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History
On Friday, August 13, 1965 Jonathan and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out. They had agreed that none would accept bail until everyone was released. After their release the following Friday Jonathan and a few protesters entered a local shore where they were stopped by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young girl in the protesters, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly. Not long before his death he wrote: "I lost fear in the black belt when 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. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one's motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it. As Judy and I said the daily offices day by day, we became more and more aware of the living reality of the invisible "communion of saints"--of the beloved community in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of the ones gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven--who blend with theirs our faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and 'ends' all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably one." (NOTE: Much of Alabama has brick-red clayey soil. The region where the soil is black loam is called "the black belt." The term has no racial referent, although Yankees often assume that it does.) From The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider (Morehouse, 1992 ; ISBN: 0819215864 - out of print but available used) (orig. publ. 1967) |
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