Now Daniels and more than a dozen Black demonstrators — who had all been arrested after protesting the discriminatory way White-owned shops treated Black customers — craved a cold drink.
So they walked the short distance from the sewage-plagued jail in Hayneville, Ala., to a convenience store. But when Daniels and one of his Black compatriots, a 17-year-old girl named Ruby Sales, approached the front door, a White man clutching a 12-gauge shotgun stood in their way.
Daniels asked the man — Tom Coleman, a state highway employee who served as a volunteer special deputy sheriff — if he was threatening them, according to “Outside Agitator,” a biography of Daniels by historian Charles Eagles. Then, Daniels pushed Sales out of the way and onto the ground as Coleman opened fire, killing the VMI alumnus instantly.
The death of Daniels made national news and turned him into a civil rights hero. He has also become an idolized martyr at his alma mater, VMI, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college.
At the time of Daniels’s death, VMI was an all-White, all-male public college that resisted racial integration and whose cadets fought and died for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
VMI wouldn’t enroll its first Black cadets on its Lexington campus until 1968, the last public college in the state to integrate.
In the wake of the 2021 state-ordered investigation that found a “racist and sexist culture” on campus, VMI is planning to enhance its commemoration of Daniels. The school already boasts the Daniels courtyard and Daniels Library, and one of the arches leading into the student barracks is named after him. A plaque in the courtyard bears his image over a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.: “One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”
According to the college’s spokesman, Bill Wyatt, VMI has retained an architectural firm to help design a monument honoring Daniels, planned for near the school’s entrance. VMI expects to finalize the design and select the exact site for the monument later this year.
“The design will capture the last moments of Daniels’s life while summoning the viewer to reflect on their personal opportunities for humanitarian service,” Wyatt said.
But VMI still has not figured out whether to relocate, keep or contextualize other tributes and traditions with ties to slavery or the Confederacy.
‘Unadulterated hell’
Daniels, in many respects, did not fit the typical mold of a VMI cadet. He was not from the South or Virginia. And, his biographer wrote, he was a “gentle, intellectual, undisciplined young man” who frequently skipped class, smoked cigarettes on the school grounds and earned multiple speeding tickets. His mystified friends worried he might not withstand “the physical rigors and regimented life of a military institution.”
Yet, VMI — about which he had probably heard through a family friend who was an alumnus — made total sense. His father, Phil Daniels, a physician who strongly influenced him, served in World War II, suffering injuries to his feet and legs. He earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, according to his obituary.
But, when Daniels entered VMI in 1957 as a “rat” — as all new cadets are known — he found his predicament “almost unbearable,” according to his biographer. At VMI, rats face a months-long induction period full of verbal harassment and grueling workouts.
Daniels, an English major who loved music, theater, philosophy and literature, lamented that he had little time to study.
“The life of a rat is somewhat less than ethereal bliss,” Daniels wrote, according to the biography. VMI, he said, was “pure, unadulterated hell.”
His classmates didn’t think the nearly 6-foot-tall, 142-pound native of Keene, N.H., would survive. “The experience may have given him some idea of what it was like to be a second-class citizen and to be oppressed by another group,” his biographer wrote.
At VMI, Daniels found refuge with a clique of fellow English majors who belonged to a club that he described in his senior yearbook as a “monument to humanism in a wasteland” of athletes, scientists and engineers. (He also found relief in a bottle of J&B scotch, which he kept hidden in a hollowed-out Civil War dictionary, his biographer said.)
A description of him next to his senior yearbook photo noted “his purposeful egoism,” but said it was “balanced by unfailing tact and generosity.”
“The presence of a New Hampshire Yankee in a southern military college has for four years roused the curiosity of his Dixie colleagues,” the entry read.
Indeed, the New Englander was constantly bombarded with Confederate traditions, such as an annual event honoring VMI cadets who fought and died for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market in 1864. During the New Market ceremony his junior year, the event drew a record crowd of 2,000 people, ending with students marching to “Dixie.”
VMI’s spokesman said there was no indication that Daniels pushed the school to integrate. The future civil rights activist was hardly exposed to people of color during his years at VMI, his biographer wrote.
“The all-white VMI student body and faculty did not appreciably expand Daniels’ personal contact with Blacks or his understanding of race relations,” his biographer wrote, “though he did regularly observe Blacks in menial jobs,” who were routinely slurred by White cadets with the n-word.
His final year at VMI, Daniels was an editor on the student newspaper, won a Danforth Foundation fellowship for graduate school and was elected class valedictorian. But Daniels struggled to write the valedictory speech, his biographer wrote, because he “could not say things he did not believe, and he had mixed feelings about VMI.”
In his VMI commencement speech, Daniels said: “We have spent four years in preparation for something. What that something is, who we are, we do not know.”
‘I had to come back’
It did not take long for Daniels to find that “something.” He spent a year at Harvard’s graduate school studying English but left after discovering a renewed passion for religion. By the fall of 1963, he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. As part of his training, he was dispatched to an inner-city parish in Providence, R.I.
“It was unlike anything Daniels had known in Keene or at VMI,” his biographer wrote. “For the first time, Daniels gained experience with Blacks.”
The work galvanized him. And, in early 1965, when King issued a call for clergy of all faiths to join him in Selma, Ala. — for demonstrations and a drive to boost Black voter registrations — Daniels and other seminarians and ministers followed.
For much of 1965, he went to Alabama repeatedly, helping Black people register to vote, getting them on or reinstated to welfare rolls, or even taking people to medical appointments. His final visit came in August.
“Something had happened to me in Selma which meant I had to come back,” Daniels explained, according to the biography. “I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes were too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question.”
That month, he arrived in the town of Fort Deposit, where he and other activists protested outside shops that still had separate entrances for African Americans or refused to hire people of color.
When armed White counterprotesters arrived, Daniels and his compatriots got arrested. They were driven to the Hayneville jail, where Daniels led inmates in prayers and hymns. When Daniels and others were released about a week later — with little explanation — they feared a trap.
Milling about outside the jail, they had nowhere to go. That’s when a handful of them, including Daniels and Ruby Sales, headed to the store down the road.
Moments later, when Tom Coleman fatally shot Daniels, the seminarian fell backward, clad in his clerical collar. Another demonstrator was injured by Coleman’s gunfire: Richard Morrisroe, 26, a Roman Catholic priest from Chicago.
When Daniels’s body was delivered to a local funeral home, according to Taylor Branch’s “At Canaan’s Edge,” it had no identification, other than his 1961 VMI class ring.
“He walked away from the king’s table,” she said. “He could have had any benefit he wanted, because he was young, White, brilliant and male.”
Coleman was quickly put on trial but not for first-degree murder, the initial charge. Instead, he was tried for manslaughter. On Sept. 30, an all-White jury found him not guilty, after a trial in which Coleman’s lawyer argued that Daniels had been armed and that his client shot him in self-defense, even though no weapons were ever found in Daniels’s possession and other witnesses confirmed that he carried nothing dangerous.
Three years after Daniels was gunned down in Alabama, VMI opened its doors for the first time to five Black cadets: Harry Gore, Adam Randolph, Dick Valentine, Phil Wilkerson and Larry Foster.
Valentine, who graduated from VMI in 1972, participated in one of the college’s pilgrimages to Hayneville almost four years ago, according to an article on VMI’s website. The alumni stopped at the county courthouse for a service. Valentine, now the head of the office of civil rights for Florida’s Department of Children and Families, addressed the group.
“Jonathan was placed in a situation where he had to act, and he did. It cost him his life, but we’re all better for it,” Valentine told fellow graduates. “I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that there’s a connection between the activities of [that day] and what took place three years later … when VMI … let people of color attend the university. So, I just wanted to make a connection that the struggle is real. … There’s no wrong time to do the right thing.”