Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama

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Overview

Outside Agitator tells the dramatic, largely forgotten story behind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jon Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, by detailing the lives of killer and victim. A white Episcopal seminary student from New Hampshire, Jon Daniels helped organize blacks in Selma during the aftermath of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. In August 1965 he was fatally shot in neighboring Lowndes County by Tom Coleman, a highway department engineer and steadfast segregationist, who was later acquitted by an all-white jury.
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Overview

Outside Agitator tells the dramatic, largely forgotten story behind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jon Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, by detailing the lives of killer and victim. A white Episcopal seminary student from New Hampshire, Jon Daniels helped organize blacks in Selma during the aftermath of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. In August 1965 he was fatally shot in neighboring Lowndes County by Tom Coleman, a highway department engineer and steadfast segregationist, who was later acquitted by an all-white jury.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In this detailed but readable book, Eagles (who edited The Civil Rights Movement in America ) fleshes out the 1965 killing in Alabama of white Episcopal seminarian Jon Daniels, which received little attention at the time because of the Watts riots and a subsequent New York newspaper strike. Eagles traces the New Hampshire background of the ``intensely self-critical'' Daniels, and his decision to join protests led by Martin Luther King in Selma. Daniels then became the first white civil rights volunteer in nearby Lowndes County. Eagles ably elaborates the white-supremacist history of isolated, backward Lowndes, as well as the growth of grass-roots civil rights activism there. Arrested for picketing local merchants and released, Daniels then led an interracial group to a store, where a local resident, Tom Coleman, shot him. Eagles speculates on why Coleman might have felt more threatened than others by the civil rights movement. An inept prosecution, coupled with defense lawyers playing to an all-white jury, assured Coleman's acquittal. This book, as well as the Episcopal Church's 1991 decision to cite Daniels as a martyr, serves as a measure of redress. Photos not seen by PW. (June)
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From The Critics
More than four decades ago, political scientist V.O. Key Jr. observed in his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation that whites in Southern ``Black Belt'' counties were the most staunch supporters of racial segregation and white supremacy. Historian Eagles examines the events surrounding the shooting death of civil rights worker and Episcopalian seminary student Jon Daniels in one Black Belt county (Lowndes) of Alabama in 1965. Eagles's account of how Daniels came to be in Alabama and his work there is both well researched and emotionally moving. Readers seeking a broader overview of events in Alabama during this turbulent time may consult Carl Elliot Sr. with Michael D'Orso's The Cost of Courage: The Journey of an American Congressman ( LJ 2/1/92). A valuable addition to public and academic collections on the civil rights movement.-- Thomas H. Ferrell, Univ . of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780807820919
  • Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, The
  • Publication date: 6/1/1993
  • Pages: 352
  • Product dimensions: 5.77 (w) x 9.54 (h) x 1.12 (d)

Meet the Author

Charles Eagles, Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, is the author of several books, including Democracy Delayed: Congressional Reapportionment and Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s, and editor of The Civil Rights Movement in America.

Table of Contents

Preface
1 From Keene to Cambridge 1
2 Selma 29
3 The Black Belt: Reality Is a Kaleidoscope 61
4 "Bloody" Lowndes 89
5 The Lowndes County Movement: A Genuine Social and Political Revolution 119
6 Demonstration and Death 163
7 Preparing for Trial: Friends Meet in Hayneville 185
8 Trial in a Temple of Justice 213
9 The Making of a Martyr 251
Notes 265
Bibliography 307
Acknowledgments 321
Index 325
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