Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidadian American, led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for a time. His more militant, anti-white agenda eventually went against the original mission of the student-led civil rights organization, according to the National Archives. He left the group in 1967 and became part of the more radical Black Panther Party.
In an interview 14 years later for a documentary series, Carmichael spoke about a white seminarian and Episcopal activist whom he described as “different from the regular activists that came.”
“He tried to analyze your problems a little bit deeper, and he too, was more interested in lasting solutions, rather than the temporary ones,” Carmichael said.
He was referring to Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who responded to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy of all faiths to come to Selma, Alabama, and support those marching for voting rights.
A native of Keene, New Hampshire, Daniels graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1961 and was attending Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the predecessor of today’s Episcopal Divinity School.
In the summer of 1965, Daniels worked for voting rights in Selma and Lowndes County. He and a group of African Americans integrated St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Selma by attending services together, as recorded by Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.
“He had an abundance of strength that comes from the inside that he could give to people,” Carmichael said of Daniels, as reflected in the seminarian’s biography on the City of Keene’s website.
On August 9, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was inside the Lowndes County Courthouse with pilgrims from across the country. It was standing room only. The Rev. Canon Kelly Sundberg Seaman represented the Diocese of New Hampshire.
“It’s a long walk to freedom, so you got to keep the faith,” Curry said, inviting his fellow pilgrims to repeat the line to the person next to them. “If you try walking on your own power, you won’t make it.”
Curry read from Isaiah 40, offering a homily on walking—an ode to the path Daniels walked in Alabama and the pilgrimage that day.
“Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Curry, who referred to Daniels by his first name, said his aim was to remember him “not as a fond memory, but to reconstitute within our soul a commitment to which he gave his life—and all the martyrs of Alabama.”
“Bishop Curry spoke of prayer, and of persistence and power—the Holy Spirit’s power to continue to transform the world,” Sundberg Seaman told The Living Church, “and to empower us to be part of that holy work, especially when the path isn’t easy.”
Earlier that day, pilgrims gathered at 11 a.m. on the courthouse square in Hayneville, 35 minutes from Selma and 17 miles from Fort Deposit, the largest town in Lowndes County. They walked along the path commemorating Daniels’ final day, stopping at the Lowndes County Jail, where Daniels and others were detained for protesting white-only businesses in Fort Deposit.
They also stopped at the former site of Varner’s Cash Store, where on August 20, 1965, Daniels stepped into the path of a shotgun blast aimed at 17-year-old Black activist Ruby Sales. Daniels died instantly. He was 26.
Between Varner’s and the courthouse, Sundberg Seaman saw a priest step out of the procession to speak with a group of young men outside a store, sharing the printed program that told Daniels’ story.
“They were looking at it together,” she said, describing it as a form of witnessing. “Telling the story of what had happened there in Hayneville 60 years ago, and showing that it still matters—to the church and to the world.”
According to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Daniels’ murder received relatively little coverage compared to the killings of other white activists such as Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. He was the 22nd person killed in the civil rights struggle since 1963. Sixteen of the victims were Black, with only a few cases receiving national attention.
The pilgrimage, organized by the dioceses of Alabama and the Central Gulf Coast, is now in its 28th year. It remembers Daniels and 14 other martyrs of the state’s civil rights movement, including Elmore Bolling, a successful Black entrepreneur lynched in 1947 by white men angered by his business success.
In March 1965, when Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference proposed a march to the state capitol in Montgomery, many SNCC activists were skeptical. Carmichael feared for the safety of marchers in what he called “the most backward and violent county in Alabama.” At the time, despite a population that was 80 percent Black, only one Black person was registered to vote in Lowndes County.
But it was that call to march that led Daniels to remain in the South.
“He lived his life faithfully by doing what Jesus does, which is standing up for the marginalized and the poor and the outcast, to the point where he was even willing to lay his life down,” said the Rev. David Gierlach, a retired priest and member of the Diocese of Hawaii’s Social Justice Task Force. Daniels is commemorated in the Episcopal Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts every August 14.
“Few people in our time will know such fulfillment or meaning though they live to be a hundred,” Dr. King said then, on the seminarian’s martyrdom.
If he were alive today, Daniels would be 86.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
