05/01/2026
On August 20, 1965, four young civil rights activists walked through the stifling Alabama heat to buy cold drinks at a local store. Minutes earlier, they had been released from six days in jail for picketing Whites-only stores in Fort Deposit. They were thirsty, tired, and stranded -- the jailers had let them go without explanation, transportation, or a phone call. The streets of Hayneville felt wrong. Ruby Sales, a 17-year-old Tuskegee student, would remember an eerie stillness, not a Black face anywhere.
They walked to Varner's Cash Store, a place they had visited before. They never made it inside.
Tom Coleman, a part-time deputy sheriff and white supremacist, was waiting in the doorway with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He yelled at the group, Ruby later recounted: "The store is closed. If you don't get off this goddamn property, I'm going to blow your damn brains out."
What happened next took only seconds. Coleman pointed his gun at Ruby. Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old White seminarian from New Hampshire, grabbed the back of her shirt, pulling her down. The shotgun blast caught him full in the chest. He died instantly.
Coleman fired again, hitting Father Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, in the back as he shielded 19-year-old Joyce Bailey while they ran away. Morrisroe collapsed, crying for water in the August heat. Coleman stood over his body with the shotgun, daring anyone to help him.
Ruby Sales, covered in Jonathan's blood, thought she was dead. It would take her seven months to start speaking again.
"I saw the best and the worst of White men," she would say later, "in the same moment."
Jonathan Myrick Daniels had not planned to be in Alabama that summer. He was a seminary student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing for ordination in the Episcopal Church -- a kid from Keene, New Hampshire, who had been valedictorian at Virginia Military Institute, who loved theater and poetry, who was known even as a child for being the first to stand up for anyone who wasn't being treated fairly.
But in March 1965, like millions of Americans, Jonathan watched the footage of Bloody Sunday -- state troopers beating and tear-gassing peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as they demanded the right to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for clergy of all faiths from around the country to come to Alabama and join the fight for voting rights.
Jonathan answered. He intended to stay for a weekend. He stayed for five months.
In Selma, he moved in with a Black family, the Wests. He worked to integrate the local Episcopal church, which had been turning away Black worshippers at the door. He tutored children. Helped families apply for federal aid. Registered voters. He did the quiet, dangerous, daily work of the movement in Lowndes County -- a place they called "Bloody Lowndes," where no Black citizen had been allowed to vote in the twentieth century, where Viola Liuzzo, a White civil rights activist from Detroit, had been murdered by the Klan just months before.
Ruby Sales had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager. She and Jonathan became friends and co-workers that summer, two young people united by the same commitment in the same deadly place.
On August 14, they were arrested together as part of a group picketing Whites-only stores. They were hauled to the Hayneville jail in a garbage truck. For six days they sat in sweltering cells -- no air conditioning, temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, toilets backing sewage onto the floor.
On August 20 -- Jonathan's mother's birthday -- the jailers suddenly released them. It was the last day of his life.
Tom Coleman was charged with manslaughter -- not murder. At trial, his defense claimed Jonathan had a knife and Father Morrisroe had a gun. No weapons were ever found. What Morrisroe actually held in his hand was a dime. The all-White jury deliberated less than ninety minutes. Not guilty. Coleman never served a day. He died in 1997, a free man.
Despite death threats against her and her family, the seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales testified at his trial. She was determined, she said, to speak for Jonathan because he was dead and couldn't speak for himself. Then she kept going.
In the decades that followed, Ruby became one of the most important voices of the Civil Rights Movement -- and one of its most profound theologians. She earned degrees from Tuskegee, Manhattanville College, and Princeton University. And then she made a choice that would have surprised no one who knew her: she enrolled at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- the same seminary Jonathan Daniels had attended. She graduated in 1998 with a Master of Divinity.
She founded the SpiritHouse Project in Atlanta, a nonprofit organization dedicated to his memory, using art, spirituality, and education to fight for racial and social justice. Starting in 2007, the SpiritHouse Project documented over 2,000 state-sanctioned killings of Black Americans. Ninety-eight percent of them were unarmed.
Ruby Sales is seventy-seven years old now. She is one of fifty civil rights leaders featured in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her 2019 TED Talk, "How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division," has been viewed nearly two million times.
Her message is not what you might expect from someone who watched a friend murdered in front of her by a white supremacist.
She speaks of the "spiritual crisis of White America" -- of the forty-five-year-old he**in addict in Appalachia who feels erased, of White people who have lost all sense of meaning and identity. She calls for a "liberating white theology" that helps people find genuine humanity -- not through domination, but through connection. And she asks a question she learned to ask in the movement, one she believes we have lost the ability to ask in public life: "Where does it hurt?"
"I didn't carry his death as a burden of guilt," Ruby Sales has said of Jonathan Daniels. "I carried it as a commitment."
Jonathan Daniels was twenty-six years old when he died. He never got to become a priest. Never got to marry, have children, grow old. Never got to see the Voting Rights Act change the South, or the first Black president, or Ruby Sales become everything she became.
But in the last second of his life, he saw a man with a gun pointed at a seventeen-year-old girl. And he acted.
The Episcopal Church designated Jonathan Daniels a martyr in 1991. His name is carved at the Washington National Cathedral, alongside Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks. At the Virginia Military Institute, a memorial arch and courtyard honor his memory; the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award has been given to President Jimmy Carter and Congressman John Lewis. In 2026, he was named patron of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.
But perhaps the most fitting memorial is simpler than any of these.
It is Ruby Sales -- still alive, still speaking, still asking: Where does it hurt? It is the life she built from the one he gave her.
"I was glad that I met Jonathan," she once said, "because it helped me understand that White people are not one-dimensional, that they are also constrained by the system of white supremacy."
In a doorway in Alabama, in the summer of 1965, Ruby Sales saw a White man point a shotgun at her face and pull the trigger. And she saw another White man step in front of it.
"One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry," said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "was performed by Jonathan Daniels."
The best and the worst. In the same moment.
We face the same choice every day. Rarely so lethal. But always the same: stand up or look away.
---
For an extraordinary, in-depth history of this tumultuous period, we recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," which opens with Selma and covers Lowndes County, at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780684857138 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3QGPFfu (Amazon)
To introduce tweens and teens to the riveting story of Jonathan Daniels and Ruby Sales, we highly recommend "Blood Brother: Jonathan Daniels and His Sacrifice for Civil Rights" for ages 11 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781629797489 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4w2juXR (Amazon)
For adult readers seeking a deeper scholarly account, we recommend "Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama" at https://amzn.to/4vYWJEt
To introduce younger readers to the Selma voting rights struggle, we recommend "Child of the Civil Rights Movement" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/child-of-the-civil-rights-movement) and "Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March" for 12 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/turning-15-on-the-road-to-freedom)
To introduce children and teens to more courageous women who helped lead the fight for equality, we've shared many reading recommendations in our blog post, "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177
To listen to Ruby Sales' powerful TED talk "How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division," visit https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_sales_how_we_can_start_to_heal_the_pain_of_racial_division
