, but claims he killed Daniels in "self-defense" after the seminary student threatened him with a knife. White friends of Coleman allege that Morrisroe was armed with a pistol, Daniels had a knife, and that "unidentified Negroes" stole the weapons from the crime scene after the shooting. With steadfast courage, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales defy intimidation from the hostile crowd and testify that Coleman murdered Jonathan Daniels and tried to kill Father Morrisroe without any cause or justification.
Most civil rights activists familiar with the events are convinced that the shooting was a planned ambush. They believe that the abrupt eviction of the incarcerated protesters out of the jail into the street was not a coincidence, but rather an action pre-arranged between Coleman and the jailors. When he was ready with his loaded shotgun, they set up his targets. As soon as he saw the mixed group of Black and white, he charged out of the store and opened fire. But the possibility of police collusion and conspiracy is not raised or explored in the trial.
The jury confers in front of the Confederate soldiers monument across from the courthouse. Despite the nonviolent history of Daniels and Morrisroe, the obvious fact that there was no way prisoners just released from jail would have had access to any weapons and that no weapons were found at the scene, they accept Coleman's "self-defense" lie and quickly return a verdict of "Not Guilty." All 12 jury men then shake Coleman's hand and congratulate him.
Nationally, the verdict is roundly condemned by political leaders and the major media as a perversion of justice. And in a sign that at least some change is finally coming to the Deep South, the Birmingham News describes it as "an obscene caricature of justice," and the Atlanta Constitution, which had refused to even cover the The March to Montgomery 6 months earlier, writes that the verdict "has broken the heart of Dixie." Attorney General Flowers is blunter, stating that the verdict represents 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. Die-hard white racists agree with one thing he says, they plaster "License to Kill" bumper stickers next to their Confederate flag plates. (Trial 1-2).
“I would shoot them both tomorrow,” Coleman insisted years later. After all, they were “outsiders from the North.” (Troy 6).
Then-Presiding [Episcopal] Bishop John Hines said that what Coleman’s acquittal showed “about the likelihood of minorities securing even-handed justice in some parts of this country should jar the conscience of all men who still believe in the concept of justice in this land of hope.”
Instead of attributing Coleman’s release to the price a free society pays for the jury system, Hines said it was “the fearful price extracted from society for the administration of the system by people whose prejudices lead them to sacrifice justice upon the altar of their irrational fears” (Schjonberg 9).
Looking back, Stokely Carmichael related: Jonathan's murder grieved us. His wasn't the first death we'd experienced. But it was in some ways the one closest to me as an organizer. I'd thought they might have been gunning for me that night when they shot Silas McGhee in my car. That brother survived. But this one. ... Now I knew the kind of pressure I'd watched Bob Moses endure. I don't mean I understood or sympathized. Everyone had understood. But, now I felt what Bob must have been feeling, the pressure, the weight of the responsibility, the sorrow. But we couldn't let that stop the work. That's precisely what the killers intended. However, from then on, a little too late, the project staff took the strong position, nonnegotiable, that to allow whites in would be tantamount to inviting their deaths. That became our policy. And we armed ourselves (Trial 3).
Today, America’s Colemans are disgraced, while people like Daniels are canonized. The ESCRU launched a campaign, Operation Southern Justice, to integrate Southern juries. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, the Episcopal Church added Jonathan Daniels to the Church Calendar, marking his martyrdom every Aug. 14 (Troy 7).
Works cited:
“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/...
“The Trial of Tom Coleman.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonatha...
It was afternoon. And the street was very eerie. There was a quietness over that downtown area that made us feel really, really eerie. ... What really prevailed that day was that we were thirsty and needed — wanted something to drink. And so we decided that everybody shouldn't go to the store just Morrisroe, Daniels, me, and Joyce Bailey. ... As we approached the store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman. At that time I didn't know his name; I found that out later. I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But my mind kind of blanked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
[Daniels yanks Ruby out of the line of fire.] Jonathan was behind me and I felt a tug. The next thing I knew there was this blast, and I had fallen down. I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I heard another shot go off and I looked down and I was covered with blood. I didn't realize that Jonathan had been shot at that point. I thought I was the one who had been shot.
Morrisroe was running with Joyce Bailey ... he's holding her hand and he's not letting it go for nothing. And he's running with her, and he did not let go of her hands until he was shot in the back, and she kept running and he fell. ... I made a decision that I would just lie there, and maybe if I lie there, then Coleman would think that I was dead and then I could get help for the other people. He walked over me and kicked me and in his blind rage he thought I was dead.
Joyce Bailey had escaped and she ran back around the store to the side near an old abandoned car. ... very close to where I had fallen. And to her credit she did not leave until she could determine who was alive and who was dead. So she started calling my name, "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby." I heard her and I got up. I didn't stand up, I crawled, literally on my knees, to the side of the car where she was, and when I got to her, she picked me up and we began to run and Coleman realized that I wasn't dead. At that point, he started shooting and yelling things, ... because you have to understand that this man's rage was not depleted. [He] is over Morrisroe's body, standing guard over this body, because [Morrisroe] is calling for water and he'll be damned if he's gonna let anybody give him water. Jimmy Rogers comes over and tries to give Father Morrisroe water, and the man threatens to blow his brains out. So he is not finished. He is on a rampage.
It was a setup. They turned us out of jail knowing that somebody was going to go to that store. It was a setup (Ambush 1-3).
The rest of the group scattered and ran, knocking on doors as they passed homes. “Nobody would let us in; people were so terrified,” Sales said (Schjonberg 7).
Thomas Coleman, a 55-year-old road-construction supervisor, part-time deputy sheriff, and a member of one of the oldest white families in Lowndes County then strolled to the county courthouse where his sister is Superintendent of Schools and calls his friend Al Lingo, head of the State Troopers in Montgomery. "I just shot two preachers. You better get on down here" (Ambush 3).
A black doctor with combat experience saved Father Morrisroe’s life, removing his lung and spleen in an 11-hour operation. It took two years before Morrisroe could walk again—and he still feels pain daily (Troy 6).
When other SNCC workers went to look for Daniels’ body, they could not find it, Sales said. “The streets had been swept clean, and you could not tell a murder had taken place.”
Meanwhile, back in Keene that morning, Daniels’ mother, Constance, did not know that her son had even been in jail. She worried when the day’s mail did not include a birthday card for her from Daniels, who never forgot such things. Aug. 20 was her 60th birthday.
Two months before his murder, Daniels wrote this about living with and advocating with blacks in what was known as the so-called Alabama Black Belt: “I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I have truly been 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.”
President Johnson ordered a federal investigation of the shooting. The next day, his chief civil rights aide, Lee White, told Johnson that Daniels’ mother was having a hard time getting her son’s body returned from Alabama. Johnson told White to handle the transportation of Daniels’ corpse.
Carmichael traveled to Keene for Daniels’ funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, the parish that sponsored Daniels for ordination. Carmichael and a group of mourners sang a tearful We Shall Overcome at Daniels’ grave near his father’s at the edge of the Monadnock View Cemetery.
King called Daniels’ death “brutal and bestial,” but said that he had performed “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”
Alice West, with whom Daniels and Upham lived in Selma, said that Daniels had been a part of her family. “We all loved him and trusted him,” she told a website for veterans of the civil rights movement. “He taught my family all about the wonders of God’s love. His death took a toll on my family as well as all the black people in Selma, Alabama” (Schjonberg 7-9).
In less than 12 hours Coleman is released on minimal bail. An all-white Lowndes County grand jury charges Coleman with manslaughter rather than murder. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a racial "moderate" and a political foe of both George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, calls the manslaughter charge "shocking," and assumes charge of the prosecution. But as the trial date approaches, a flood of death threats dissuades Flowers from personally showing up in Lowndes County. He sends a deputy to Hayneville rather than appear in court himself.
The short trial takes place on Wednesday, September 29, little more than a month after the shooting. The Hayneville courthouse is crowded with Coleman's friends and supporters, among them Imperial Klan Wizard Robert Shelton, Grand Dragon Robert Creed, and the three Klansmen who murdered Viola Liuzzo. Circuit Judge Werth Thagard denies the motion from Flower's deputy to raise the charge to murder, denies the motion to change the trial venue out of Lowndes County, and denies the motion to delay the case until Father Morrisroe is recovered enough from his wounds to testify (since the jury trying Coleman will be made up entirely of white men, Flowers considers Morrisroe, the only surviving white witness, crucial to his case). Thagard then removes Flower's deputy and assigns local prosecutor Arthur Gamble — a personal friend of Coleman — to handle the prosecution.
Coleman admits he brought his loaded shotgun to the store that day, but claims he killed Daniels in "self-defense" after the seminary student threatened him with a knife. White friends of Coleman allege that Morrisroe was armed with a pistol, Daniels had a knife, and that "unidentified Negroes" stole the weapons from the crime scene after the shooting. With steadfast courage, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales defy intimidation from the hostile crowd and testify that Coleman murdered Jonathan Daniels and tried to kill Father Morrisroe without any cause or justification.
Most civil rights activists familiar with the events are convinced that the shooting was a planned ambush. They believe that the abrupt eviction of the incarcerated protesters out of the jail into the street was not a coincidence, but rather an action pre-arranged between Coleman and the jailors. When he was ready with his loaded shotgun, they set up his targets. As soon as he saw the mixed group of Black and white, he charged out of the store and opened fire. But the possibility of police collusion and conspiracy is not raised or explored in the trial.
The jury confers in front of the Confederate soldiers monument across from the courthouse. Despite the nonviolent history of Daniels and Morrisroe, the obvious fact that there was no way prisoners just released from jail would have had access to any weapons and that no weapons were found at the scene, they accept Coleman's "self-defense" lie and quickly return a verdict of "Not Guilty." All 12 jury men then shake Coleman's hand and congratulate him.
Nationally, the verdict is roundly condemned by political leaders and the major media as a perversion of justice. And in a sign that at least some change is finally coming to the Deep South, the Birmingham News describes it as "an obscene caricature of justice," and the Atlanta Constitution, which had refused to even cover the The March to Montgomery 6 months earlier, writes that the verdict "has broken the heart of Dixie." Attorney General Flowers is blunter, stating that the verdict represents 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. Die-hard white racists agree with one thing he says, they plaster "License to Kill" bumper stickers next to their Confederate flag plates. (Trial 1-2).
“I would shoot them both tomorrow,” Coleman insisted years later. After all, they were “outsiders from the North.” (Troy 6).
Then-Presiding [Episcopal] Bishop John Hines said that what Coleman’s acquittal showed “about the likelihood of minorities securing even-handed justice in some parts of this country should jar the conscience of all men who still believe in the concept of justice in this land of hope.”
Instead of attributing Coleman’s release to the price a free society pays for the jury system, Hines said it was “the fearful price extracted from society for the administration of the system by people whose prejudices lead them to sacrifice justice upon the altar of their irrational fears” (Schjonberg 9).
Looking back, Stokely Carmichael related: Jonathan's murder grieved us. His wasn't the first death we'd experienced. But it was in some ways the one closest to me as an organizer. I'd thought they might have been gunning for me that night when they shot Silas McGhee in my car. That brother survived. But this one. ... Now I knew the kind of pressure I'd watched Bob Moses endure. I don't mean I understood or sympathized. Everyone had understood. But, now I felt what Bob must have been feeling, the pressure, the weight of the responsibility, the sorrow. But we couldn't let that stop the work. That's precisely what the killers intended. However, from then on, a little too late, the project staff took the strong position, nonnegotiable, that to allow whites in would be tantamount to inviting their deaths. That became our policy. And we armed ourselves (Trial 3).
Today, America’s Colemans are disgraced, while people like Daniels are canonized. The ESCRU launched a campaign, Operation Southern Justice, to integrate Southern juries. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, the Episcopal Church added Jonathan Daniels to the Church Calendar, marking his martyrdom every Aug. 14 (Troy 7).
Works cited:
“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/...
“The Trial of Tom Coleman.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm...
Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonatha...
