During the six months Richard Morrisroe was convalescing, barely able to move following gunshot wounds to the back, he would have recurring dreams about a particular night in Lowndes County, Alabama, when he was jogging along a dark country road. The stretch was not unlike the little roads he’d run around Mundelein in Lake County, where he’d gone to seminary. That August night in rural Alabama was foggy. He was 26, strong, and running just for fun. It was one of the last times, in fact, he’d ever run without discomfort.
So how did a white Irish Catholic priest from Chicago end up embroiled in the fight for equality in the south in 1965? A half century later, Morrisroe traces it all back to a fluke of weather.
In August 1965, a Saint Columbanus parishioner, Sammy Rayner, invited Morrisroe to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention in Birmingham, Alabama. (King had founded SCLC and was its president.) Rayner owned a funeral parlor and was planning to drive down in style in a black Cadillac with his two sons and a few male education students from the college that is now Chicago State University. Here was an opportunity to hear the leaders of the civil rights movement speak. Morrisroe jumped at the chance.
At the SCLC conference he hoped to speak with John Lewis and Silas Norman. SNCC chairman Lewis had spoken at Saint Columbanus that spring. News cameras had captured Lewis’s image: a dignified figure in a beige trench coat at the head of the march that wasn’t on Bloody Sunday, when his skull was fractured by state troopers. Norman had been recruited from graduate school at the University of Wisconsin to work with the Selma Literacy Project to prepare African-American citizens to register to vote. For many black southerners it was an ordeal involving humiliating and arcane “tests” that whites were not subject to. Instead Morrisroe met SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael. (Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in 1966 and advocated for black power, a term he’s credited with having coined.)
But Rogers and Carmichael stayed and helped build the Lowndes County Freedom Organization with the three people who remained. And the activists listened to what residents wanted to accomplish. While their elders were concerned about voting rights, black youth in Fort Deposit wanted respect. They had chosen to picket three downtown businesses, the ones that treated blacks the worst, overcharging them, making them come in through the back door. They wanted to be treated as equals in a society one step up from slavery.
Daniels, Morrisroe recalls today, “was a little bit more verbal about stuff than I tended to be and I still tend to be. It was very important for Jonathan to articulate what was happening, whereas I often just went along as it happened.”
