A Martyr for Justice, A Call to Action: How the Spirit of Jonathan Myrick Daniels ’66 Continues to Call us to Activism
Initial interview by Rebecca Grossfield for "EDS Now" in the fall of 2014; expanded on and edited by Mary Grace Donohoe for republication on the 60th anniversary of Jonathan Daniels’ martyrdom
No one remembers the brutal murder of Episcopal Theological School – now Episcopal Divinity School – seminarian Jonathan Daniels as vividly as Ruby Sales. She was the 17-year-old Tuskegee Institute student and activist Daniels shielded in front of the Cash Grocery Store on August 20, 1965. Tom Coleman, a volunteer deputy sheriff, shot Daniels and Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe at point blank range. Daniels died instantly. He was 26 years old.
Daniels, Morrisroe, Sales, and their companions were part of a group of young people who had been working together to register Black voters in Selma before arriving in Hayneville, Alabama. They were answering the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to the clergy and young adults to help the still nascent civil rights movement in the American South.
Just released after six hot days in Lowndes County Jail, they stopped to purchase beverages at a local shop in the town square. “I had never seen that level of violence and I was totally traumatized,” Sales remembered. “He was murdered in cold blood.” Sales did not speak for months after the assassination. She had not witnessed such “callous indifference” to human life before. Sales took the stand during Coleman’s trial, despite knowing what the outcome would be. “I was not naïve, I had grown up in the South,” she said. Coleman was acquitted by an all-white jury.
Sales and several other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers traveled to Daniels’ hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, to deliver the awful news to his family. Because Ruby Sales deeply understands the call to activism, she knows what brought Jonathan Daniels to that grocery store and his instinct to protect her. “I was there because I felt an obligation to challenge the racism embedded in our society,” Sales explained. “And I was there with Jonathan because I had made a choice and he had made a choice to participate in this moment. And we both knew that in doing that kind of work, you ran a risk of being killed. But at the same time, all of us understood that we were going to do what the spirit says to do.”
Sales survived the attack and went on to become a nationally recognized human-rights activist, public theologian, and founder of the SpiritHouse Project. Deeply marked by Daniels’ sacrifice and the profound spiritual questions raised by her experiences, Sales eventually enrolled at EDS, earning her Masters of Divinity in 1998.
Daniels’ journey from New Hampshire to Alabama reflected a spiritual and moral transformation that unfolded at what was then Episcopal Theological School. Daniels left the comfort of Cambridge for the frontlines of a movement he came to understand as central to his Christian faith. In the months before his death, Daniels joined marches from Selma to Montgomery, worshiped alongside Black congregants who were often relegated to the back pews of white churches, and worked to desegregate worship spaces in accordance with Episcopal canons.
His theological convictions led him to challenge segregation not only on the streets but also within the church. Daniels and fellow ETS seminarian Judith Upham, ’67 repeatedly confronted Episcopal clergy in Alabama who refused to admit Black worshippers to Holy Communion except after all white parishioners had received. In Birmingham, they pleaded with Bishop Charles Carpenter to uphold denominational commitments to racial equality, only to be met with resistance cloaked in appeals to decorum and “ecclesiastical harmony.”1 When conversation with both clergy and the bishop proved unproductive, Upham, Daniels, and others from the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) picketed the diocesan headquarters, holding signs proclaiming that white Episcopalians had resurrected the “slave gallery” custom of antebellum times.2
For Daniels, faith was inseparable from justice. He wrote shortly before he was killed that his time in Selma taught him to not fear death,
“I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly 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.”3
Jon’s legacy at EDS
This summer marks the 60th anniversary of Daniels’ martyrdom. His story, and the witness of those who marched, organized, and suffered alongside him, is not a historical footnote, but rather a living challenge that continues to shape EDS’s commitment to justice today.
As Sales articulated, she and Daniels had made the conscious choice to “participate in this moment” - to not stand idly by in the face of injustice. Last March, the Very Rev. Lydia Kelsey Bucklin, President and Dean of EDS, lectured at Seminary of the Southwest, where she deeply considered what “faithful leadership” looks like today, in a political moment that often requires an immediate response to new threats to the dignity of our beloved siblings in Christ - from immigrants, to activists, to trans people, to Palestinians. In other words, what does it take now to “participate in this moment” as leaders of faith and followers of Christ?
Part of EDS’s proud legacy is creating space for students—and now the greater public—to engage theological reflection from the perspective of those historically pushed to the margins. This means being better listeners, being more curious, and less certain and actively working with those who have been misunderstood, ignored, or feared. This unwavering dedication to walking with those on the margins, to raising our voices when those around us would prefer to maintain an unjust peace, and the central belief that every person is made in God’s image and held in God’s unwavering love is the enduring legacy of Jonathan Daniels at EDS.
Join us in-person to honor Jon’s memory and legacy
On Saturday, August 9, 2025, Episcopal Divinity School will join the 28th Annual Jonathan Daniels and All Martyrs Pilgrimage in Hayneville, Alabama, alongside the Episcopal Church in Alabama and the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast. The procession will begin in the courthouse square, move to the jail where Daniels and his companions were held, and end at the site of Varner’s Cash Store, where he was killed. The day concludes with a service of Holy Communion in the very courtroom where Daniels’ killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
On the evening before the pilgrimage, EDS will host a vigil in Jonathan Daniels’ memory: Walk With Me. The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas will preach and the vigil is open to the public. If you are local to Montgomery, please consider joining us.
Rebecca Grossfield wrote the beginning section of this article for the Fall 2014 publication of EDS Now, a publication of Episcopal Divinity School at the time. Mary Grace Donohoe, Communications Manager at EDS, expanded the article to demonstrate Jon’s legacy on our current work.
Shattuck, Gardiner H. Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights. University Press of Kentucky, 2000, 159.
Ibid, 157.
American Martyr: The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider, Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, PA, 1992.