Alabama in August? Yup, That’s Right.

“What brought y’all down to Alabama?” the coffee seller on a Montgomery street corner asked, as friendly as she could be. We paused. It wasn’t so easy to explain to a welcoming Southerner that we were a group from New Hampshire travelling through their state to commemorate the murder 50 years ago of a civil rights activist from our state– Jonathan Daniels.

But she didn’t flinch and, in fact, said something like, “Oh, that’s SO interesting!” Then she went on to tell us how the proceeds from her coffee stand go to support an organization working to fight human trafficking.

The March Continues, all right. In fact, all kinds of marches continue.

I’d never before fancied myself a pilgrim, but since I accompanied my husband and a youth group from Keene on a kind of civil rights commemorative tour, also called a “pilgrimage” by the organizers, I guess that’s what I was for those five days. Come to think of it, those wide hats that the original Massachusetts Pilgrims used to wear would’ve come in handy in that blazing sun.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, I tried to learn something about who Jonathan Daniels was. In 1964, my own brother had participated in “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, registering voters along with a few hundred other college students from the North, so I had images from the era, even if I had just been a little kid then, safely out climbing trees. In addition to this brother, another sister-in-law introduced us to a few of her best friends who spent months working with SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. From what I could tell, lots of people of a certain age – many of them with no particular religion at all – had heard the call to help bring justice. This, for them, was a compelling moral issue.

Jonathan Daniels, though, was on the path to ordination when he took a leave from Episcopal Theological School (now called “EDS”) along with a classmate, Judith Upham, to go to Alabama. His faith was deeply embedded in who he was; he wore his collar — the student version — constantly when he was there.

Before we left, I started reading a biography of Daniels, called Outside Agitator by Charles Eagle. It didn’t take long to get absorbed by the story, which traces his roots in Keene, his process of self-discovery as a young adult, his decision to devote himself to the work in Lowndes County (notorious for its deep racism), and the series of events leading up to the day when he walked to a little store, accompanied by two black women and one white man and—while saving the life of Ruby Sales, one of the women — met his own death. The book also paints a detailed and disturbing picture of Tom Coleman, the killer who was acquitted of any crime.

It was a little eerie, frankly, to be reading about this harrowing time as we were driving on the same roads that Jonathan himself must have been on, but it sure made the whole drama come pulsing to life.

If I had to choose just two words to describe the trip, they would be 1) Powerful and 2) Hot. Indeed, I could also say it was “powerfully hot,” or even that we were “fired up.” But you get the idea.

Here’s the gist of the civil rights remembrance activities we did. I will use the present tense, just to differentiate our doings from the history that we were discovering. You can just skip over this list if you want, but I’m offering it to give you the facts – pretty much straight up.

1) Arrive in Atlanta and visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site. This area of a just a few blocks includes The King Center (displaying many personal possessions and detailed timelines), the tombs of both MLK and Coretta, King’s childhood home as well as Ebeneezer Baptist Church, where he shared the pulpit with his father and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was born. Sitting in that church, listening to King’s voice from a recording, made the whole trip worth it. And we were only in the first day.

2) Drive to Montgomery, where we live dorm-style in a building connected to Church of the Ascension. There, over the course of a few days, we visit the Rosa Parks Museum (in three parts, including a re-enactment of exactly what happened on that bus), the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church (where MLK served in the 50’s), the site of the Slave Depot, and the Civil Rights Memorial Center at the Southern Poverty Law Center. We put our hands in the water that runs over the black granite memorial, designed by Maya Lin,  and met the remarkable Morris Dees, one of the founders, who continues to work tirelessly against hate groups in this country. He’s the real deal. At the time, we didn’t know that just a few days later there would be a memorial service at this same spot for Julian Bond, first president of the SPLC.

We also attended a presentation at Alabama State University by several individuals who knew Jonathan and/or were deeply involved in the civil rights struggle. They gathered to speak just to us, so we felt truly honored.

3) Drive to Selma, where we visit the Interpretive Center (with huge photographs of the original marches), actually meeting James Webb, who had been a 16 year old marcher at the time and was right up front in one photograph and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Before leaving, we also drive by the Washington Carver Homes (where Jonathan Daniels stayed for a time, with the West family) and the Brown Chapel AME Church, which served as a kind of gathering place for marchers. Learn about “Bloody Sunday” and what followed, culminating in the successful 50 mile march to the steps of the Capitol in Montgomery.

4) On the way back to Montgomery, we stop at the National Park Service Interpretive Center (at the site of the former Tent City for tenant farmer families) offering more history of about the Civil Rights Trail, and then the memorial for Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker from Detroit, and mother of five, who was killed by Klansmen while driving back to Selma after the final march.

5) Drive to Hayneville on Saturday for the Pilgrimage and Procession for Jonathan Daniels. We walk, along with 1,500 others (including many Episcopal bishops) from the Courthouse to the Jail –where JD and others had been held, enduring terrible conditions–and then to the site of the “Cash Store” where he was gunned down, shortly after his release from jail, by Tom Coleman, on August 20^th, 1965. We watch — some of us from the bit of shade we found — as the first-ever memorial marker is put on the site. Rev. Richard Morrisroe, who was also shot on that day, was with us, in his wheelchair. Then, many of us pack the courthouse for a service, at which placards with photographs of other “Alabama Martyrs” are held up. Michael Curry, the newly elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, gives a fiery sermon; NH Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, my husband, also speaks about the legacy of Jonathan Daniels in New Hampshire.

The heat finally gets me, and I just can’t stand up anymore, so leave the church/courthouse and slink down on the outside porch floor to rest. But then my particular purple-shirted guy finds me to hurry back to Atlanta and the flight home. Turns out, it’s hot in New Hampshire too. And it’s still my birthday, so I celebrate with a scrumptious dessert at Uno Pizzeria.

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If you’re still with me, I’ll put the present tense aside now, for the rest. Just a few days later, I got to visit with my brother Mike – the one who had served in Mississippi. I had plenty of questions to ask him, and he patiently tried to answer—remembering, for instance, that he had returned South during the Spring of 1965 and spent about a week with scores of others in some kind of Montgomery detention center, where some of them even proposed a hunger strike. “I didn’t know you were in Alabama, too!” I said, wanting to catch up on everything I had missed, which was apparently a whole lot. Going back to the time in Mississippi, he acknowledged that it had been plenty scary: he was roughed up himself and, worse even, he had been in the very same group with Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney—the three workers who disappeared and then were discovered dead. Their pictures were on the wall when we visited the Civil Rights Memorial Center, and I looked at them long and hard.

“Didn’t many of you want to leave at that point?” I asked. “What did Mom and Dad say on the phone?”

He couldn’t precisely remember, kind of shrugged even, only recalling that most everyone involved understood that there was important work still to do there, and they ought to try to stay and do it.

The fact is, it might have been my own brother who lost his life. Thank goodness we get to be with him now that he’s topped 70 years old! The guy has always had a light touch, is quick to laugh and to get others laughing, but there was a time when he was on the front lines.

Rest in peace, Jonathan Daniels. You and many others from that time, you really had what it took. Those of us who got to walk back in history and look closely at this particular place and time, just a couple of hot weeks ago, understand a little better now than we did before what real courage, in regular people, looks like. Here’s hoping we can use this light to see the needs in our own communities a little more clearly now, and go forward.