AL Political Reporter: “Twenty-six-year-old white Episcopal seminary student, Jonathan Daniels knew the dangers he faced.
His cleric’s collar and the quarter-sized black and white lapel pin that he always wore — with the white cross in the middle and the initials “ESCRU” underneath, which stood for Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity — made him a target of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.
He answered the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s call on March 7, 1965, for clergy from the North to come to Selma after Bloody Sunday. That same day, Daniels boarded a chartered plane to Atlanta.
“Jon knew in his heart that it was naturally the right thing to help those who needed it,” said Daniels’ childhood friend, Bob Perry, who lived around the corner and attended kindergarten through high school with him in Keene, New Hampshire.
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Nearly five months after the Selma marches, Daniels participated in another protest on Saturday, Aug. 14, 1965, in Fort Deposit with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council leader Stokely Carmichael and more than two dozen other activists.
The demonstrators picketed local stores that refused to serve Black Americans.
Lowndes County sheriff’s deputies arrested Daniels and other demonstrators and took them to the Hayneville jail where they stayed for six days.
Six days later, on Aug. 20, 1965, after being released from the Hayneville jail, Daniels walked with 17-year-old Tuskegee University student Ruby Sales and teenager Joyce Bailey — who were both Black — along with white Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe to nearby Varner’s Cash Store to purchase soft drinks.
Thomas L. Coleman, 55, a white highway engineer, part-time sheriffs’ deputy and an alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan, confronted the group holding a shotgun.
The shooting of these two civil rights workers made headlines across the country. President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered the FBI to investigate.
“One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry and career for civil rights was performed by Jonathan Daniels,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King at the time.
Five hours after the shooting, sheriff’s deputies arrested Coleman. They took him to the Hayneville jail, the same jail that they’d released Daniels from earlier that day.
The arrest log shows that the sheriff’s department booked Coleman into jail and charged him with murder.
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Daniels’ impact on the criminal legal system in Alabama and throughout the South is less well known.
A year after Daniels’ death, in response to the ACLU and ESCRU lawsuit, Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr.ordered the inclusion of Black Americans on jury pools and also struck down the exclusion of women.
“The whole jury system after Jonathan’s death came under attack in affirmative lawsuits, literally scores of them all across the South, to result in ordering jury officials to put Blacks in the jury box so that they could be selected at random with whites for juries,” said ACLU attorney Charles Morgan in the 1999 film, Here Am I Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels, that aired on PBS and was produced by former Keene State College Emeritus Professor Dr. Larry Benaquist and retired professor Bill Sullivan.
“That resulted in a great power shift that’s gone generally unnoticed,” Morgan said.”