Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9308120100
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"He was going to be a minister. His way of life was going to be a way of peace," one roommate, retired Army Capt. Walter Bossart, remembers more than three decades later. "He just didn't want anything to do with weapons."
It was a strange thing for a member of the corps, where discipline and the warrior tradition prevail.
But then Jonathan Daniels always believed in doing things his own way - and following his conscience.
That's what Daniels, a New Englander, was doing in Alabama a few years later. Daniels, by then a Episcopal seminary student, had come South and joined the battle for civil rights during the summer of 1965.
On Aug. 20, 1965, Daniels' commitment to the cause cost him his life.
That afternoon, Daniels, Ruby Sales and other voting-rights demonstrators had been released from the Lowndes County Jail, where they had been taken after sheriff's deputies had broken up a protest march. They walked down a silent street in heat so stifling that mist rose from the sidewalks. They were thirsty, so they headed for a grocery store that was willing to serve civil-rights workers.
Tom Coleman, a white highway-department worker, stepped out of the store's front door holding a shotgun. He leveled a gun at them and told them to leave "or I'll blow your g-d--- heads off."
Ruby Sales, a young black woman staring down both barrels of the shotgun, felt someone grab her. She heard a blast. Then another.
Jonathan Daniels had pulled Sales out of the way. He was hit point-blank in his chest by first blast.
The Rev. Richard Morrisroe, a white Catholic priest, was severely wounded. Coleman claimed that Daniels and Morrisroe had been carrying a knife and a gun - a preposterous idea to those who knew Daniels and his hatred of weapons. Witnesses said Daniels was not armed.
But an all-white jury took just 91 minutes to acquit his killer.
The trial clearly was rigged from the start. One prosecutor was quoted in the newspaper saying that if Daniels and Morrisroe "had been tending to their own business, like I tend to mine, they'd be living and enjoying themselves today."
Doing things right
Jonathan Daniels, VMI Class of '61, became a martyr of the civil rights movement. It was an unlikely role for a graduate of the institute, a bastion of Southern tradition that did not admit a black student until 1968.
Daniels' life is the story of a young man who loved the rituals of the military but hated the weapons, a student of literature and philosophy who was also a man of action, and a man who respected authority but often rebelled, from the inside, against it.
"He was not a crusader, exactly, as a cadet," remembers George Roth, a retired professor of English at VMI. "But he was committed to doing things right."
Daniels' story is told in "Outside Agitator," a book written by historian Charles Eagles and published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born in 1939 in Keene, N.H. His father, an Army captain during World War II, was a prominent physician in town. His mother, Connie, was an energetic leader of Keene's social elite.
As a teen-ager, Jonathan was a bit of rebel. He was careless enough about his school work that all the Ivy League schools he applied to turned him down. VMI was the only place that accepted him.
Eagles wrote that VMI's uniforms, ceremonies and traditions of gallantry were probably alluring to Daniels, just as he had been drawn to the ritual of the Episcopal church as a teen-ager.
Still, it was a strange choice.
Jonathan was gentle and undisciplined. He weighed 142 pounds and stood less than 6 feet tall. He seemed an unlikely candidate for an institution where first-year cadets were called "Rats" and put through hellish physical and psychological hazing.
Most of the institute's students were from the South. The cadets often saluted a statue of Stonewall Jackson, a former VMI professor and Confederate general.
The solidarity of the corps - fostered by the equal-opportunity ordeal of abuse that all first-year cadets suffered - has always helped minimize the differences between those who attended the institute. But in those days, regional rivalries were still evident.
"It was Northerners versus Southerners: Us Yankees and You Rebels," Daniels' roommate, Walter Bossart, recalls. "You knew who the Rebels were in the class. And they knew who the Yankees were."
Daniels, Bossart and another roommate, James Wilson, "belonged to the Yankee club."
The rebel yells from the Southerners would sometimes be met with a taunt from the Northerners: "We'll march through Georgia again."
Eagles wrote that some cadets' first impressions of Daniels was that he was "immature" and "delicate." But "he soon demonstrated the strength of his personality and ideas."
He didn't run from an argument. "There was no way anyone was going to outdo Jonathan," Bossart says. "Because Jonathan had such a command of the English language."
Despite Daniels' strong opinions, Bossart says, "everybody thought an awful lot of him. Jon could get along with anybody:
`Damn you, Jon, I'm not sure if I like you or not.'
`Oh c'mon, let's go up town and have a pizza and a brew.' "
Daniels' grades suffered during the rigors of his Rat year. But he survived, and began to blossom in the classroom and out.
Daniels and his roommates chose the path of "Rat Daddies," placing themselves among the handful of upperclassmen who each year took it upon themselves to serve as protectors of first-year cadets.
One evening during his Rat year, Josiah Bunting was listening to music in the Timmins Room, a place were cadets could sit in listening booths and enjoy classical records. Bunting put on a Boston Pops recording of the Marine Corps Hymn - loud.
Daniels, a junior, was the cadet in charge of the room that night. Suddenly, he threw open the door and angrily dressed the Rat down: "It's appalling that you would play that kind of thing in a setting like this. This is a place for serious music."
A few hours later, around midnight, Bunting was in bed when he heard a knock on the door. Daniels walked in. Bunting jumped up and set on the edge of his bed.
"My name is Jonathan Daniels," he began. "I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you earlier. I don't know you."
He said he now realized that the Marine Corp Hymn could be as important and serious to Bunting as Beethoven or Schubert was to him. Then he turned on his heels and left.
For an upperclassman to do that - given the stringent caste system that the Rat system imposed - was "an astounding thing," says Bunting, who later served as president of Hampden-Sydney College. Bunting and Daniels became friends during Daniels' last year.
Daniels had a love-hate relationship with VMI. He complained about military discipline's "deadening effects on the poor cadet." But he used his intellectual hunger to build his own world within the institute. He devoured great works of literature and philosophy. When a professor mentioned a book in passing, he would read it and come back with comments and questions.
He had, Bunting says, a "complete autonomy of self. He was pretty much indifferent to what people thought of him."
He found small ways to rebel. He stashed a bottle of J&B scotch in a hollowed-out Civil War dictionary in his barracks room.
During his senior year, he telephoned the Rev. John Fletcher, then the rector of Robert E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church in Lexington.
Fletcher remembers Daniels asking, "How would you like it if 1,100 cadets came to church on Sunday?"
Fletcher said it sounded like a good idea. Except that the church only seated about 500.
Daniels admitted he had a hidden motive: The institute required all the cadets to attend the church of their choice on Sundays. Daniels thought it was wrong to force anyone to attend church. Religion was something a person should come to freely.
His idea was to use the entire corps to flood R.E. Lee Church, and other Lexington churches each Sunday from then on - until VMI's administration was forced to drop mandatory church attendance.
It never happened. "The Saturday night before he called and said his colleagues had lost their moral fervor," Fletcher recalls.
But his unexecuted plan was an example of how Daniels' mind worked: He wanted to use the trappings of the system to force subversive change upon itself.
Bossart remembers Daniels questioning why VMI did not allow black students. "By the time he was a senior, he was definitely a rebel-type. He wanted to see change not only at VMI but he wanted to see change in the country. That sort of alienated some of his classmates from him."
Still, that didn't stop the Class of 1961 from voting him its highest honor: The seniors elected him to give the valedictory speech at graduation.
That fall, Daniels entered Harvard to study English on a prestigious fellowship. But, Eagles wrote, he longed "to be involved in the world of action."
He decided to become a minister and headed for an Episcopal seminary in Massachusetts. As part of his training, he was assigned to an inner-city parish in Rhode Island. His work there fueled his belief that "Christian social action" could change the world.
On March 7, 1965, in Selma, Ala., civil-rights marchers were attacked, as they knelt praying, by state troopers and local deputies with clubs and tear gas. After "Bloody Sunday," the Rev. Martin Luther King called for ministers of all faiths to come to Selma to join the crusade for voting rights.
Daniels heard the call. His mastery of the cruel hardships of VMI had shown he had the courage to face any challenge. "He had a kind of confidence," Roth, one of his professors at VMI, remembers. "He said there was really a feeling of freedom that this commitment gave him."
He headed south with other students from the seminary. Once there, Daniels joined black and white ministers in a weekslong campaign to integrate Selma's Episcopal church.
While others came and left, Daniels decided to stay. Daniels said in a letter to a friend that "something had happened to me in Selma which meant I had to come back. I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value."
He moved in with the Wests, a black family with 10 children. He became part of the family. He took the children on errands with him around town. He held their hands during protest marches.
Rachel West was 9 at the time. Years later she told the author of "Lord, Selma, Lord," a book on the civil-rights movement:
I remember one day after many of our people had been arrested and there was talk of more trouble before us, I was standing outside in the apartment yard watching some of the other children play. Jonathan saw me and came and knelt down beside me.
"Why aren't you playing with the others?" he asks.
And I had shrugged, "I don't know why."
So he stares at me very seriously and puts an arm around me. "You afraid of something?"
And I told him I was thinking about the sheriff's posse and some of the bad things that had been happening.
"You don't have to be afraid anymore," he said. "I'll watch you and make sure nothing or nobody bothers you. All right?"
But I didn't know. So all of a sudden he picked me up and tossed me up in the air. "Now are you afraid?" he asked. And I started laughing then. He kept spinning around and throwing me up and catching me. Finally I yelled that I wasn't afraid, and he put me down.
After a few months, however, Daniels grew frustrated at the lack of progress in Selma. He decided to make a move - to an even more daunting challenge.
He packed up and drove to "Bloody Lowndes" County, a low, swampy place in south-central Alabama. It was a poor, violent county. Until just a few months before Daniels' arrival, no black man or woman had registered to vote there in the 20th century. Many whites in Lowndes liked to say that the first black who tried to register would be dead before the day was out.
In the spring of 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who had come south to work for civil rights, was murdered as she drove through Lowndes County. A gun blast from a carload of Klansmen killed her at the wheel of her car.
When one of the Klansmen was put on trial, the jurors deadlocked, despite overwhelming evidence against him. The fact that they would not convict him, Eagles wrote, was a clear signal that violence was an acceptable weapon against the civil-rights movement.
Nonetheless, a small grass-roots movement of the county's black citizens fought a dangerous campaign that spring for the right to vote. By May 3, they had succeeded in registering 11 blacks.
When he arrived in the county in late July, Daniels was the first white person to join the civil rights movement in Lowndes.
He traveled the county, attempting to persuade fearful black farmers to agree to register to vote. He spoke briefly at mass meetings, recalling the story of how Moses had led the people of Israel out of slavery.
By early August, about 200 blacks had succeeding in getting on the voter rolls - but as many as 1,000 others had been turned away by the white registrars. On Aug. 10, the U.S. Justice Department sent federal voter registrars to Lowndes.
Four days later, Daniels and other demonstrators were arrested while they picketed stores in the town of Fort Deposit. They were put into a truck and taken to the county jail in Hayneville.
Daniels spent six days in a cramped, dirty cell where the toilet overflowed with sewage. The black prisoners called the young seminary student "Reverend." He led them in singing hymns and freedom songs. Deputies yelled at them to be quiet, but they kept singing. Their rising voices could be heard all over town.
On Aug. 20, as civil-rights lawyers sued to have the demonstrators' cases heard in federal court, Hayneville's mayor decided to cut the prisoners lose.
At 2 p.m., jailers told them they were free to go. No one was there to meet them. Daniels, Father Morrisroe and two black women - Ruby Sales and Joyce Bailey - headed to a small grocery store.
Tom Coleman, son of the former county superintendent of schools, was waiting for them in the doorway with a 12-gauge shotgun. He leveled the gun at the four and vowed he was going to shoot them. Daniels asked if he was threatening them.
Coleman responded by blowing hole in Daniels' chest and blasting Morrisroe in the back as the priest grabbed Bailey's hand and turned to flee.
Daniels died almost instantly. He was 26.
His mother was celebrating her birthday when she got the news that evening.
Coleman was tried on a manslaughter charge. Defense attorneys painted Daniels and Morrisroe as agitators and terrorists. They warned to jury to beware of "ravening wolves" who come disguised in sheep's clothing: "These were not men of God as we know them here in Alabama."
"We got a right to protect ourselves," one of Coleman's attorneys said to close the trial. Coleman was simply doing what he had to do to protect the community, the lawyer argued. Then he shouted: "God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls - and ready hands! Tall men."
After the jurors acquitted Coleman, they filed out and, one by one, shook his hand. One called to Coleman: "We gonna be able to make that dove shoot now, ain't we?"
Today, Lowndes County is still one of the poorest in the nation. In 1983, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported that "Political gains have yet to translate into economic gains. Blacks in Lowndes County have little reason for optimism." Still, Eagles says, much has changed. Blacks vote, hold office, go to schools with whites and live free from the fear of white-hooded terrorism.
One reason is that Jonathan Daniels' death didn't frighten the county's black citizens into giving up - it inspired them to fight harder.
`We been walkin' with dropped down heads, with a scrunched up heart, and a timid body in the bushes. But we ain't scared any more," one old black farmer said a few months after Coleman's acquittal. "Don't meddle, don't pick a fight, but fight back! If you have to die, die for something, and take somebody before you."
The thought of such violence would have bothered Daniels, whatever the justice of the cause.
But things did change in Lowndes, without bloodshed. Five years after Daniels' death, "Bloody Lowndes" elected its first black sheriff.
Before the new sheriff's election, Eagles wrote, gun racks in the back of white-owned pickup trucks almost always held shotguns. Blacks were afraid to carry guns in theirs.
After the new sheriff took over, more and more blacks put shotguns in their gun racks - and more whites began leaving theirs at home.
After a while, the shotguns began to disappear from pickups owned by both blacks and whites. They were replaced with umbrellas and fishing rods.
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by CNB