Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "ruby-sales"
Civil Rights Events -- SCOPE Project -- Recollections
It was hope that took them south in June 1965. They were idealistic college kids, many still teenagers, clutching hard to an outsized hope and a belief that they could change the world. …
With a characteristically rousing oratory, King welcomed them, some 350 students from universities across the country who had enlisted in the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project. It was a new effort of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to register and energize black voters as the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 wended its way through the legislative process.
Coming on the heels of the historic march in Selma, Alabama, SCOPE was a follow-up to, and extension of, the well-known Freedom Summer a year earlier. The hope for the new initiative was not only to register voters but also to seed and grow lasting social change by galvanizing poor black communities.
“How happy I am to see you here in Atlanta, in such enthusiastic and spirit-filled numbers, to become a part of what I believe will be one of the most significant developments ever to take place in our whole struggle for freedom and human dignity,” King said to kick off a weeklong orientation and training in nonviolent action. “You are here because history is being made here, and this generation of students is found where history is being made.”
Among the crowd of students that day was a contingent from UC Santa Barbara. The seaside campus was a stop on a SCOPE recruiting tour headlined by noted activist, SCLC leader and trusted King confidant Hosea Williams.
“When I heard him speak, I was ready,” recalled Lanny Kaufer, who was a freshman at UCSB in 1965, when Williams spoke on campus. “That feeling that things I’d taken for granted, I suddenly realized, were not the way I thought they were. The feeling that somebody should do something about this, about civil rights, and I realized I am somebody. I can do something.”
Sussex County, Virginia, was a far cry from Santa Barbara. Rural, extremely poor and completely segregated, it was a world away in geography and ideology alike.
The UCSB group arrived in Sussex with hopeful hearts and open minds. They were welcomed into the black community where they were to stay with kindness, enthusiasm and no lack of wonder.
“During dinner on our very first night, the young son of the family that hosted me kept staring and staring,” Kaufer, of Ojai, said recently. “His mother noticed and told him it wasn’t polite to stare, and he said, ‘But Mama, he eats just like we do.’ That moment I will never forget — that realization of what racial segregation does to people. To go out on the street the next day with the kids all around us — them wanting to touch my arm and commenting that my skin felt just like theirs — it was a revelation.”
Just hours into their assignment — the SCOPE volunteers were dispatched in clusters to similar counties across the South — Kaufer and his fellow students were already seeing, on a small scale, how King’s bold prediction could come to pass.
“You will do far more this summer than teach literacy, canvass for voters, educate Negroes in community organization,” King had told them in Atlanta. “You are going to make the entire nation a classroom. You’re going to teach tens of millions that ugly facts of injustice exist — and yet they can be overcome by a passionate zeal for decency and brotherhood.”
…
“From a young age I had a very deep belief, which I hold to this day, that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and equal opportunity,” said [Peggy Ryan] Poole, who sought out and joined SCOPE on her own as an 18-year-old freshman at Chico State University. She was assigned to travel and work with the UCSB chapter during the orientation week in Atlanta.
“My parents kept all my letters from that summer and in one of them I say, ‘I’ve never been happier,’” Poole recalled recently. “It was because I had a sense of purpose and solidarity. And there was so much courage. There was dignity. These were poor people living in incredibly difficult circumstances, and a lot of them weren’t educated or politically savvy at all. But they believed in what was right. That made a huge impression on me.
“People really put their lives on the line for basic things — for their right to vote — and it’s not exaggerating to say that,” she added. “It was a very happy time for me. I was doing something meaningful, with people who were very inspirational. We were seeing people at their finest. What I learned is that you treat everyone with dignity and you can make a difference, one person at a time” (Leachman 1-10).
Joyce Brians (later known as Maria Gitin), a freshman at San Francisco State College, was assigned to work in Camden, Wilcox County, Alabama. She wrote about her immediate experiences in a July 9 letter she sent to her family.
I had a rather narrow escape today & when I got back to The Academy [an all black Presbyterian private school in Camden that was used as our headquarters after the church was damaged and closed by the police] & got your letters it made me so happy I wanted to cry. I sure think about you all often.
I was with a Negro boy, girl & one other white boy today walking down the highway when a man in a pickup truck tried to run over us; we jumped across a ditch but he kept coming back to try for more. He had a shotgun pointed at us, too. We finally decided to try to get to a phone. We went into a Negro cafe & tried to call the Academy (now SCOPE headquarters) but the line was busy. Our white Klan friend kept cruising up & down in front of the place while we two white folk hid in the outhouse. The woman who owned the place got scared & made us leave. We hid in the woods & tried to plan what to do. Finally the Negro boy went to try to find another phone. It took him over an hour. At last someone from the Academy came to pick us up & we made it safely back to town. I wasn't scared — just mad. Now our chances are blown in that community — Arlington, 'cuz the folks are scared of us.
I'm so tired of living in constant danger that I can't be afraid anymore. Every nite when I go to bed I just say "Thank God no one got killed today." We are getting people registered, tho' the Klan is trying its damndest to see that we don't.
To answer your questions:
It is very hot. It rains & thunders & lightenings for about an hour every day — usually while we are out canvassing. We seldom get cars. I have walked as much as 25 miles in one day.
I move from house to house, nite to nite. Everyone is afraid to keep us longer than that. They won't let me stay at The Academy anymore except in emergencies like tonite (there are Klansmen at the gate to the Academy but they can't come up here) cuz we didn't get that letter yet [from Rev Hosea Williams approving me for this housing]. I usually share a double or single bed with another girl. I've never had a room or bed to myself. Few of the homes have running water or electricity. I've never stayed in a place with indoor toilets.
We eat on the run — ice cream bars, milk — whatever we can find. Few people can feed us because they are so poor. When they do — it is usually fried chicken, grits, corn, beans, etc. I seldom get vegetables or meat and never get any kind of fruit. I guess I miss that the most. I'm losing weight slowly but we have to eat when we can, as much as we can cuz we never know where our next meal is coming from.
I seem to survive on the sleep I get. Considering I had pneumonia 2 wks ago I'm in great shape. I do get tired quicker than the others but the doctor said he's never seen anyone shake it so quickly.
I haven't been to church at all since I've been here cuz we aren't allowed in the white one and the Negro one has been closed by the sheriff. But I pray constantly & read my Bible every nite. Whenever a few of us gather for meals I ask grace. I feel in God's hands more than I ever have before.
My work right now is mainly going from shack to shack trying to convince people to get off their behinds & get down to register. We usually split up and get local kids to show us around. We never work in white pairs cuz the people are still scared of us. [Note: these comments pain me today; the local people were courageous beyond belief — just living there was a constant struggle. I was echoing the talk from leaders who were frustrated with the pace of registration.] We get all sorts of reactions and excuses, but we also get the rewards of seeing people stand in line at the courthouse all day & finally walk home with a new kind of pride that says "I'm a registered voter." We have what we call Mass Meetings where we give pep talks. They are rather like football rallies. I've never gotten to really 'preach' but I've given a couple of short talks.
… I am getting pretty tan. I wish I could get really black & blend in more-- I feel so conspicuous — I'm so white. I've almost caused more near accidents. White folks just about drive off the road when they see me walking down the street carrying a Negro child. But I'd say they are just going to have to get used to it.
…
… By late July it felt more like the locals were protecting us in emergency impromptu freedom houses on a night-by-night basis than that we were being helpful to them. We felt bad, guilty that we weren't giving the locals more and instead, were taking from them: food and bed space mostly. But worst of all, that we were bringing them into even greater danger (Gitin Letter 1-5).
Maria Gitin (Joyce Brians then) wrote separately about two local black activists that assisted her.
One of the local young men who canvassed with me was 16 year-old Robert Powell, a well-spoken good looking student who had a smile that charmed doors open for us. I'd stand back and he'd knock. Then he'd introduce me or sometimes we'd both stand at the door. Robert had good ideas about what would work best with which residents. If they only saw me, sometimes the door wouldn't open or we'd be quickly asked to leave. Often women were working at home farming, doing laundry and ironing, cooking. Sometime we got lucky. A woman would open the door with a wide smile and look of near disbelief. "My, my, my, Lawd have mercy — look at them!" A heavy set lady with her housework rag wrapped around her head waved me in, "You is the first one of them to ever to set foot in this house by invitation. We had the sheriff come out once and break everything up after my son was in the march but that were no invite. You are most welcome here young lady, most welcome."
As soon as I began working in my assigned areas, Coy, Boiling Springs and Gees Bend, locals told us why they had not yet registered. They repeated stories of lynching in the too near past, recent beatings and being fired from scarce decent-paying jobs at the okra canning or box making factory.
One afternoon Robert wanted to stop at one of the little country stores for a soda. We weren't supposed to go into any place where whites might see us together but I didn't want to show Robert my fear. There was a white man in there. He threw one glance at me before he started for Robert who took off running. I ran the opposite direction. I wasn't quite sure how to get back to where I was staying but growing up in the country did me some good. I walked along the red dirt road until I saw trucks where the highway might be, then I got oriented back to my host's house. A few weeks later, in nearby Haneyville on August 21st, Rev. Jonathan Daniels, a white minister, was walking out of a small store after buying sodas with Ruby Sales and Jimmy Rogers of SNCC. He was shot and killed by a racist incensed at the integrated trio of civil rights field workers.
Coy quickly became one of my favorite places to work because it was where Ethel Brooks lived. Ethel was only five years older than me but I looked up to her as one of the most active, progressive and exciting adults.
Ethel was an attractive, high-energy twenty-four year old with medium brown skin, dimples, a huge grin and thick unruly hair. She had a seven-year old son that her mother watched while she and her Dad were out doing community organizing. Ethel had encouraged and "carried" (the local term for drove) students to participate in the Selma marches. She had already been in the Camden jail several times and kept a pair of old paisley pedal pushers that she called her "jail pants" in the back of her car.
I wasn't the only person attracted to Ethel's fiery brand of leadership. She had convinced dozens of high school students to join her on the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma — a march many of you were in — and the folks we just were with three weeks ago of back there still recall surviving with pride.
Once we were driving back from her place in the bend area of Coy to Camden. A Lane Butane (local Klan leaders) pickup truck started chasing us. Ethel tried to outrun them, driving faster and faster over the bumpy one lane road. At the crossroads where Harvey's store is, she pulled onto a sidetrack in back and hid until the pickup passed us. Whew!
Then, to my horror, she pulled out behind them and started tailgating them with her window rolled down, yelling and laughing wildly. Another worker and I were screaming at her "Ethel stop! Stop!" We were laughing, but at the same time we were scared half to death. Finally, she backed off. The white men glared back at her with faces that said "Crazy lady. We'll get you next time." before they roared on. She wasn't always nonviolent, but her reckless courage sure made us feel braver (Gitin Story 1-5).
The passage of the Voting Right Act August 6 did not stop hard-line segregationist intimidation and violence. Sherlie Labedis’s excerpt from her book, You Came Here to Die, Didn't You? provides context and emotional consequence.
During the summer of 1965, I was a 125-pound natural blonde, eighteen years old, and I was absolutely committed to equality. I was a voter registration worker for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. My project was SCOPE, or Summer Community Organization and Political Education project. …
Friday, August 20, Pineville, South Carolina. I need to pee, but I can't walk down the outside stairs to the toilet. I'm scared! In the loft of the Freedom House past midnight, soaked in sweat, our sheets thrown aside, Nellie, Carol and I pray for relief. Relief from fatigue, heat and constant nagging fear that drains our energy. Our bodies crave sleep. Can't. I'm frightened to death listening for the sinister crunch of gravel in front of the Freedom House and the crash of a Molotov cocktail smashing the storefront window setting the building on fire with us in it. The past two months here have taken their toll on me, on all of us. For Herb and Henry, who live here, that toll has been life-long.
I need to pee, but night frightens me most. Secrets happen in the dark. We can't escape in deep slumber, but occasionally there might be a tattered dream of home, the fleeting face of a boyfriend or the memory of sleeping in. Not tonight. A legion of mosquitoes plagues us, whining in the oppressive darkness. And when they land, a smack follows.
I feel the world is about to explode. Something waits in the night. I know it as I drift off.
"Fire!" a male voice yells below.
I jump up to look out the window expecting the male workers' rooms to be engulfed in flame, but a dull red glow highlights the horizon across the street accentuating silhouettes of loblolly and yellow pine.
"It's not here," I cry. "Looks like it's over near Redeemer."
Scrambling for our clothes in the dark, we fly barefoot down the stairs. Mrs. Simmons waits next to her car her black face fierce in Herb's headlights as he, Carol and Henry peel out of the parking lot spitting gravel against us. Nellie and I jump in Mrs. Simmons' car and she races after Herb toward that ominous glow. John stays behind next to the phone.
My voice quivers when I blurt out, "Could it be Redeemer?"
Mrs. Simmons worships there. We consider it our "home" church.
"Do you think it's the Klan?" I exclaim.
"You jus' hush now, you hear?" Mrs. Simmons hisses, both anger and resignation in her voice.
It's our fault. If we weren't here, there wouldn't be a fire. Then I look at Mrs. Simmons, her jaw set, her lips tight. Is she thinking the same thing? Or does she feel responsible? I don't have the guts to ask her so I never find out.
We round the bend and a blazing Redeemer fills our view.
"Lord, have mercy," Mrs. Simmons whispers. She steers the car onto the grassy shoulder and stops behind Herb.
"We are so sorry," Nellie breathes. And we are.
Redeemer has been a base for our voter registration drive. Rev. Gadsden and many of the congregation support white civil rights workers in their midst. On registration day folks meet here at Redeemer to catch the bus to the county seat. The church, surrounded by cotton fields on a rural road, obviously offered too tempting a target to those who would rid the community of outside agitators: Us.
We leave the cars only to shrink back from the blast of heat.
"Is that a fire truck?" Carol asks in disbelief as a truck passes us and pulls up to two houses on the right of the church.
"It belongs to Robert Bobbitt," Herb says. "He owns the cotton gin near Day Dawn Church. He's white, but he's wanted a local fire department as long as I can remember. The St. Stephen Fire Department is at least ten minutes away so he has his own truck."
Bobbitt runs out the hose. Henry and other neighbors hurry to help him. Even though there's no hope for the church, the houses might be saved.
"How'd it start?" Nellie asks.
"Fire bomb," Herb angrily picks up a hand full of sand and hurls it against the air.
"White guys in a pickup truck."
A pine tree explodes in a spray of sparks as flames reach its branches, fence posts char and suddenly the second story of Redeemer collapses with a horrifying whoosh and thud. Mrs. Simmons shudders.
"Why did it burn so fast?" I demand. "It's brick."
"It's veneer," she says simply. "We jus' finished it last year. We passed that collection plate lots of Sundays to pay for this rubble. It was built in 1911, jus' an old frame church."
Oh, my God, we're not playing I realize as we stare, hypnotized while flames die down and the fire is reduced to hot coals.
"The Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform," Mrs. Simmons says as she turns away from the fire and strides back to the car as we hurry to follow. "Some folks is gon' be mad with me, but most gon' be mad about our church. We need to plan a mass meetin'. The Lord's will be done."
She seems resigned, but I am far beyond the outrage I felt watching televised burning churches in Mississippi or Alabama. The Civil Rights Movement means Martin Luther King Jr., sit-ins, marches and Negroes voting for the first time. Outrage would be a relief from the guilt I now feel.
This is no longer an adventure or an opportunity to help others. Someone destroyed this House of God because we are here. Pineville is just a rural area, literally a wide spot on the road. Martin Luther King didn't come here. It isn't part of a Supreme Court case changing the way people interact in the world. No news cameraman captures this devastation. We four came and the most obvious proof of our arrival lies blackened before us. And tomorrow, we canvass for voters again (Labedis 1-5).
Works cited:
Gitin, Maria. “Letter From Wilcox County, Alabama.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Gitin, Maria. “Story From Wilcox County, AL.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Labedis, Sherie. “Fireball in the Night.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Leachman, Shelly. “For Freedom and Human Dignity.” The Current. April 14, 2015. Web. https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015316...
With a characteristically rousing oratory, King welcomed them, some 350 students from universities across the country who had enlisted in the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project. It was a new effort of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to register and energize black voters as the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 wended its way through the legislative process.
Coming on the heels of the historic march in Selma, Alabama, SCOPE was a follow-up to, and extension of, the well-known Freedom Summer a year earlier. The hope for the new initiative was not only to register voters but also to seed and grow lasting social change by galvanizing poor black communities.
“How happy I am to see you here in Atlanta, in such enthusiastic and spirit-filled numbers, to become a part of what I believe will be one of the most significant developments ever to take place in our whole struggle for freedom and human dignity,” King said to kick off a weeklong orientation and training in nonviolent action. “You are here because history is being made here, and this generation of students is found where history is being made.”
Among the crowd of students that day was a contingent from UC Santa Barbara. The seaside campus was a stop on a SCOPE recruiting tour headlined by noted activist, SCLC leader and trusted King confidant Hosea Williams.
“When I heard him speak, I was ready,” recalled Lanny Kaufer, who was a freshman at UCSB in 1965, when Williams spoke on campus. “That feeling that things I’d taken for granted, I suddenly realized, were not the way I thought they were. The feeling that somebody should do something about this, about civil rights, and I realized I am somebody. I can do something.”
Sussex County, Virginia, was a far cry from Santa Barbara. Rural, extremely poor and completely segregated, it was a world away in geography and ideology alike.
The UCSB group arrived in Sussex with hopeful hearts and open minds. They were welcomed into the black community where they were to stay with kindness, enthusiasm and no lack of wonder.
“During dinner on our very first night, the young son of the family that hosted me kept staring and staring,” Kaufer, of Ojai, said recently. “His mother noticed and told him it wasn’t polite to stare, and he said, ‘But Mama, he eats just like we do.’ That moment I will never forget — that realization of what racial segregation does to people. To go out on the street the next day with the kids all around us — them wanting to touch my arm and commenting that my skin felt just like theirs — it was a revelation.”
Just hours into their assignment — the SCOPE volunteers were dispatched in clusters to similar counties across the South — Kaufer and his fellow students were already seeing, on a small scale, how King’s bold prediction could come to pass.
“You will do far more this summer than teach literacy, canvass for voters, educate Negroes in community organization,” King had told them in Atlanta. “You are going to make the entire nation a classroom. You’re going to teach tens of millions that ugly facts of injustice exist — and yet they can be overcome by a passionate zeal for decency and brotherhood.”
…
“From a young age I had a very deep belief, which I hold to this day, that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and equal opportunity,” said [Peggy Ryan] Poole, who sought out and joined SCOPE on her own as an 18-year-old freshman at Chico State University. She was assigned to travel and work with the UCSB chapter during the orientation week in Atlanta.
“My parents kept all my letters from that summer and in one of them I say, ‘I’ve never been happier,’” Poole recalled recently. “It was because I had a sense of purpose and solidarity. And there was so much courage. There was dignity. These were poor people living in incredibly difficult circumstances, and a lot of them weren’t educated or politically savvy at all. But they believed in what was right. That made a huge impression on me.
“People really put their lives on the line for basic things — for their right to vote — and it’s not exaggerating to say that,” she added. “It was a very happy time for me. I was doing something meaningful, with people who were very inspirational. We were seeing people at their finest. What I learned is that you treat everyone with dignity and you can make a difference, one person at a time” (Leachman 1-10).
Joyce Brians (later known as Maria Gitin), a freshman at San Francisco State College, was assigned to work in Camden, Wilcox County, Alabama. She wrote about her immediate experiences in a July 9 letter she sent to her family.
I had a rather narrow escape today & when I got back to The Academy [an all black Presbyterian private school in Camden that was used as our headquarters after the church was damaged and closed by the police] & got your letters it made me so happy I wanted to cry. I sure think about you all often.
I was with a Negro boy, girl & one other white boy today walking down the highway when a man in a pickup truck tried to run over us; we jumped across a ditch but he kept coming back to try for more. He had a shotgun pointed at us, too. We finally decided to try to get to a phone. We went into a Negro cafe & tried to call the Academy (now SCOPE headquarters) but the line was busy. Our white Klan friend kept cruising up & down in front of the place while we two white folk hid in the outhouse. The woman who owned the place got scared & made us leave. We hid in the woods & tried to plan what to do. Finally the Negro boy went to try to find another phone. It took him over an hour. At last someone from the Academy came to pick us up & we made it safely back to town. I wasn't scared — just mad. Now our chances are blown in that community — Arlington, 'cuz the folks are scared of us.
I'm so tired of living in constant danger that I can't be afraid anymore. Every nite when I go to bed I just say "Thank God no one got killed today." We are getting people registered, tho' the Klan is trying its damndest to see that we don't.
To answer your questions:
It is very hot. It rains & thunders & lightenings for about an hour every day — usually while we are out canvassing. We seldom get cars. I have walked as much as 25 miles in one day.
I move from house to house, nite to nite. Everyone is afraid to keep us longer than that. They won't let me stay at The Academy anymore except in emergencies like tonite (there are Klansmen at the gate to the Academy but they can't come up here) cuz we didn't get that letter yet [from Rev Hosea Williams approving me for this housing]. I usually share a double or single bed with another girl. I've never had a room or bed to myself. Few of the homes have running water or electricity. I've never stayed in a place with indoor toilets.
We eat on the run — ice cream bars, milk — whatever we can find. Few people can feed us because they are so poor. When they do — it is usually fried chicken, grits, corn, beans, etc. I seldom get vegetables or meat and never get any kind of fruit. I guess I miss that the most. I'm losing weight slowly but we have to eat when we can, as much as we can cuz we never know where our next meal is coming from.
I seem to survive on the sleep I get. Considering I had pneumonia 2 wks ago I'm in great shape. I do get tired quicker than the others but the doctor said he's never seen anyone shake it so quickly.
I haven't been to church at all since I've been here cuz we aren't allowed in the white one and the Negro one has been closed by the sheriff. But I pray constantly & read my Bible every nite. Whenever a few of us gather for meals I ask grace. I feel in God's hands more than I ever have before.
My work right now is mainly going from shack to shack trying to convince people to get off their behinds & get down to register. We usually split up and get local kids to show us around. We never work in white pairs cuz the people are still scared of us. [Note: these comments pain me today; the local people were courageous beyond belief — just living there was a constant struggle. I was echoing the talk from leaders who were frustrated with the pace of registration.] We get all sorts of reactions and excuses, but we also get the rewards of seeing people stand in line at the courthouse all day & finally walk home with a new kind of pride that says "I'm a registered voter." We have what we call Mass Meetings where we give pep talks. They are rather like football rallies. I've never gotten to really 'preach' but I've given a couple of short talks.
… I am getting pretty tan. I wish I could get really black & blend in more-- I feel so conspicuous — I'm so white. I've almost caused more near accidents. White folks just about drive off the road when they see me walking down the street carrying a Negro child. But I'd say they are just going to have to get used to it.
…
… By late July it felt more like the locals were protecting us in emergency impromptu freedom houses on a night-by-night basis than that we were being helpful to them. We felt bad, guilty that we weren't giving the locals more and instead, were taking from them: food and bed space mostly. But worst of all, that we were bringing them into even greater danger (Gitin Letter 1-5).
Maria Gitin (Joyce Brians then) wrote separately about two local black activists that assisted her.
One of the local young men who canvassed with me was 16 year-old Robert Powell, a well-spoken good looking student who had a smile that charmed doors open for us. I'd stand back and he'd knock. Then he'd introduce me or sometimes we'd both stand at the door. Robert had good ideas about what would work best with which residents. If they only saw me, sometimes the door wouldn't open or we'd be quickly asked to leave. Often women were working at home farming, doing laundry and ironing, cooking. Sometime we got lucky. A woman would open the door with a wide smile and look of near disbelief. "My, my, my, Lawd have mercy — look at them!" A heavy set lady with her housework rag wrapped around her head waved me in, "You is the first one of them to ever to set foot in this house by invitation. We had the sheriff come out once and break everything up after my son was in the march but that were no invite. You are most welcome here young lady, most welcome."
As soon as I began working in my assigned areas, Coy, Boiling Springs and Gees Bend, locals told us why they had not yet registered. They repeated stories of lynching in the too near past, recent beatings and being fired from scarce decent-paying jobs at the okra canning or box making factory.
One afternoon Robert wanted to stop at one of the little country stores for a soda. We weren't supposed to go into any place where whites might see us together but I didn't want to show Robert my fear. There was a white man in there. He threw one glance at me before he started for Robert who took off running. I ran the opposite direction. I wasn't quite sure how to get back to where I was staying but growing up in the country did me some good. I walked along the red dirt road until I saw trucks where the highway might be, then I got oriented back to my host's house. A few weeks later, in nearby Haneyville on August 21st, Rev. Jonathan Daniels, a white minister, was walking out of a small store after buying sodas with Ruby Sales and Jimmy Rogers of SNCC. He was shot and killed by a racist incensed at the integrated trio of civil rights field workers.
Coy quickly became one of my favorite places to work because it was where Ethel Brooks lived. Ethel was only five years older than me but I looked up to her as one of the most active, progressive and exciting adults.
Ethel was an attractive, high-energy twenty-four year old with medium brown skin, dimples, a huge grin and thick unruly hair. She had a seven-year old son that her mother watched while she and her Dad were out doing community organizing. Ethel had encouraged and "carried" (the local term for drove) students to participate in the Selma marches. She had already been in the Camden jail several times and kept a pair of old paisley pedal pushers that she called her "jail pants" in the back of her car.
I wasn't the only person attracted to Ethel's fiery brand of leadership. She had convinced dozens of high school students to join her on the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma — a march many of you were in — and the folks we just were with three weeks ago of back there still recall surviving with pride.
Once we were driving back from her place in the bend area of Coy to Camden. A Lane Butane (local Klan leaders) pickup truck started chasing us. Ethel tried to outrun them, driving faster and faster over the bumpy one lane road. At the crossroads where Harvey's store is, she pulled onto a sidetrack in back and hid until the pickup passed us. Whew!
Then, to my horror, she pulled out behind them and started tailgating them with her window rolled down, yelling and laughing wildly. Another worker and I were screaming at her "Ethel stop! Stop!" We were laughing, but at the same time we were scared half to death. Finally, she backed off. The white men glared back at her with faces that said "Crazy lady. We'll get you next time." before they roared on. She wasn't always nonviolent, but her reckless courage sure made us feel braver (Gitin Story 1-5).
The passage of the Voting Right Act August 6 did not stop hard-line segregationist intimidation and violence. Sherlie Labedis’s excerpt from her book, You Came Here to Die, Didn't You? provides context and emotional consequence.
During the summer of 1965, I was a 125-pound natural blonde, eighteen years old, and I was absolutely committed to equality. I was a voter registration worker for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. My project was SCOPE, or Summer Community Organization and Political Education project. …
Friday, August 20, Pineville, South Carolina. I need to pee, but I can't walk down the outside stairs to the toilet. I'm scared! In the loft of the Freedom House past midnight, soaked in sweat, our sheets thrown aside, Nellie, Carol and I pray for relief. Relief from fatigue, heat and constant nagging fear that drains our energy. Our bodies crave sleep. Can't. I'm frightened to death listening for the sinister crunch of gravel in front of the Freedom House and the crash of a Molotov cocktail smashing the storefront window setting the building on fire with us in it. The past two months here have taken their toll on me, on all of us. For Herb and Henry, who live here, that toll has been life-long.
I need to pee, but night frightens me most. Secrets happen in the dark. We can't escape in deep slumber, but occasionally there might be a tattered dream of home, the fleeting face of a boyfriend or the memory of sleeping in. Not tonight. A legion of mosquitoes plagues us, whining in the oppressive darkness. And when they land, a smack follows.
I feel the world is about to explode. Something waits in the night. I know it as I drift off.
"Fire!" a male voice yells below.
I jump up to look out the window expecting the male workers' rooms to be engulfed in flame, but a dull red glow highlights the horizon across the street accentuating silhouettes of loblolly and yellow pine.
"It's not here," I cry. "Looks like it's over near Redeemer."
Scrambling for our clothes in the dark, we fly barefoot down the stairs. Mrs. Simmons waits next to her car her black face fierce in Herb's headlights as he, Carol and Henry peel out of the parking lot spitting gravel against us. Nellie and I jump in Mrs. Simmons' car and she races after Herb toward that ominous glow. John stays behind next to the phone.
My voice quivers when I blurt out, "Could it be Redeemer?"
Mrs. Simmons worships there. We consider it our "home" church.
"Do you think it's the Klan?" I exclaim.
"You jus' hush now, you hear?" Mrs. Simmons hisses, both anger and resignation in her voice.
It's our fault. If we weren't here, there wouldn't be a fire. Then I look at Mrs. Simmons, her jaw set, her lips tight. Is she thinking the same thing? Or does she feel responsible? I don't have the guts to ask her so I never find out.
We round the bend and a blazing Redeemer fills our view.
"Lord, have mercy," Mrs. Simmons whispers. She steers the car onto the grassy shoulder and stops behind Herb.
"We are so sorry," Nellie breathes. And we are.
Redeemer has been a base for our voter registration drive. Rev. Gadsden and many of the congregation support white civil rights workers in their midst. On registration day folks meet here at Redeemer to catch the bus to the county seat. The church, surrounded by cotton fields on a rural road, obviously offered too tempting a target to those who would rid the community of outside agitators: Us.
We leave the cars only to shrink back from the blast of heat.
"Is that a fire truck?" Carol asks in disbelief as a truck passes us and pulls up to two houses on the right of the church.
"It belongs to Robert Bobbitt," Herb says. "He owns the cotton gin near Day Dawn Church. He's white, but he's wanted a local fire department as long as I can remember. The St. Stephen Fire Department is at least ten minutes away so he has his own truck."
Bobbitt runs out the hose. Henry and other neighbors hurry to help him. Even though there's no hope for the church, the houses might be saved.
"How'd it start?" Nellie asks.
"Fire bomb," Herb angrily picks up a hand full of sand and hurls it against the air.
"White guys in a pickup truck."
A pine tree explodes in a spray of sparks as flames reach its branches, fence posts char and suddenly the second story of Redeemer collapses with a horrifying whoosh and thud. Mrs. Simmons shudders.
"Why did it burn so fast?" I demand. "It's brick."
"It's veneer," she says simply. "We jus' finished it last year. We passed that collection plate lots of Sundays to pay for this rubble. It was built in 1911, jus' an old frame church."
Oh, my God, we're not playing I realize as we stare, hypnotized while flames die down and the fire is reduced to hot coals.
"The Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform," Mrs. Simmons says as she turns away from the fire and strides back to the car as we hurry to follow. "Some folks is gon' be mad with me, but most gon' be mad about our church. We need to plan a mass meetin'. The Lord's will be done."
She seems resigned, but I am far beyond the outrage I felt watching televised burning churches in Mississippi or Alabama. The Civil Rights Movement means Martin Luther King Jr., sit-ins, marches and Negroes voting for the first time. Outrage would be a relief from the guilt I now feel.
This is no longer an adventure or an opportunity to help others. Someone destroyed this House of God because we are here. Pineville is just a rural area, literally a wide spot on the road. Martin Luther King didn't come here. It isn't part of a Supreme Court case changing the way people interact in the world. No news cameraman captures this devastation. We four came and the most obvious proof of our arrival lies blackened before us. And tomorrow, we canvass for voters again (Labedis 1-5).
Works cited:
Gitin, Maria. “Letter From Wilcox County, Alabama.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Gitin, Maria. “Story From Wilcox County, AL.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Labedis, Sherie. “Fireball in the Night.” Remembrances of the SCOPE Project. Civil Rights Movement Articles & Speeches by Movement Veterans
Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, 1965-66. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/nars/gitin2.htm
Leachman, Shelly. “For Freedom and Human Dignity.” The Current. April 14, 2015. Web. https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015316...
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...
