Bull Connor

A boyhood accident cost him the sight in one eye, and he never finished high school. Theophilus Eugene Connor was eight when his mother died in Atlanta, and he spent the rest of his childhood among relatives in Plantersville and Birmingham while his father worked the railroad telegraph. He learned the same trade and married Beara Levens in 1920. Radio made him. Calling Birmingham Barons games gave him a voice the whole city knew, and Willie Mays, listening as a boy, judged him a pretty good announcer who got too excited. Accounts of the nickname differ, crediting either the booming delivery or a cartoon character called Dr. B. U. L. Conner. In 1934 he barely campaigned for a seat in the Alabama House and won it on name recognition.

Connor ran Birmingham's police and fire departments, its schools, its libraries and its public health service for most of the years between 1937 and 1963. All of it was segregated by state law, and he promised on returning to office to enforce that law to the utmost of his ability. His officers arrested a sitting US senator from Idaho for addressing a Black youth congress. He shut 60 parks rather than open them. In May 1961 he gave a Klan mob 15 minutes alone with the Freedom Riders at the Trailways station. Two years later he set dogs on children.

The 1963 campaign was designed around him. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Birmingham because Connor could be relied on to do in front of television cameras what other Southern officials did out of sight. On May 2, some 959 children between six and 18 walked out of the 16th Street Baptist Church and filled his jails. The next day he ordered fire hoses and police dogs used against them, and Bill Hudson of the Associated Press caught an officer's dog lunging at Walter Gadsden, a 15-year-old from Ullman High School who had come to watch rather than march. The picture ran on three of the country's biggest front pages the next morning. Kennedy said the civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor, that he had helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

He was out of office within three weeks. Birmingham's voters had already traded the city commission for a mayor and council, and on May 23, 1963, the Alabama Supreme Court refused to let him keep the job. He won the presidency of the Alabama Public Service Commission the next year and held it until voters turned him out in 1972, working from a wheelchair after a stroke on December 7, 1966. A second stroke left him unconscious on February 26, 1973, and he died in Birmingham on March 10. He took none of it back. His name became a political insult, and in 1992 the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened across from Kelly Ingram Park, where he gave the order.

Bull Connor's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Birmingham Barons radio broadcasts other
  Play-by-play through the 1932 to 1936 seasons, the job that made his name 1936
• Birmingham anti-communism ordinance law
  Pushed through the city commission, outlawing communism inside the city limits 1954
• Libel suit against The New York Times other
  Filed for 1.5 million dollars, cut to 400,000, and lost on appeal after six years 1960
• Closing of the Birmingham public parks other
  Sixty parks shut rather than obey a federal desegregation order 1962
• The order of May 3, 1963 other
  Fire hoses and police dogs against the children marching from 16th Street Baptist Church 1963

• 1934 aged ~37 Wins a seat in the Alabama House on radio name recognition He called the candidacy a lark and hardly campaigned.
• 1937 aged ~40 Takes office as Birmingham commissioner of public safety The post carried the police, the fire department, the schools, public health and the libraries.
• 1948 aged ~51 Leads the Alabama walkout at the Democratic National Convention The party had adopted a civil rights plank. The Dixiecrats nominated Strom Thurmond in Birmingham weeks later.
• November 4, 1957 aged 60 Sworn in for a second run as Birmingham commissioner of public safety
• May 14, 1961 aged 63 Gives a Klan mob 15 minutes with the Freedom Riders before police arrive He said afterward that his officers had been visiting their mothers, because it was Mother's Day.
• May 2, 1963 aged 65 Jails 959 children marching from the 16th Street Baptist Church They were between six and 18 years old.
• May 3, 1963 aged 65 Orders fire hoses and police dogs used on the marchers Bill Hudson photographed a dog lunging at 15-year-old Walter Gadsden. It ran nationwide the next morning.
• May 23, 1963 aged 65 The Alabama Supreme Court ends his tenure Birmingham had voted to replace the commission with a mayor and council. He had sued to stay.
• March 10, 1973 aged 75 Dies in Birmingham at 75 A stroke on February 26 had left him unconscious.

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. arrested
• John Lewis 1940–2020
  Freedom Rider and congressman whose activism was central to the civil-rights movement and voting-rights legislation. arrested
• George Wallace 1919–1998
  Segregationist governor whose campaigns helped shape racial backlash and modern populist politics. endorsed by
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. opposed by
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. opposed by