Remembering Jonathan Daniels on MLK Day 2025
Pat Sutton
RETIRED HEALTH INFORMATION MGR........... Healthcare Consumer Looking for Fixes/Improvements
NOTE: This is a reprint of an article I posted on 8/20/2015, the 50th anniversary of the death of another civil rights activist from the 1960s. In March 1965, he answered the call from Martin Luther King Jr. to join the movement to take part in the march for voting rights from Selma AL to the capital in Montgomery.
Each year I remember him while honoring MLK and in 2022 I had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful MLK Memorial Park in Washington DC last year. Plan a visit: Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
August 20, 2015: Fifty years ago today, as a young teenager, I heard some news that changed my life. My French teacher’s son, Jonathan Daniels, was killed near Selma, Alabama, in an act that Martin Luther King, Jr. said was “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”
Jonathan’s last act in life was to push a young black girl to safety when a store owner pointed a shotgun at her and said “I will blow your brains out.”?I heard these shocking words today, spoken by that once-young girl of seventeen years, Ruby Sales, on All Things Considered. The short remembrance on the radio brought back those memories of 1965.
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The twenty-six year old seminarian, from my hometown in New Hampshire, is a little-known civil rights martyr. He was in Alabama to help register voters and he was arrested and taken to the county jail, one of four demonstrators. When they were released they were not allowed to use the phone so?they went to a store nearby for a soda and the store owner killed Jonathan who stepped in front of Ruby to protect her. The store owner was later acquitted at a trial. Jonathan’s death was on his mother’s birthday. He had sent her a birthday card from that county jail.
I remember the impact of that tragedy on my life and how it marked a time when history was beginning to come alive instead of just reading from old text books and watching black and white films in class. President Kennedy was killed just two years earlier, civil rights protests, boycotts and sit-ins were in the news, the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson and it felt as if the relative calm of my childhood was about to change even more.