By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965.

By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965.
Black civil rights activist recalls white ally who took a shotgun blast for her

Local

By Michael E. Ruane August 16 

By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965. ... She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama.
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But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place.
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Much has been written about Daniels, the 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire who was killed that hot afternoon in Hayneville, Ala. ... Although now largely forgotten, his slaying was front-page news across a country, then as today, torn by racial violence and upheaval, and was the latest in a string of brutal attacks on civil rights workers in the South.



Jonathan M. Daniels, a native of Keene, N.H., was valedictorian of the VMI Class of 1961. (Photo by VMI)

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Since then, Daniels’s name has been added to the Episcopal calendar, with an Aug. 14 feast day. A Daniels memorial has been erected in Hayneville. And a limestone sculpture of Daniels has just been created inside the Washington National Cathedral.
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{Sales} praised him. “You have to understand the significance of Jonathan’s witness,” she said. He had graduated from the Virginia Military Institute. A doctor’s son, he had studied at Harvard and at a traditionally white Episcopal divinity school. ... “He walked away from the king’s table,” she said. “He could have had any benefit he wanted, because he was young, white, brilliant and male. ”