Murphy, Matt (d. 1965)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 1965 Aug 26 p. 1, 3

Birth date:

text of obituary:

. . .

Race Shootings Take Another Life, Minister, Priest Wounded

Shootings resulting from racial tensions have taken another life in the South and a Catholic priest and Protestant minister lie critically wounded in Alabama and Mississippi hospitals.

The priest, 26-year-old Richard Morrisroe of Chicago, was felled by a shotgun blast that killed Jonathan Daniels, 27, theology student from Keene, N. H., as the two stood with a group of Negroes near a country store at Haynesville, Ala., about 40 miles west of Montgomery. Daniels died at the scene, Morrisroe was rushed to a Montgomery hospital.

A white man charged in connection with the shootings was arrested and then released under $12,500 bond.

At Jackson, Miss., the 59-year-old Rev. Donald Thompson was seriously wounded in a night-time shotgun ambush as he walked from the parking lot to his apartment. Thompson, a native of Terre Haute, Ind., has had a pastorate in Jackson for two years and was connected with the Mississippi Council of Human Relations.

At Birmingham, Ala., some 350 persons attended the funeral services for Matt Murphy Jr., stormy Ku Klux Klan lawyer, who was fatally injured in a car accident. Murphy had gained national attention earlier this year as attorney for one of three Klansmen charged with the slaying of a white civil rights worker.