Last summer my team at Episcopal Divinity School hosted a screening of the 1999 documentary Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels. Daniels, a White man from New Hampshire and a student at EDS (then called Episcopal Theological School), was killed in 1965 while volunteering with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register Black voters in Lowndes County, Alabama.
After being released from jail for picketing, the 26-year-old seminarian walked to a grocery store with fellow activists Richard Morrisroe and 17-year-old Ruby Sales to buy soda. In Sales’s account, Tom Coleman, a deputy sheriff for the county, stood in the doorway as they approached and said, “The store is closed. If you don’t get off this goddamn property, I’m going to blow your damn brains out.” As Coleman raised his shotgun to fire, Daniels pulled Sales behind him. Shot in the stomach, he died at the scene.
In 1994, Daniels was added to the Episcopal Church’s calendar as a martyr and witness to the gospel. Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, was also shot; after months in the hospital, he recovered. Sales escaped and went on to become a nationally recognized human rights activist and public theologian, earning her MDiv from EDS in 1998.
