The freedom to resist politics as usual
by Anne E. Cox
Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels
Lawrence Benaquist and
William Sullivan, producers
The Episcopal Media Center
(Atlanta, GA)

Had politics as usual held sway in the early 1960s, the civil rights movement in this country would never have happened. Particularly for those born and bred to the social and political mores of life in the southern U.S., black and white alike, the rules of engagement were clear: Wealthy whites made the rules; blacks and poorer whites followed the rules or else.

So what changed things? Resistance to politics as usual, refusal to continue to toe the line, recognition that there are some absolutes that are not open to political negotiation and compromise. Most of all, respect for the dignity of every human being, regardless of the consequences.

The story of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, told in the 1999 videotape, Here Am I, Send Me from Atlanta's Episcopal Media Center, is the story of one who died resisting the white political structure that held sway in Alabama in 1965. A 25-year-old white seminarian at the Episcopal Theological Seminary (now the Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Mass., Daniels woke up to racial injustice in 1963 while a student at the seminary. He had spent his undergraduate years at the all-white (and all-male) Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where he gingerly navigated the hazing inflicted on first-year students and went on to edit the school paper and graduate as valedictorian of his class. The video portrays him as a young man who pragmatically adapted and worked through his circumstances, but also as someone who constantly questioned himself internally -- wondering, for instance, if going through with the painful and humiliating "rat-line" at VMI, as he did, was endorsing an oppressive system.

The film suggests that responding to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call in the spring of 1965 for white clergy and others from the north to join their black brothers and sisters in Selma was for Daniels a matter, finally, of responding to Isaiah's question, "Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" with the only possible answer, "Here am I, send me."

More compelling than answering Isaiah's call, however, is Daniels' discovery of the freedom that comes with conscience. After being tear-gassed during a voter registration march, he wrote that up to that point he would have gladly taken a rifle to fight his enemies, but he now saw that the white men who opposed him were also captives of racism. As a Christian facing the cross, he said, he suddenly saw that he was totally free to give his life, if need be, for the liberation of all those caught up in this struggle in an eagerness for "the kingdom that is no longer hidden." Thus he was free to work to integrate the Episcopal Church, free to register black voters, free to go to the most segregationist county in Alabama, free to love even members of the Ku Klux Klan.

And so it was that in this new sense of freedom that Daniels died, shot by Tom Coleman, a special deputy sheriff who never spent a day in jail for his crime despite the many witnesses who saw him shoot Daniels outside a grocery store in Hayneville, Ala.

This compelling film is more than a tale of a modern martyr. It is about the courage of one Christian, the quiet conversion that led him to act on behalf of liberation -- and the difference his life has made in ours.

Through dogged spiritual effort, Daniels came to a moral point that eludes too many of us, a point where he recognized some unavoidable absolutes: Absolutely, he needed to go and place his white body next to the many black bodies marching in Alabama. No negotiating, no waiting until his education was finished, no acquiescing to his fears about his personal safety.

In this time of complacency and political expediency in so many churches, this is an important film because its message is that true freedom in Christ is the freedom of which the Magnificat speaks, the freedom through which "the mighty are cast down and the lowly are lifted up" -- absolutely. l

Anne E. Cox is an Episcopal priest and artist who runs a small landscaping business in Martinsville, Me.