Thomas Coleman
*Thomas Coleman was born on this date in 1910. He was a white-American highway engineer, sheriff deputy, and segregationist.
On August 20, 1965, voting rights activists were released from jail in Fort Deposit, a small town in Lowndes County, Alabama. After release, the group waited near the courthouse jail while one of their members called for transport. With three others, Father Richard F. Morrisroe (a white Catholic priest), Seminarian Jonathan Daniels, and two Black female activists walked to buy a cold soft drink at nearby Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local places to serve Blacks. Coleman, an unpaid special deputy barred the front door holding a shotgun with a pistol in a holster.
He threatened the group and leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down, catching the full blast of the shotgun, and was killed instantly. Though arrested for the murder of Daniels, Coleman, an alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan, Coleman was acquitted six weeks later by an all-white jury in what the Alabama attorney general dubbed a "callous disregard for the taking of a human life" (Nelson, "Jury Acquits").
Thomas H. Coleman died on June 13, 1997.
