Wikipedia Deep Dive

Bull Connor

12 min read

The civil rights movement had an unlikely ally: a man who despised everything it stood for. Bull Connor, Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, did more to advance the cause of racial equality than perhaps any segregationist in American history—not through any change of heart, but through the sheer brutality he unleashed on peaceful protesters. When television cameras broadcast images of fire hoses and attack dogs turned on Black children, Connor's violence shocked the conscience of a nation and helped push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It's a strange paradox of history. The man who wanted to preserve segregation forever became the instrument of its destruction.

A Career Built on Oppression

Theophilus Eugene Connor—everyone called him "Bull"—was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1897. His father worked as a train dispatcher and telegraph operator, jobs that kept the family moving around the South. Before entering politics, Connor found an unexpected career as a radio announcer, calling play-by-play for the Birmingham Barons minor league baseball team from 1932 to 1936. Willie Mays, who would become one of baseball's greatest players, remembered listening to those broadcasts as a kid. "Pretty good announcer, too," Mays recalled, "although I think he used to get too excited."

That excitability would define his political career.

Connor entered Alabama politics in 1934, winning a seat in the state legislature as a Democrat—this was the era of the "Solid South," when the Democratic Party dominated the region and stood firmly for white supremacy. His first legislative acts told you everything you needed to know: he voted to extend the poll tax, a fee that effectively prevented Black citizens from voting, while opposing a bill designed to limit union activity. In those days, you could be for oppressing Black workers or for oppressing all workers, and Connor managed to find himself on both sides.

In 1936, he won election as Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, a position he would hold for most of the next 26 years. The title sounds bureaucratic, but the power was immense. Connor had administrative authority over the police department, the fire department, the schools, public health services, and the libraries. Every one of these institutions was segregated by state law, and Connor intended to keep them that way.

The Political Operative

Connor wasn't just a local official with a mean streak. He was a political animal who understood how to wield power in the Jim Crow South. In 1948, when the national Democratic Party included a civil rights plank in its platform at that year's convention, Connor led the Alabama delegation in a theatrical walkout. The Southern rebels formed their own party—the States' Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats—and nominated Strom Thurmond for president. They held their convention right in Birmingham, Connor's home turf.

That same year, Connor's police arrested Glen Taylor, a sitting United States Senator from Idaho, for the crime of trying to address a gathering of Black activists. Taylor was running for vice president on the Progressive Party ticket with Henry Wallace, who had served as Franklin Roosevelt's vice president during World War II. Connor's justification? The meeting was supposedly communist. "There's not enough room in town for Bull and the Commies," he declared.

This rhetorical sleight of hand—equating civil rights activism with communism—was a favorite tactic of segregationists throughout the Cold War era. If you couldn't defend racism on its merits, you could at least wrap your opposition in the flag of anti-communism.

Connor twice ran for governor of Alabama, in 1938 and 1954, losing both times. But his real power was in Birmingham, and that was enough.

The Freedom Rides

In the spring of 1961, integrated teams of civil rights activists mounted what they called "Freedom Rides" to challenge the illegal practice of segregation on interstate buses. Federal law clearly prohibited racial discrimination in interstate travel, but Southern states simply ignored this, forcing Black passengers to sit in the back and use separate facilities. The Freedom Riders planned to travel through the South on Greyhound and Trailways buses, with New Orleans as their final destination.

As the buses moved deeper into Dixie, the violence escalated.

On May 8, 1961, a local politician named Tom King met with Connor to discuss Birmingham politics. At the end of their conversation, Connor mentioned that he was expecting the Freedom Riders to reach the city the following Sunday—which happened to be Mother's Day. "We'll be ready for them, too," Connor said. King replied, "I bet you will, Commissioner," and walked out.

Connor was ready, but not in the way you might expect from a public safety official.

When the Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders stopped in Anniston, Alabama, about 60 miles east of Birmingham, a violent mob attacked it. There was no police protection. The mob firebombed the bus and burned it, though miraculously no one died. A new bus was brought in to continue the journey to Birmingham.

Meanwhile, on the Trailways bus, Ku Klux Klan members had boarded in Atlanta. They beat the activists and forced them all to the back of the bus.

When the Trailways bus finally reached the Birmingham terminal on May 14, 1961, a large crowd of Klansmen was waiting, along with news reporters who had been tipped off that something was about to happen. The Riders were viciously attacked the moment they stepped off the bus. Some were dragged to a loading dock area, away from the cameras, but even some reporters were beaten with metal bars, pipes, and baseball bats. One journalist had his camera destroyed.

For fifteen minutes, this went on.

Fifteen minutes of savage beating, and no police anywhere in sight.

When officers finally arrived, most of the Klansmen had already left. Connor's explanation was breathtaking in its cynicism: "No policemen were in sight as the buses arrived, because they were visiting their mothers on Mother's Day." He insisted the violence came from "out-of-town meddlers" and that police had rushed to the scene "as quickly as possible."

This was a lie. Connor had deliberately arranged for the police to stay away, giving the Klan a free hand to beat the Freedom Riders. He had coordinated the whole thing.

Project C

By 1963, Birmingham had earned a grim nickname: "Bombingham." The homes and churches of Black civil rights activists had been attacked so many times that the violence had become a dark joke. When the president of the city's Chamber of Commerce was traveling in Japan, he saw a newspaper photograph of a bus engulfed in flames from the Freedom Rides. This was how the world saw his city.

Local activists had tried for years to negotiate change with city officials and business leaders. They wanted basic things: integration of public facilities, hiring of Black workers in local businesses. They got nowhere.

So they invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help.

King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, known by its initials S-C-L-C, launched what they called "Project C"—the C stood for "confrontation." The campaign began the day after Connor lost his bid to become mayor of Birmingham in an April 1963 election. (Voters had changed the city's form of government specifically to get rid of Connor and his fellow commissioners, though Connor tried unsuccessfully to block the change in court.)

The strategy was counterintuitive. King wanted mass arrests. He wanted to fill the jails. He wanted to provoke Connor into the kind of brutal overreaction that would shock the nation.

In a sense, King was using Connor's own cruelty as a weapon against segregation.

Throughout April 1963, King led smaller demonstrations. He was arrested and jailed, where he wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail"—a moral argument for civil rights activism that became one of the defining documents of the movement. But the campaign needed to escalate.

The Children's Crusade

Here's the problem the movement faced: most adult Black workers in Birmingham had jobs with white employers who threatened to fire anyone who participated in the protests. The economic pressure was intense. People wanted to stand up, but they couldn't afford to lose their livelihoods.

James Bevel, a young strategist with the S-C-L-C, proposed a controversial solution. If the adults couldn't march, the children would.

On May 2, 1963, young people and students walked out of the 16th Street Baptist Church and attempted to march to Birmingham's City Hall. They wanted to talk to the mayor. By the end of the day, 959 children had been arrested. Their ages ranged from six to eighteen.

Think about that. Six-year-olds, arrested for wanting to be treated as equal citizens.

The next day, even more students joined the marches. And that's when Bull Connor made the decision that would destroy everything he claimed to be fighting for.

He ordered fire hoses turned on the protesters. These weren't garden hoses—fire hoses deliver water at enough pressure to knock a grown man off his feet, to rip bark off trees. Connor aimed them at children.

He unleashed police attack dogs on the demonstrators. German shepherds, trained to bite, lunging at teenagers and kids.

The news cameras captured everything.

Americans across the country—white Americans who had never given much thought to what was happening in the South—watched these images on their television sets and were horrified. This wasn't an abstract political debate about states' rights anymore. This was children being attacked by dogs and blasted with fire hoses for peacefully protesting.

By May 7, Connor had detained more than 3,000 demonstrators. But he had already lost. The images had changed everything.

Victory Through Defeat

The economic boycott that Black Birmingham had mounted against segregated businesses began to bite. Store owners who had refused to hire Black workers or desegregate their facilities suddenly wanted to negotiate. On May 10, 1963, the S-C-L-C and the Senior Citizens Committee, representing the majority of Birmingham businesses, reached an agreement: lunch counters, restrooms, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains would be desegregated; Black workers would be hired and promoted; all the detained protesters would be released; and a formal line of communication would be established between the Black and white communities.

Birmingham's white supremacist power structure had cracked.

Connor's reign was over. He had lost his bid for mayor, and the Alabama Supreme Court had ruled against his attempt to stay in office as commissioner. After 23 years, his tenure ended.

But the violence he had encouraged wasn't finished with Birmingham yet.

The Bombing

On a Sunday morning in September 1963, just months after the breakthrough agreement, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church—the same church where the Children's Crusade had begun. The blast destroyed a portion of the basement.

Four Black girls died: Addie Mae Collins, age 14. Carol Denise McNair, age 11. Carole Rosamond Robertson, age 14. Cynthia Dionne Wesley, age 14.

The church had been the center of civil rights activity in Birmingham, and someone had decided to send a message. The message was murder.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Governor George Wallace and threatened to send federal troops to control the violence in Birmingham. The deaths of those four children—children who had simply been at church on a Sunday morning—shocked the nation as much as Connor's fire hoses had.

The Long Aftermath

Connor found his way back into government one more time. In 1964, he was elected president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, a regulatory body that oversees utilities and transportation. It was a significant step down from his former power, but it was something.

In December 1966, Connor suffered a stroke that left him wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. He won another term in 1968, but was defeated in 1972. On February 26, 1973, he suffered another stroke that left him unconscious. He died a few weeks later, in March, at the age of 75.

He was survived by his widow, Beara, a daughter, and a brother.

The Paradox of Bull Connor

There's a school of thought in civil rights history that Bull Connor was, in a perverse way, one of the movement's greatest assets. His brutality was so extreme, so visible, so photogenic in its awfulness, that it made the case for federal intervention better than any speech or legal brief ever could.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. That was the whole point of Project C—to provoke a confrontation with a man they knew would respond with disproportionate violence. King was essentially betting that Connor wouldn't be able to help himself, that he would do exactly what he did.

And Connor played his part perfectly.

The images from Birmingham in May 1963 changed the political calculus in Washington. President Kennedy, who had been cautious on civil rights, went on national television to announce his support for what would become the Civil Rights Act. When Kennedy was assassinated that November, Lyndon Johnson made passing the act a tribute to the slain president. It became law on July 2, 1964.

Connor's fire hoses and attack dogs had helped end legal segregation in America.

This doesn't make him a hero, obviously. He was a brutal, racist man who used his power to oppress Black citizens for more than two decades. He coordinated with the Ku Klux Klan to attack peaceful protesters. The climate of violence he fostered contributed to the bombing that killed four innocent girls.

But history is strange. The thing Connor wanted most—to preserve white supremacy—was destroyed in part by his own actions. He became famous not as the defender of Southern tradition he imagined himself to be, but as the villain of a story that ends with his defeat. His name survives as a symbol of everything the civil rights movement was fighting against.

In the end, Bull Connor got exactly the legacy he deserved.