Many touched by Jonathan Daniels’ life and legacy return to Alabama to remember

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Aug 15, 2015
by Susan Reing

... On Friday, Upham and her partner, Lauren Gough, joined a delegation from the Episcopal Divinity School that is on a prayerful pilgrimage visiting key sites in the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s. Many of the stops Friday followed in the footsteps of Keene native Daniels, including a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday confrontation on March 7, 1965, in which demonstrators were severely beaten by local authorities ...

Today, remembrances of Daniels in Alabama will climax when hundreds of people from around the country gather in Hayneville, a small town about 35 miles from Selma, where Daniels was shot and killed by a local special deputy on Aug. 20, 1965. Stops will include the jail where Daniels and others were held for a week before the shooting, the site of the shooting itself and the courthouse where former deputy Tom Coleman was tried for his murder and acquitted by an all-white jury ...

Daniels was a seminarian at the divinity school in Cambridge, Mass., then called the Episcopal Theological School, when he answered Martin Luther King’s call to join the voter rights movement in the summer of 1965 ...

Friday also included a stop at the Viola Liuzzo Roadside Memorial. A mother of five and activist from Michigan, she was killed March 25, 1965, in her car, reportedly by the Klu Klux Klan ...

http://www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/bridge-to-the-past-many-touched-by-jonathan-daniels-life/article_19d34d3b-76cf-5476-a1d2-0a118197f9ac.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Edmund Pettus Bridge

Brian van der Brug
Los Angeles Times
Posted: Saturday, August 15, 2015 8:00 am


A billboard near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., features Civil War general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest on horseback with the quote "Keep the Skeer On 'Em." Not a subtle welcome to town. While much in Selma has changed in the 50 years since Bloody Sunday, many things have not.
http://www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/edmund-pettus-bridge/image_03390895-629a-57d2-9d8e-23550d3774a5.html

[1939]

2. Johathon Daniels was a friend of mine

We were ushers at the cadet chapel at the Virginia Military Institute. Jon was our class valedictorian. I remember his closing remark, "I wish you the joy of a purposeful life". At the time, he was suspended between a philosophy of secular humanism and religion. while in graduate school in English (Danforth Scholarship as i remember), he chose religion and entered an Episcopal Seminary. While in the seminary, he answered Martin Luther King's call to come to the south.

http://admissions.vmi.edu/jonathan-daniels-61/

[struggle4progress]

3. what a glorious and terrible time that was

[1939]

4. Yes

but between a combination of "black power" and white resistance, our dreams of a post-racial society were shattered.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. Our family is Episcopalian, and the memory of the young martyr Jonathan Daniels...

is forever in our hearts. Blessings to you for posting this tribute to him.

[jcboon]

6. A saint for our time