
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993                   TAG: 9308120104
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOOK HAPPENED BY CHANCE

One Saturday morning in 1981, Charles Eagles was visiting a library at the University of North Carolina, checking footnotes for a book he was finishing up on a well-known newspaper editor named Jonathan Worth Daniels. Eagles indicated on the library's register that he was researching "JDaniels."

Soon, a black woman came over to him. She was excited. She wanted to know if Eagles was researching "THE Jonathan Daniels." Eagles sensed some confusion, and explained that the Jon Daniels he was writing about had been a newspaper editor.

The woman was disappointed. She had hoped he was writing about the seminary student and civil rights activist who had been killed in Alabama in 1965.

The woman's name was Ruby Sales. In 1965, she had been a young college student fighting for civil rights. On a street in Hayneville, Ala., Jonathan Myrick Daniels had pulled her out of the way just before a shotgun blast ripped into his chest.

Eagles, a historian at University of Mississippi, said his conversations with Ruby Sales convinced him that he should do a book on young Jon Daniels. Over the past decade, he made research trips to Alabama, New England and to Virginia Military Institute, where Daniels was an iconoclastic cadet.

His book, "Outside Agitator," is riding a recent wave of interest in Daniels' life and death.

The Episcopal church is in the process of adding him to its Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts as a martyr of the church.

Filmmakers at Keene State College, in the New Hampshire town where Daniels grew up, are wrapping up a documentary on him.

Last year, VMI's black student organization, Promaji, named one of its alumni service commendations the "Jonathan Daniels '61 Award." The first Jon Daniels award went to Salem businessman and Total Action Against Poverty founder Cabell Brand.

David Coffey, a history instructor at VMI, hopes to organize an symposium at VMI next year that would bring together Eagles, Ruby Sales and others who want to remember Daniels.

Despite the growing interest, Coffey said, most current cadets probably don't know who he was. Daniels' name and the date of his death are on a plaque on the door of the VMI's English Department study lounge.

It doesn't say how or why he died. And given the date, Coffey said, "I think they sort of jump to the conclusion he was a Vietnam War casualty."

by CNB