What would Daniels think?

One wonders what Jonathan Daniels would have had to say about the Supreme Court’s major surgery on the Voting Rights Act this week.
Never heard of Jonathan Daniels?
That’s not surprising. Few Americans have.
But those who recall the early days of the civil rights movement and the struggle for fair voter registration in the Deep South may know the name.
They may remember a young Episcopalian seminarian from New Hampshire who made his way down to Alabama to help African-Americans register to vote.
He worked for a bit in Selma, then with the sanction of his seminary he returned to Alabama and went to work in Lowndes County.
He was, in the parlance of that era and that locale, an “outside agitator.”
In other words, he was someone who wanted to share the rights he enjoyed with others who were entitled to the same rights.
In Lowndes County, the right to vote was limited almost exclusively to those who were white. Though the population of the county was overwhelmingly black, less than 4 percent of the eligible black population was registered.
An elaborate, shameful structure had developed that made the simple act of registering anything but simple for black residents of Alabama and the rest of the Deep South. The rules were rigged, officials were arrogant and dishonest, and the whole thing was an embarrassment to the rest of America. That’s why a white student from New Hampshire felt it was his duty, his obligation, to step forward in an effort to change the situation.
His reasoning was pretty simple: Being an American carried with it certain rights, and those rights belonged to all Americans regardless of the color of their skin.
That may sound obvious today, but it was far from obvious in 1965 when Jonathan Daniels was “agitating” in Lowndes County. In fact, the effort to register black voters was viewed as an enormous threat by the political and social power structure.
And that power structure was capable of fighting back.
Jonathan Daniels was among a group of 29 protesters arrested on Aug. 14, 1965, after picketing a whites-only store in Fort Deposit, Ala. He remained in jail in Hayneville, Ala., until Aug. 20, when the last of the protesters were released on bail.
While awaiting a ride out of town, Daniels and a white Catholic priest and two black female protesters decided to get a soft drink at the few places in town that would serve non-whites. At the entrance, Daniels was stopped by a self-appointed protector of the southern power structure, a white guy with a shotgun.
Daniels died instantly from his wounds. The priest would take months to recover.
Their offense: They tried to change Alabama, and they were part of a larger movement to change the entire Deep South.
That sort of horrific violence was endemic during that era, and memories of that violence still haunt the region.
So one has to wonder what Jonathan Daniels would have to say about the Voting Rights Act’s evisceration this week.
Would he say that things have changed enough over nearly 50 years?
Or would he, instead, suggest that ghosts of a brutal past still haunt us today?[[In-content Ad]]