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

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)