Bull Connor: The Movement's Unwilling Ally

Theophilus Eugene Connor had been Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety since nineteen thirty-seven, and by nineteen sixty-three he was as predictable as a machine. Fred Shuttlesworth knew it. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference knew it when they chose Birmingham as the site of the nineteen sixty-three spring campaign. They chose Birmingham in part because of Bull Connor. They expected him to do exactly what he did.

In May of nineteen sixty-three, Connor ordered fire hoses turned on demonstrators in Kelly Ingram Park. The hoses used for firefighting could peel bark from a tree at close range. He also deployed police dogs against the crowds. The demonstrators included children, some as young as six years old, recruited in what the movement called the Children's Crusade. Photographs of children being slammed against storefronts by water pressure and snarled at by German Shepherds appeared on the front pages of newspapers in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

The photographs produced what the movement needed: a moral crisis visible enough that the federal government could no longer look away. Connor's brutality was not a miscalculation on his part. He genuinely believed he was maintaining order by any means necessary. The movement's calculation was that his belief would make him useful. They were right.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in July of nineteen sixty-four, fourteen months after the children walked into Kelly Ingram Park. The act prohibited racial discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Connor did not survive politically to see it. He was defeated in a special election in April of nineteen sixty-three, the same month the Birmingham campaign began. The photographs had undermined not just his authority but the argument that Birmingham's segregation system was sustainable.