By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Wed Aug 19, 2015, 02:00 PM - Edit history (2)

Black civil rights activist recalls white ally who took a shotgun blast for her

Local

By Michael E. Ruane August 16 

By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965. ... She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama.
....

But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place.
....

Much has been written about Daniels, the 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire who was killed that hot afternoon in Hayneville, Ala. ... Although now largely forgotten, his slaying was front-page news across a country, then as today, torn by racial violence and upheaval, and was the latest in a string of brutal attacks on civil rights workers in the South.



Jonathan M. Daniels, a native of Keene, N.H., was valedictorian of the VMI Class of 1961. (Photo by VMI)

....
Since then, Daniels’s name has been added to the Episcopal calendar, with an Aug. 14 feast day. A Daniels memorial has been erected in Hayneville. And a limestone sculpture of Daniels has just been created inside the Washington National Cathedral.
....

{Sales} praised him. “You have to understand the significance of Jonathan’s witness,” she said. He had graduated from the Virginia Military Institute. A doctor’s son, he had studied at Harvard and at a traditionally white Episcopal divinity school. ... “He walked away from the king’s table,” she said. “He could have had any benefit he wanted, because he was young, white, brilliant and male. ”

Jonathan Myrick Daniels (VMI Class of 1961) Civil Rights Hero

About Jonathan Daniels

Jonathan M. Daniels, a native of Keene, New Hampshire, was valedictorian of the VMI Class of 1961. He was awarded the prestigious Danforth Daniels at VMIFellowship for post-graduate study and enrolled at Harvard University to continue his study of English literature. Daniels soon realized that he was called to the ministry. While a seminarian at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts he responded to the pleas of Dr. Martin Luther King for clergy to become more actively involved in the Civil Rights movement, and traveled to Alabama to assist with voter registration efforts in the South.

In August 1965 Daniels and 22 others were arrested for participating in a voter rights demonstration in Fort Deposit, Alabama, and transferred to the county jail in nearby Hayneville. Shortly after being released on August 20, Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, and Daniels accompanied two black teenagers, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales, to a Hayneville store to buy a soda. They were met on the steps by Tom Coleman, a construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff, who was carrying a shotgun. Coleman aimed his gun at sixteen year old Ruby Sales; Daniels pushed her to the ground in order to protect her, saving her life. The shotgun blast killed Daniels instantly; Morrisroe was seriously wounded. When he heard of the tragedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels."

Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 years after his martyrdom

Young seminarian gave his life in Alabama to save fellow civil rights worker

By Mary Frances Schjonberg | August 13, 2015

{Episcopal News Service} In Fort Deposit, Alabama, the day of Aug. 14, 1965, began hot and humid, and it only got more oppressive as it went on.

It was the beginning of the last six days of Jonathan Daniels’ life, most of which would be spent in a squalid county jail and which would end with the 26-year-old dying from a shotgun blast as he saved the life of another. He would become the 26th civil rights worker to be murdered.

[marble falls]

1. Moving memorial. k&r.

[roody]

2. Knr

[Gormy Cuss]

3. “I never imagined that ... once again black people would be fighting for our lives....”

Fifty years after the slaying, Sales said, she is dismayed by the state of race relations in the country.

With all the achievements of the civil rights era, “I never imagined that there would be people working overtime to dismantle those changes,” she said. “I never imagined that . . . once again black people would be fighting for our lives....”

“And I never thought that at this stage of my life, as I face being close to the riverside, that now we have to walk back over territory that I thought we had fertilized forever,” she said.

[Angry Dragon]

4. kick

[malaise]

5. Thanks for this post

Rec

[Archae]

6. I noticed this about the shooter...

He was let off the hook by an all-white jury and judge, and went to his grave thinking he did nothing wrong, and would do it again.

[oasis]

7. No greater love.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. 50 years ago, VMI valedictorian in 1961 was gunned down in Alabama

Schapiro: 50 years ago, VMI valedictorian in 1961 was gunned down in Alabama

The article says he was an English major. I know someone whose uncle taught English at VMI back then. The uncle, who has been dead for a good fifty years, surely would have had Jonathan Daniels in some of his courses.

Posted: Saturday, August 22, 2015 10:00 pm

BY JEFF E. SCHAPIRO Richmond Times-Dispatch
[phone]
@RTDSchapiro
Listen to his analysis 8:45 a.m. Friday on WCVE (88.9 FM).

At Virginia Military Institute, Jonathan Daniels wasn’t the spit-and-polish type. ... He had no interest in athletics. He didn’t seek rank. In that crenelated, tradition-bound, testosterone-riven setting, where the practical is emphasized, Daniels pursued the abstract. He studied English, graduating near the top of his class in 1961.

Selected by his classmates as valedictorian, he gave a haunting, little-noted speech that proved prophetic. It augured that the skinny kid from New England who admitted a strange attraction to the South would embody a VMI tradition as few ever have — a tradition of leadership, bravery, principle and sacrifice.

Fifty years ago this past Thursday, Daniels — then an Episcopal seminarian stirred by the civil right struggle — was fatally shot in Alabama by a bigoted lawman who had lowered his shotgun at Daniels and an African-American woman as they tried to enter a grocery store in tiny Hayneville to buy sodas.
....

One can wonder if Daniels’ theme, drawing on William Wordsworth, Robert Browning and Christopher Marlowe, registered with one of the more prominent people in the audience: the governor of Virginia, J. Lindsay Almond Jr. He had led the failed crusade to preserve segregated public schools. Almond’s unexpected surrender to federal court edict had broken his relationship with the state’s conservative political class. Almond was isolated and largely powerless in those final months of his term.

[1939]

9. Jon's Valedictory Address

http://www.vmi.edu/uploadedFiles/Archives/Alumni/DanielsJ1961/Daniels_ValedictorySpeech.pdf

[shrike]

10. I didn't know about this man.

No greater love, as another poster said.

[HughBeaumont]

11. And as for the asshole shitpig that killed him?

Thomas L. Coleman, 55, a road construction supervisor and part-time deputy sheriff, was arrested in connection with Daniels’s death. Coleman claimed he had fired in self-defense. He was acquitted before a white judge, by an all-white jury.

snip

Coleman died in 1997, at the age of 86. In a CBS television interview a year after the killings, Coleman said he had no regrets, according to a book about Daniels by Charles W. Eagles.

“I would shoot them both tomorrow,” Coleman said.

That's justice. This old sisterhumper commits a hate crime murder with tons of witnesses in broad daylight, gets acquitted and gets to live a long life. Fuck. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

This earth is too good to have that fucker be allowed to dwell in it. His bones should be unearthed, shredded and deposited in a urinal.