Civil Rights Events

After the 1965 Voting Rights Act

The Murder of Jonathan Daniels

Part Two

The suddenly released prisoners are tense. … SNCC veteran Jimmy Rogers urges caution, something ain't right, the streets are too empty, it's too quiet. Ruby Sales recalls:

It was afternoon. And the street was very eerie. There was a quietness over that downtown area that made us feel really, really eerie. ... What really prevailed that day was that we were thirsty and needed — wanted something to drink. And so we decided that everybody shouldn't go to the store just Morrisroe, Daniels, me, and Joyce Bailey. ... As we approached the store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman. At that time I didn't know his name; I found that out later. I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But my mind kind of blanked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.

[Daniels yanks Ruby out of the line of fire.] Jonathan was behind me and I felt a tug. The next thing I knew there was this blast, and I had fallen down. I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I heard another shot go off and I looked down and I was covered with blood. I didn't realize that Jonathan had been shot at that point. I thought I was the one who had been shot.

Morrisroe was running with Joyce Bailey ... he's holding her hand and he's not letting it go for nothing. And he's running with her, and he did not let go of her hands until he was shot in the back, and she kept running and he fell. ... I made a decision that I would just lie there, and maybe if I lie there, then Coleman would think that I was dead and then I could get help for the other people. He walked over me and kicked me and in his blind rage he thought I was dead.

Joyce Bailey had escaped and she ran back around the store to the side near an old abandoned car. ... very close to where I had fallen. And to her credit she did not leave until she could determine who was alive and who was dead. So she started calling my name, "Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby." I heard her and I got up. I didn't stand up, I crawled, literally on my knees, to the side of the car where she was, and when I got to her, she picked me up and we began to run and Coleman realized that I wasn't dead. At that point, he started shooting and yelling things, ... because you have to understand that this man's rage was not depleted. [He] is over Morrisroe's body, standing guard over this body, because [Morrisroe] is calling for water and he'll be damned if he's gonna let anybody give him water. Jimmy Rogers comes over and tries to give Father Morrisroe water, and the man threatens to blow his brains out. So he is not finished. He is on a rampage.

It was a setup. They turned us out of jail knowing that somebody was going to go to that store. It was a setup (Ambush 1-3).

The rest of the group scattered and ran, knocking on doors as they passed homes. “Nobody would let us in; people were so terrified,” Sales said (Schjonberg 7).

Thomas Coleman, a 55-year-old road-construction supervisor, part-time deputy sheriff, and a member of one of the oldest white families in Lowndes County then strolled to the county courthouse where his sister is Superintendent of Schools and calls his friend Al Lingo, head of the State Troopers in Montgomery. "I just shot two preachers. You better get on down here" (Ambush 3).

A black doctor with combat experience saved Father Morrisroe’s life, removing his lung and spleen in an 11-hour operation. It took two years before Morrisroe could walk again—and he still feels pain daily (Troy 6).

When other SNCC workers went to look for Daniels’ body, they could not find it, Sales said. “The streets had been swept clean, and you could not tell a murder had taken place.”

Meanwhile, back in Keene that morning, Daniels’ mother, Constance, did not know that her son had even been in jail. She worried when the day’s mail did not include a birthday card for her from Daniels, who never forgot such things. Aug. 20 was her 60th birthday.

Two months before his murder, Daniels wrote this about living with and advocating with blacks in what was known as the so-called Alabama Black Belt: “I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I have truly been baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

President Johnson ordered a federal investigation of the shooting. The next day, his chief civil rights aide, Lee White, told Johnson that Daniels’ mother was having a hard time getting her son’s body returned from Alabama. Johnson told White to handle the transportation of Daniels’ corpse.

Carmichael traveled to Keene for Daniels’ funeral at St. James Episcopal Church, the parish that sponsored Daniels for ordination. Carmichael and a group of mourners sang a tearful We Shall Overcome at Daniels’ grave near his father’s at the edge of the Monadnock View Cemetery.

King called Daniels’ death “brutal and bestial,” but said that he had performed “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”

Alice West, with whom Daniels and Upham lived in Selma, said that Daniels had been a part of her family. “We all loved him and trusted him,” she told a website for veterans of the civil rights movement. “He taught my family all about the wonders of God’s love. His death took a toll on my family as well as all the black people in Selma, Alabama” (Schjonberg 7-9).

In less than 12 hours Coleman is released on minimal bail. An all-white Lowndes County grand jury charges Coleman with manslaughter rather than murder. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, a racial "moderate" and a political foe of both George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, calls the manslaughter charge "shocking," and assumes charge of the prosecution. But as the trial date approaches, a flood of death threats dissuades Flowers from personally showing up in Lowndes County. He sends a deputy to Hayneville rather than appear in court himself.

The short trial takes place on Wednesday, September 29, little more than a month after the shooting. The Hayneville courthouse is crowded with Coleman's friends and supporters, among them Imperial Klan Wizard Robert Shelton, Grand Dragon Robert Creed, and the three Klansmen who murdered Viola Liuzzo. Circuit Judge Werth Thagard denies the motion from Flower's deputy to raise the charge to murder, denies the motion to change the trial venue out of Lowndes County, and denies the motion to delay the case until Father Morrisroe is recovered enough from his wounds to testify (since the jury trying Coleman will be made up entirely of white men, Flowers considers Morrisroe, the only surviving white witness, crucial to his case). Thagard then removes Flower's deputy and assigns local prosecutor Arthur Gamble — a personal friend of Coleman — to handle the prosecution.

Coleman admits he brought his loaded shotgun to the store that day, but claims he killed Daniels in "self-defense" after the seminary student threatened him with a knife. White friends of Coleman allege that Morrisroe was armed with a pistol, Daniels had a knife, and that "unidentified Negroes" stole the weapons from the crime scene after the shooting. With steadfast courage, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales defy intimidation from the hostile crowd and testify that Coleman murdered Jonathan Daniels and tried to kill Father Morrisroe without any cause or justification.

Most civil rights activists familiar with the events are convinced that the shooting was a planned ambush. They believe that the abrupt eviction of the incarcerated protesters out of the jail into the street was not a coincidence, but rather an action pre-arranged between Coleman and the jailors. When he was ready with his loaded shotgun, they set up his targets. As soon as he saw the mixed group of Black and white, he charged out of the store and opened fire. But the possibility of police collusion and conspiracy is not raised or explored in the trial.

The jury confers in front of the Confederate soldiers monument across from the courthouse. Despite the nonviolent history of Daniels and Morrisroe, the obvious fact that there was no way prisoners just released from jail would have had access to any weapons and that no weapons were found at the scene, they accept Coleman's "self-defense" lie and quickly return a verdict of "Not Guilty." All 12 jury men then shake Coleman's hand and congratulate him.

Nationally, the verdict is roundly condemned by political leaders and the major media as a perversion of justice. And in a sign that at least some change is finally coming to the Deep South, the Birmingham News describes it as "an obscene caricature of justice," and the Atlanta Constitution, which had refused to even cover the The March to Montgomery 6 months earlier, writes that the verdict "has broken the heart of Dixie." Attorney General Flowers is blunter, stating that the verdict represents the, "democratic process going down the drain of irrationality, bigotry and improper law enforcement. ... now those who feel they have a license to kill, destroy, and cripple have been issued that license. Die-hard white racists agree with one thing he says, they plaster "License to Kill" bumper stickers next to their Confederate flag plates. (Trial 1-2).

“I would shoot them both tomorrow,” Coleman insisted years later. After all, they were “outsiders from the North.” (Troy 6).

Then-Presiding [Episcopal] Bishop John Hines said that what Coleman’s acquittal showed “about the likelihood of minorities securing even-handed justice in some parts of this country should jar the conscience of all men who still believe in the concept of justice in this land of hope.”

Instead of attributing Coleman’s release to the price a free society pays for the jury system, Hines said it was “the fearful price extracted from society for the administration of the system by people whose prejudices lead them to sacrifice justice upon the altar of their irrational fears” (Schjonberg 9).

Looking back, Stokely Carmichael related: Jonathan's murder grieved us. His wasn't the first death we'd experienced. But it was in some ways the one closest to me as an organizer. I'd thought they might have been gunning for me that night when they shot Silas McGhee in my car. That brother survived. But this one. ... Now I knew the kind of pressure I'd watched Bob Moses endure. I don't mean I understood or sympathized. Everyone had understood. But, now I felt what Bob must have been feeling, the pressure, the weight of the responsibility, the sorrow. But we couldn't let that stop the work. That's precisely what the killers intended. However, from then on, a little too late, the project staff took the strong position, nonnegotiable, that to allow whites in would be tantamount to inviting their deaths. That became our policy. And we armed ourselves (Trial 3).

Today, America’s Colemans are disgraced, while people like Daniels are canonized. The ESCRU launched a campaign, Operation Southern Justice, to integrate Southern juries. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, the Episcopal Church added Jonathan Daniels to the Church Calendar, marking his martyrdom every Aug. 14 (Troy 7). 

Works cited:

“Ambush!” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965daniels

Schjonberg, Mary Frances. “Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after His Martyrdom.´ ENS. Episcopal News Service. Web. https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2015/08/13/remembering-jonathan-daniels-50-years-after-his-martyrdom/

“The Trial of Tom Coleman.” Murder of Jonathan Daniels. Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965daniels

Troy, Gil. “Jonathan Daniels: The Forgotten Civil Rights Preacher Killed by a Cop in Alabama.” Daily Beast. August 21, 2016. Web. https://www.thedailybeast.com/jonathan-daniels-the-forgotten-civil-rights-preacher-killed-by-a-cop-in-alabama