Jonathan Daniels - Aftermath and Commemoration

Aftermath and Commemoration

The murder of an educated, white, priest-in-training who was defending an unarmed teenage girl helped shock the Episcopal Church into facing the reality of racial inequality that it had tacitly participated in and continued. Daniels' death helped put civil rights on the map as a goal for the church as a whole, and reminded many upper class white Episcopalians that this struggle was not nearly so distant as they had imagined it to be.

In 1991, Jonathan Myrick Daniels was designated a martyr of the Episcopal Church, one of fifteen modern-day martyrs, and August 14 was designated as a day of remembrance for the sacrifice of Daniels and all the martyrs of the civil rights movement. The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama and the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast sponsor a yearly pilgrimage in Hayneville on August 14, commemorating Daniels and all other martyrs of the civil rights movement.

Ruby Sales, the teenager whose life Daniels saved, went on to attend Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) herself, and has gone on to work as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C. as well as founding an inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.

Virginia Military Institute created the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award in 1998, of which former President Jimmy Carter has been a recipient.

One of the five elementary schools in his hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, is named after him. He is also one of forty martyrs memorialized at Southern Poverty Law Center's Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2010, a commemorative pilgrimage in Hayneville included Ruby Sales and Bishop Todd Ousley of the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Michigan.

Daniels was the subject of University of Mississippi history professor Charles Eagles's 1993 book Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, which won the Lillian Smith Award that year.

A play by Lowell Williams, Six Nights in the Black Belt, chronicles the events around the murder of Daniels. It also highlights the relationship between Daniels and then Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member Stokely Carmichael, with whom he shared a cell.

Daniels was portrayed by Mackenzie Astin in the film Selma, Lord, Selma.