Town Pays Homage To Civil Rights Hero Monument Honors White Man Who Saved Black Woman’s Life

The town square of Hayneville, with a monument to Confederate dead and a courthouse built by slaves, added a strikingly different memorial to its past on Saturday, a past that many local whites prefer to forget.

A rusty red brick monument was unveiled honoring Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminary student from New England who was shot to death in 1965 by a white man angered by Daniels and other civil rights protesters.

“It is time now for us to break the historical silence,” said Ruby Sales, who was a 17-year-old black demonstrator with Daniels, who was white, when he was shot. She said Daniels moved her aside and took Tom Coleman’s shotgun blast to save her life.

“I’m deeply troubled,” said Sales, who is a student at the Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Mass., that Daniels attended. “We haven’t made the most of the sacrifices of Jonathan Daniels and others who laid down their lives.”

Another speaker, Richard Morrisroe, was a 27-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Chicago when he joined in the 1965 civil rights work in Alabama. He was seriously wounded in the shooting that killed Daniels.

“We were too young to respect the boundaries between white and black, North and South,” Morrisroe said.

At the close of the unveiling ceremony a few hundred people marched about a block down a dusty country road to the site where Daniels was slain and Morrisroe wounded in the blazing afternoon sun on Aug. 20, 1965.

The killing of Daniels, who was reviled at the time by some local whites as an “outside agitator,” cast Hayneville as one of segregation’s battle sites.

It is no longer such a war zone, said Barbara Evans, a white labor organizer who was coordinator of the memorial project. But she acknowledged the Daniels marker may still scrape a racial nerve in Lowndes County, one of the state’s poorest. About three-fourths of the 13,000 residents are black.

Most of those attending the ceremony were blacks. Only one white elected public official was on hand.

Lee Smith, a 44-year-old Hayneville black man, said the memorial on the town square won’t sit well with whites, even though they have been mostly quiet about it.

“I think they’re objecting to it like hell but they can’t stop it,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they pulled it down with a truck one night.”

But G.A. Tippins, a black policeman in Hayneville, said he didn’t think the Daniels marker would be a problem. He pointed to the Confederate monument, a concrete spire in the middle of the square with the names of Lowndes County’s Civil War dead.

“Black people don’t pay it any attention,” he said.

The man accused of Daniels’ slaying, Coleman, was never tried for murder or for the shooting of Morrisroe. A jury of 12 white men found the highway employee and part-time deputy innocent of manslaughter. He claimed self-defense, saying he thought Daniels had a weapon.

Coleman died in June of cancer.

“I hope he found peace,” said Morrisroe.