The Feast Day of Jonathan Myrick Daniels
The following are excerpts from an essay by Jonathan Myrick Daniels, the saint commemorated today in the Episcopal Church calendar of saints. He wrote this essay as a reflection on one of his trips to Selma, Alabama, in which he heeded the call of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to help with the Civil Rights movement. Unlike most of the "civil rights tourists," as my grandfather used to call them, who came down from the North in the summer for a week of marching, finger waging, and stirring up trouble (sometimes needlessly), and then only to return to their safe, comfortable homes in Cape Cod while leaving the white Southerners who were actually working for civil rights in the South but who still had to live there and deal with the fallout of needless Klan antagonism, Daniels returned numerous times and actually worked. WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS INAPPROPRIATE LANGUAGE AND MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUNGER READERS. I HAVE TRIED TO EDIT THE LANGUAGE AS BEST I COULD, BUT I HAV...