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

By Charles W. Eagles and Professor Charles Eagles

Book Overview

Outside Agitator tells the dramatic, largely forgotten storybehind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jonathan Myrick "Jon" Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, detailing the lives of the killer and the victim. A white Episcopal seminary student from New Hampshire, Jon Daniels helped organize blacks in Selma during the events that led to 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.

Lowndes County was a bastion of white minority dominance. For half a century, no black had voted or served on a jury there. Known for the violence used by whites to maintain their control, "bloody" Lowndes presented Daniels and other civil rights workers with almost insurmountable obstacles. Tom Coleman, a Lowndes County native, represented the consensus among local whites that violent resistance to racial change was justified. To defend his community and to prevent change, he resorted to violence against "outside agitators."

Following the deaths of a score of other civil rights workers, the killing of Jon Daniels was in many ways the last atrocity of the first, southern, nonviolent phase of the Civil Rights movement. This exploration of how Daniels and Coleman came to be at opposite ends of a shotgun outside a county store captures the mechanics and emotions of forces promoting and resisting change in southern race relations. Charles Eagles reminds us that however representative Daniels and Coleman may have been of larger forces, they were nevertheless real individuals with distinctive personalities caught up in specific circumstances.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081731069X
• ISBN13: 9780817310691
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A soul-shaking read

I heard about Jon Daniels for the first time recently on NPR and was immediately interested. As a cradle Episcopalian and the mother of a bi-racial daughter, I wanted to know more about him. I found this book and was profoundly moved by his faith and call to Alabama. This book told me more about the Episcopal church's involvement in the civil rights movement than I had ever known before. I shall now remember him every August 14th, the day of his arrest and when he is remembered by the Episcopal Church is Lesser Feast and Fasts.

Great Book in Very Good Shape Sent Quickly

Brought the 60s back to me. Vendor did excellent job. Honest appraisal of the book's condition. Shipped right away.