A vivid portrait of the man who made Birmingham infamous
Nunnelley’s biography covers Connor’s early life as a sportscaster, his years as a nearly pathological police chief, and his reign as president of a corrupt public service commission.While providing the first published biographical study of Connor, Bull also traces the evolution of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. The book amplifies traditional one-dimensional accounts through the use of such primary sources a s Connor FBI files gained from a Freedom of Information request, Connor papers discovered in an old fire station about to be demolished, files from a law firm which represented Connor, interviews, and newspaper files. Connor’s racist image remains intact, but a more complete portrait of the controversial commissioner emerges.
Eugene “Bull” Connor gained infamy during the spring of 1963 as the heavy-handed Birmingham police commissioner who turned power hoses and police dogs on the black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Bull Connor and Birmingham symbolized hard-line Southern racism. Connor’s actions received national and international media coverage, which dramatized the plight of black people in segregated areas, giving the civil rights movement much-needed attention. After viewing television reports of the fire-hose and police-dogs episode, President John Kennedy said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped is as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
Bull Connor was an unlikely catalyst for the civil rights movement. Rather than forestalling integration, his response to the 1963 demonstrations hastened the demise of the dual society of which he became a symbol. Within weeks of King’s much-publicized Birmingham campaign, Congress took the first steps toward enacting the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history. Birmingham was a turning point in the civil rights struggle, and Connor was the movement’s perfect adversary.
Nunnelley’s biography covers Connor’s early life as a sportscaster, his years as a nearly pathological police chief, and his reign as president of a corrupt public service commission.While providing the first published biographical study of Connor, Bull also traces the evolution of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. The book amplifies traditional one-dimensional accounts through the use of such primary sources a s Connor FBI files gained from a Freedom of Information request, Connor papers discovered in an old fire station about to be demolished, files from a law firm which represented Connor, interviews, and newspaper files. Connor’s racist image remains intact, but a more complete portrait of the controversial commissioner emerges.
Eugene “Bull” Connor gained infamy during the spring of 1963 as the heavy-handed Birmingham police commissioner who turned power hoses and police dogs on the black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Bull Connor and Birmingham symbolized hard-line Southern racism. Connor’s actions received national and international media coverage, which dramatized the plight of black people in segregated areas, giving the civil rights movement much-needed attention. After viewing television reports of the fire-hose and police-dogs episode, President John Kennedy said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped is as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
Bull Connor was an unlikely catalyst for the civil rights movement. Rather than forestalling integration, his response to the 1963 demonstrations hastened the demise of the dual society of which he became a symbol. Within weeks of King’s much-publicized Birmingham campaign, Congress took the first steps toward enacting the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history. Birmingham was a turning point in the civil rights struggle, and Connor was the movement’s perfect adversary.
Nunnelley offers us an insightful look at Connor. Neither villain nor saint, Connor emerges as a man of humble origin and simple prejudices. He won office as a reformer, then allied to the ‘Big Mules’ who ran Birmingham’s steel mills and city hall. He survived personal sexual scandal and scandalously unprofessional behavior as police commissioner to become a symbol of Birmingham’s stormy past. And the feisty, unreflective Connor proved the ideal adversary who furnished Martin Luther King Jr. precisely the right scale to revitalize the civil rights movement after its disastrous confrontation with shrewd police chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia. Bull Connor is synonymous with a different time and a different city, as remote from Richard Arrington’s Birmingham as if two centuries separated them. That barely two decades divided their emergence as public figures suggests how cataclysmic and rapid was the racial change that transformed urban Alabama. This is a book worth reading.’
—Wayne Flynt, Auburn University
William A. Nunnelley is Director of Information Services at Samford University in Birmingham.
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