By Rebecca Grossfield for "EDS Now" in the fall of 2014; edited by Mary Grace Puszka, EDS Communications Manager, for republication on the 60th anniversary of Jonathan Daniels’ martyrdom
No one remembers the brutal murder of Episcopal Theological School – now Episcopal Divinity School – seminarian Jonathan Daniels as vividly as Ruby Sales. She was the 17-year-old Tuskegee Institute student and activist Daniels shielded in front of the Cash Grocery Store on August 20, 1965. Tom Coleman, a volunteer deputy sheriff, shot Daniels and Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe at point blank range. Daniels died instantly. He was 26 years old.
Daniels, Morrisroe, Sales, and their companions were part of a group of young people who had been working together to register Black voters in Selma before arriving in Hayneville, Alabama. They were answering the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to the clergy and young adults to help the still nascent civil rights movement in the American South.
Just released after six hot days in Lowndes County Jail, they stopped to purchase beverages at a local shop in the town square. “I had never seen that level of violence and I was totally traumatized,” Sales remembered. “He was murdered in cold blood.” Sales did not speak for months after the assassination. She had not witnessed such “callous indifference” to human life before. Sales took the stand during Coleman’s trial, despite knowing what the outcome would be. “I was not naïve, I had grown up in the South,” she said. Coleman was acquitted by an all-white jury.
Sales and several other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers traveled to Daniels’ hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, to deliver the awful news to his family. Because Ruby Sales deeply understands the call to activism, she knows what brought Jonathan Daniels to that grocery store and his instinct to protect her. “I was there because I felt an obligation to challenge the racism embedded in our society,” Sales explained. “And I was there with Jonathan because I had made a choice and he had made a choice to participate in this moment. And we both knew that in doing that kind of work, you ran a risk of being killed. But at the same time, all of us understood that we were going to do what the spirit says to do.”