Dear Friends,
August 20th marks the 60th anniversary of the horrible day in Hayneville, Alabama when Jonathan Daniels, a civil rights activist and Episcopal seminarian who grew up in Keene, New Hampshire, was murdered while protecting Ruby Sales from a racist attack. Jonathan was in Alabama fighting for social justice. He and his fellow activists, 17 year old Ruby Sales and Roman Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe, were outside a tiny store when a deputy sheriff threatened the group. When Tom Coleman aimed his shotgun at Ruby, Jonathan pushed her down and was killed instantly by a shot to the chest. He was 26 years old. Jonathan Daniels’ courageous action on that day increased support for the civil rights of blacks in the American South and throughout the world. Ruby Sales continued her work as a racial equality advocate and theologian. She is 77 years old.
Episcopalians remember Jonathan Daniels with a Eucharistic feast every year in mid-August. There are annual pilgrimages to Hayneville. Depictions of Jonathan’s young face have been carved in stone and are featured on the walls and columns of our Washington National Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral. I prayed at an altar dedicated in Canterbury to honor his witness when I joined the bishops of the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference in 2023.
Recently, the Rev. Tod Hall, son of the sixth bishop of New Hampshire and now living in Milan, NH shared the text of the sermon that his father delivered at the Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama only a week after Jonathan’s murder. Bishop Hall was accompanied on that trip by John Coburn, at that time Dean of the Episcopal Theological School. Tensions were dangerously high and the trip from the Northeast was fraught with risk. Security personnel charged with the clerics’ safety accompanied their travels in Alabama. At one point the agents whisked them away from their motel rooms in the middle of the night for their protection from death threats.
After the repugnant and morally cowardly display of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist group Blood Tribe at the New Hampshire State House recently, I feel moved to lift up an icon of what New Hampshire courage can look like. I invite my fellow Granite Staters to join me as we pause to reflect on the events which seem both long ago and quite contemporary. At several times in our nation’s history we have passed through agonizing periods of civil unrest, division, and violence. The turbulent 1960s was certainly one of those periods. I suspect we will look back at the 2020s as also a time of deep and painful disruption. We have, as a matter of course, then experienced periods of recovery, healing, reconstruction, and repair—however halted— with renewed commitments to live into the bright vision laid out by our Founders for a government “of laws and not of men.” As Bishop Hall remarks in his brief and powerful funeral homily, in that time of social distress, Jonathan was guided by a vision of God’s Kingdom where all God’s children are cherished. This vision led him from a place of comfort in New Hampshire, to a place of personal risk in what was then called “Bloody Loundes County” where there had been a particular concentration of lynchings. Jonathan was certainly not the only one who sacrificed his well-being and his life in those tragic days, but he was, and remains, our cherished local saint. We hold him as a light to give us hope and courage in times of division. I can be certain that Bishop Hall knew his seminarian quite well when he said, “there was not a shred of hatred in Jonathan’s soul”— except for hatred itself.
I pray that God speak through the words of prophets, apostles, and martyrs to each of us in our time, that we may be given the hopeful courage to seek that vision of the Kingdom where all persons can live in the blessed peace of Christ-- in our hearts, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and wherever God calls us. May we welcome the stranger, care for the outcast and the orphan, tend the sick, strengthen the weary and continue to rely on the love of Jesus to strengthen our community of faith. Like Jonathan Daniels may we do these things not merely for our own sake, but for the sake of this whole troubled and torn world.
Yours Faithfully and Gratefully in Christ,
Bishop Rob