Alabama: ALABAMA Death in the Black Belt

Lowndes County, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, was once the home of wealthy planters, a gracious land of pillared mansions and fertile cotton fields. Today it is a gritty collection of cattle farms and dying towns living in a hand-me-down past. When the present intrudes in the form of civil rights demonstrations, its people are apt to react with savage intensity. It was in Lowndes County that Detroit

Housewife Viola Liuzzo was gunned down last March as she drove down U.S. 80 to pick up Selma-to-Montgomery marchers. There, too, last week shotgun blasts killed a 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire and critically wounded a Catholic priest on a street in Hayneville (pop. 800). Both were civil rights workers.

Dead was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute (’61), who was studying for the ministry at Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. After taking part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Daniels had gone back to Cambridge to finish the school year, then returned to spend the summer working with the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity in Selma. His companion was Father Richard F. Morrisroe, assistant pastor of Chicago’s Saint Columbanus Church, who had gone earlier this month to Birmingham to attend the Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention.

“Black Bastards!” Both victims were among 29 civil rights demonstrators who were arrested Aug. 14 at nearby Fort Deposit after they had picketed stores, demanding equal job opportunities for local Negroes. After being held for nearly a week in the county jail at Hayneville, they were unexpectedly released one afternoon last week. As they waited outside the Hayneville courthouse for a ride back to Selma, the group began “singing and demonstrating and creating general disorder,” as Lowndes County Solicitor Carlton Perdue put it. Then Daniels, Father Morrisroe and two Negro girls strolled across the street to Varner’s grocery store to get something to eat.

Standing near the doorway was Tom Coleman, 55, a state highway engineer and part-time deputy sheriff, who had come to investigate the owner’s complaint that the rights workers were causing a disturbance. Coleman carried a .12gauge automatic shotgun. According to one of the girls, Ruby Sales, 20, Coleman shouted at them as they approached the store: “Get off my goddam property before I blow your goddam brains out, you black bastards!” With that, she said, he opened fire.

“Funny Look.” Daniels was cut down where he stood. Father Morrisroe turned to run and was shot in the back. Said Jimmy Rogers, another rights worker who witnessed the shooting: “Jon was lying on his back absolutely still. He had a funny look in his eye so I left him alone. Richard was yelling, ‘Water, water, water’ and rolling around on the ground. I tried to hold him still. There were about ten white people in front of the store. They told me that if I did not get out of there, the same thing would happen to me.”

Coleman was taken into custody, questioned and charged with first degree murder. Next day he was released on $12,500 bond. County Solicitor Perdue, who will prosecute Coleman when he comes to trial, remarked that the demonstrators would have been “living and happy today if they’d been tending their own business.” Said he: “Instead, they decided to do some picketing and singing. They went down to this store, and the man down there just let ’em have it, so to speak.”