Bull Connor,
Book by William A. Nunnelley; University of Alabama, 1991

1 City of Fear

When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his civil rights demonstrations to Birmingham, Alabama, during the spring of 1963, he sought a confrontation that would dramatize his efforts to break down the walls of segregation in America. King came to Birmingham in frustration, mindful that his most recent antisegregation campaign--in Albany, Georgia--had produced only modest results. Some called the Albany campaign a failure; King himself admitted that mistakes had been made and that the effort could be best described as a learning experience. 1 <26176519>

King had vaulted into the public eye by leading a successful 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, chipping away at segregation's ramparts in the Cradle of the Confederacy. By the start of the Albany campaign in 1961, he had become the nationally acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement. The movement leaders chose to attack all vestiges of segregation in Albany, rather than concentrating on one or two such as bus segregation or the all-white police force. The result was an incohesive, uncoordinated effort that prompted one observer, movement veteran Ruby Hurley, to remark, "Albany was successful only if the goal was to go to jail." <26176519>King's biographer David L. Lewis asserts that blacks demanded the wrong things at the wrong time in Albany "because there was too little coordination, trust, and harmony within the Movement."

2 "Me and Plato"

Theophilus Eugene Connor was a son of the Black Belt, that rural region of west-central Alabama noted for its rich soil and Old South mentality. Connor was born on 11 July 1897 in Selma, where his father worked as a railroad dispatcher. Eugene, as he was called, was the second--and eldest surviving--of five sons born to King Edward Connor and his wife, the former Molly Godwin of nearby Plantersville. A son born prior to Eugene had died at four months of age. Railroad employees were subject to frequent relocations during this era, and Eugene became a traveler at an early age. By 1905, when he was eight, the family had taken up residence in Atlanta, Georgia. Here tragedy struck when Mrs. Connor caught pneumonia and died four months after the birth of her fifth son, Ed.

As a boy Connor lived for a time in North Birmingham with his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. John Godwin, and attended school there. During this period a playtime accident blinded Eugene in one eye; he peeped through a hole in a fence just as a young friend shot an air rifle through the opposite side of the fence hole. Connor traveled extensively with his father during his boyhood years and once claimed to have resided in thirty-six of the American states. From his father, he learned the art of telegraphy.

During the summer of 1916 Connor made one of his periodic visits to Plantersville to spend time with another aunt, Lula Fulford. On this visit he met Beara Levens, the daughter (and one

3 The Issue Changes

Throughout the 1940s, Birmingham's predominantly white and solidly Democratic electorate reaffirmed its confidence in the leadership of Mayor W. Cooper Green (elected by a seven-toone margin following the death of Mayor Jimmie Jones in 1940 1 <26176522>) and Associate Commissioners James W Morgan and Eugene "Bull" Connor. Voters reelected this triumvirate three times--in 1941, 1945, and 1949--and on each occasion thrust the commissioners back into office without so much as a runoff election. Mayor Green ran without opposition in 1941 and 1945. Morgan, who had been elected to the commission with Connor in 1937, led the balloting for associate commissioner in each of the 1940s elections. And Connor, while he encountered the most serious opposition of the three incumbents, polled no less than 53 percent of the vote in any of the three elections. Voter satisfaction was reflected in a series of unemotional campaigns, each being described by the Birmingham News as the quietest in the history of city commission elections. <26176522>

After winning as a reform candidate in 1937, Connor based his 1941 campaign on his record in office. He had inherited a police department that employed both patrolmen and detectives who "couldn't write their own name(s)." Implementation of the civil service law for which Connor worked resulted in better-educated candidates for the police and fire departments. "At least, they would have had to have had some education, to be able to read

4 On the Comeback Trail

Bull Connor left the Birmingham Police Department in turmoil. Dissension was widespread in the aftermath of the various investigations surrounding the former commissioner. Allegations of dishonesty and corruption within the department filled the air. Into this cauldron stepped Robert E. Lindbergh, a quiet former chief clerk in the Jefferson County Sheriff's office who was elected in June 1953 to succeed the flamboyant Connor as Commissioner of Public Safety.

Lindbergh was a well-meaning man who had gone to school at night to earn a degree from the Birmingham School of Law. He made changes, shifting personnel and appointing a retired military officer, Col. Paul L. Singer, as director of police, a position tantamount to chief. Lindbergh's first act was to remove press "gag orders," which since 1951 had prevented all but a handful of "superior officers" from supplying information to reporters. He also announced that Birmingham police officers once again would go to the FBI Academy for training. 1 <26176524>Despite this promising beginning, Lindbergh encountered problems because he "didn't understand the department," recalled James Parsons. Ultimately, "he was simply whipped by the internal machine there." <26176524>

Parsons joined the Police Department as a patrolman in 1954, beginning a twenty-five year career that led to the position of chief during the 1970s. Less than a year after Connor left, Parsons found a police department

5 "That Bomb Had My Name on It"

On Christmas night of 1956, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Jr., pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in North Birmingham, relaxed in the bedroom of his home next to the church, chatting with Bethel deacon Charley Robinson. About 10 P.M., Shuttlesworth's daughter Ruby heard something hit the front porch of their home. Moments later, an explosion ripped through the dwelling, destroying the house and damaging a portion of the church.

Within minutes, a crowd of some five hundred blacks gathered at the scene, fearful that Shuttlesworth and his family had been killed. The appearance of two white police officers, W. E. Howse and C. L. Crutchfield, sparked angry murmurs. As Howse and Crutchfield approached the shattered parsonage, the crowd surrounded them, blocking their way. But Shuttlesworth and the others had survived. Hearing that policemen were on the scene, the pastor emerged from a neighbor's home and told the crowd, "The Lord has protected me. I'm not injured." 1 <26176526>

Fred Shuttlesworth, then thirty-four years old, had been at Bethel Baptist since 1953. A native of Mt. Meigs, Alabama, but reared in the Birmingham area at Rosedale, Shuttlesworth held degrees from Selma University and Alabama State College. He represented a new breed of black preacher that emerged after World War II, the social activist. These men believed in working to im-

6 Violent Sunday

Massive resistance to desegregation was the prevailing mood of the South during the middle and late 1950s. In Alabama, Attorney General John Patterson fanned the flame of defiance with his attacks on the NAACP in 1956 and his racist campaign for governor in 1958. While running for governor, Patterson boasted that he had "run the NAACP out of the state" and chided his opponents for not taking a more definite stand against the organization. George Wallace, Patterson's chief foe, claimed, "I was fighting against civil rights 10 years ago, before many knew what civil rights were." 1 <26176528>In the gubernatorial runoff election between the two, Patterson adopted a much more inflammatory style and defeated Wallace handily. The race signalled the beginning of a period in Alabama politics during which the most militant segregationist candidate had the best chance of becoming governor. And according to Alabama political lore, it prompted Wallace to say, "No one is ever going to out-nigger me again." <26176528>

Through a policy known as "interposition," Alabama and five other states sought to avoid integration legally by nullifying the Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case. The doctrine of interposition simply meant "states' rights." Its genealogy could be traced through the 1948 Dixiecrat movement to the Civil War and ultimately back to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In his

7 This Park Is Closed

The Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth accepted a pastorate in Cincinnati, Ohio, in August 1961, leaving the Bethel Baptist Church post he had held since 1953. If Bull Connor cheered the departure of his adversary, the celebration was brief. Shuttlesworth had the city of Birmingham back in court less than two months later, suing to desegregate its parks and other recreational facilities. Some facilities, such as golf courses, swimming pools, and parks, were completely segregated; others, such as the zoo and art museum, were "semi-segregated," with separate restrooms, drinking fountains, and concessions. On 24 October U.S. District Judge H. Hobart Grooms ruled unconstitutional Section 850 of the Birmingham code, which provided for segregation in public places. The outcry from Birmingham officials was immediate. 1 <26176532>

Mayor James W. Morgan (in his final week in office before retirement) and Connor gave notice that the city would appeal. They requested a stay until a higher court could hear the case. Connor said that the commission hoped Judge Grooms would delay the order and added, "if not, we will close the parks immediately, including Legion Field [football stadium], swimming pools, golf links, and all other facilities affected by this decision yesterday," and offer them for sale to private concerns. "The great majority in Birmingham do not want integration," Connor added. "It will cause nothing but chaos and bad relations between the two races.

8 Two Mayors and a King

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference attempted to break down the walls of segregation in Albany, Georgia, during 1961-62 through a series of massive nonviolent protests. But Albany repelled the efforts of SCLC leader Martin Luther King, Jr., using the same nonviolent approach that King had adopted from India's independence leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi. King hoped to bring Albany's white leaders to the bargaining table by filling the jails with demonstrators and overextending the city's capacity to deal with the protests, much as Gandhi had used massive peaceful demonstrations against the British in India. However, Albany's police chief, Laurie Pritchett, researched King prior to his arrival in the south Georgia city and made plans to cope with such tactics. Rather than filing--and ultimately overtaxing--jails in Albany, Pritchett arranged to house demonstrators in jails in neighboring cities and counties, so that the buildup in Albany never occurred. The chief coupled this strategy with a policy of protecting the arrested demonstrators to ensure that they were treated courteously. The confrontation with which the SCLC sought to dramatize its movement failed to materialize, and King left Albany in frustration. 1 <26176534>Not long thereafter, the civil rights champion cast his eyes in the direction of Birmingham, Alabama.

The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights became one of eighty-five affiliates of SCLC soon after its founding. SCLC

9 The Long Last Hurrah

If Bull Connor sensed that he had heard his last political hurrah in 1963, he failed to show it. He accepted the ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court in favor of a mayor-council form of government in typical Connor fashion--philosophically and with a quip about applying "for my pennies." Connor "had a great trait of coming back," recalled his former campaign manager J. Morgan Smith, "and he would not retain a depressed feeling at all. He always snapped back." 1 <26176537>His former city commission colleague, Jabo Waggoner, said, "I think it fell off his back like water off a duck's back. I don't think it bothered him a nickel's worth." <26176537>

During the weeks and months following the Supreme Court ruling, Connor continued his role as an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement. On 7 June 1963, four days before Alabama governor George C. Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" to block integration of the University of Alabama, Connor addressed a meeting of the Tuscaloosa County Citizens Council in Holt, less than five miles from the university. He "pleaded with the group not to appear at the University 6/11/63 and to let Governor Wallace and law enforcement agencies handle the problem," saying the message was "a personal request from the Governor." The relaying of the message "appeared to be the purpose of the meeting," according to an FBI informant in attendance. 3 <26176537>

10 The Perfect Adversary

Bull Connor fit the mold of the stereotypical Southern politician of the first half of the twentieth century. He was loud, quick with the quip, racist, and theatrical, a compulsive campaigner who discovered early that entertaining his constituents was more effective than delivering stodgy preachments on dry political issues. He enjoyed a threedecade love affair with the white voters of Birmingham, who viewed him as a colorful, protective, "dollars-and-cents" honest man of the people. He graduated from the school of hard knocks to become a success, first in local radio and then in local politics; blue-collar Birmingham, attracted by his rough-hewn charisma, applauded each step along the way.

Connor's success in winning six city commission races could be attributed partially to his popularity with the rank-and-file elements of "the great workshop town" of Birmingham. Throughout the Connor era, Birmingham was one of the most unionized cities in the South. Connor usually carried a strong labor vote, stemming from his early days in the Alabama legislature and his longtime membership in the telegrapher's union. While some union leaders viewed Bull as a pawn of the corporate fathers, white union members applauded his willingness to keep blacks "in their place," and registered their support at the polls. They liked the commissioner's brash, down-home manner and his affinity for mixing with the