Bull Connor
| T. Eugene “Bull” Connor | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
| Former President of the Alabama Public Service Commission From: January 18, 1965 – January 17, 1972 | |||
| Predecessor | Jack Owen | ||
| Successor | Kenneth Hammond | ||
| Former Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety From: 1957–1963 | |||
| Predecessor | Robert Lindbergh | ||
| Successor | (none, position abolished) | ||
| Former Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety From: 1937–1954 | |||
| Predecessor | W. O. Downs | ||
| Successor | Robert Lindbergh | ||
| Former State Representative from Alabama From: 1935–1937 | |||
| Predecessor | ??? | ||
| Successor | ??? | ||
| Information | |||
| Party | Democrat | ||
| Spouse(s) | Beara Levens | ||
Theophilus Eugene Connor (July 11, 1897 – March 10, 1973[1]), known as T. Eugene Connor or more commonly Bull Connor, was a prominent liberal-leaning[2][3] Democratic Party leader in Alabama known for his militant white supremacism consistent with the state's Progressive tradition.
Connor is known to this day for his extremist reprisals against peaceful civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, where his shameful actions epitomized the racial problems that long existed in the South. The "public safety" commissioner's card-carrying, partisan allegiance with violent Democratic segregationists is infamously remembered for his public manifestation of unrestrained, animalistic savagery unleashed upon activists of the civil rights movement.
Contents
Early life and background
Theophilus Eugene Connor was born on July 11, 1897, in Selma, Alabama, to Hugh King Connor and the former Molly Godwin.[2] Due to his father's occupation as a telegraph operator and train dispatcher, the family traveled frequently and lived in several different states during Eugene's formative years. While living in Atlanta, Georgia, while the young Connor was eight years old, his mother died from pneumonia.[2]
Due to his father's continued traveling, Connor resided with relatives in the cities of Birmingham and Plantersville, where he attended schools though failed to graduate.[2] He married the former Beara Levens in 1920, with whom he had a daughter.
In his early career, Connor worked as a reporter for sports on Birmingham radio,[1] where his amusement acquired his later-to-be-infamous nickname as a result of nearly sharing a name with the cartoon character of a local newspaper, B. U. L. Connor.[2] Connor also worked in sales as well as a telegraph operation,[4] following in the footsteps of his father.
Political career: New Deal era to Truman presidency
Connor ran for Alabama House of Representatives in 1934, lazily refraining from campaigning though benefited from recognition as a radio personality[2] and won a seat.[1] During his tenure in the lower body of the state legislature, Connor compiled a Southern progressive record opposing pay raises, tax increases, anti-sedition legislation (designed to derail labor union interests), and in support of poll tax reform popular among the populist white working class.[2]
In 1937, he was elected Commissioner of Public Safety of Birmingham, Alabama,[2] and served in the position throughout the span of three decades. Affiliated with the business hierarchy, Connor favored low taxes and limited government in accordance with Southern Jeffersonian ideals, though maintained his appeals to the working-class base as an unconditional segregationist and opponent of crime.[2]
According to author Glenn Feldman, "Bull Connor was an ardent New Dealer."[3]
Even by the early 1940s, when most segregationist Southern Democrats sharply broke with FDR, Connor referred to him as "[having] been a fine president" despite breaking with the national Administration over the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC).[6]
In 1948, when Idaho Democratic senator Glen H. Taylor protested segregation laws in Alabama, Connor arrested him. Liberal Alabama senator John Sparkman, otherwise considerably quiet on racial issues by Southern standards of the time, openly supported Connor and derided his Idaho colleague as creating a publicity stunt.[4]
Connor supports the Dixiecrat revolt, 1948
During the primaries for the 1948 U.S. presidential election, Connor joined adamant segregationists and race-baiters alike in supporting the insurgent third-party States' Rights Democratic Party (SRP) bid against the regular national Democrats aligning behind President Harry Truman, who recently advocated for and enacted civil rights policies to the disillusionment of many Southern Democrats.[2]
The Alabama Democratic Party, like its counterparts in other Deep South states, was split. At the Democratic National Convention, Connor was instrumental in leading the walkout of Alabama "Dixiecrats" who opposed Truman and supported the SRP's nominee, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond.[2] At the convention, Connor unsuccessfully attempted to garner the attention of House Democratic leader Sam Rayburn:[7]
| “ | I've always admired Sam Rayburn. I've always thought of him as a great statesman. But I hollered for five minutes. People heard me all over the hall. And when a gentleman from Texas will not recognize a delegate from Alabama—well, I just can't understand it. No, sir! | ” |
| —Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1948 | ||
However, as a result of Truman's victory, control of the Alabama Democratic Party within two years was already wrested from the Dixiecrats by the national Democrat–affiliated political machine of the more "mainstream" liberal-populist U.S. senator Lister Hill; one author notes:[8]
| “ | That revolt had turned out to be more than a failure. Truman's 1948 victory despite the South's opposition had proved that the national party didn't have to pander to its southern wing, any more than the Brooklyn Dodgers had humored Birmingham's Dixie Walker when he stormed off the team that year rather than play in the same uniform as Robinson. | ” |
| —Carry Me Home, pp. 85–86 | ||
Extramarital affair
On December 26, 1951, the day following Christmas, Connor was arrested in a hotel room for adultery with Christina Brown, his secretary.[1] As a result of a falling-out with police chief Marcus Hancock and detective Henry Darnell, who Connor placed on sick leave and sought to fire, Darnell exposed Connor's illicit relationship with Brown, violating a very ordinance, against the joint occupancy of a hotel room by an unmarried couple,[9] suggested and instituted years prior by none other than Connor himself.[10] Suddenly desperate, the commissioner pleaded Darnell to take into consideration his "poor, sick wife," adding, "Think of me, Henry. You are crucifying me. You're ruining me politically."[10]
Ever since public knowledge of the sex scandal, the local media in Birmingham began to increasingly criticize Connor.[11] The Birmingham News demanded a swift resignation: "Mr. Connor cannot do the kind of job that is needed in his high office. Conditions within his department cannot be what they should be so long as he continues in office." Another paper commented:[11]
| “ | If complete reorganization of the police department, after necessary firings or resignations, is required to restore public confidence and lift the morale of the honest, hard-working officers remaining, then the sooner that job is done the better. | ” |
| —Post-Herald, cir. Dec. 1951 | ||
Although fined, convicted, and sentenced to prison, the verdict was overturned the following year. However, as a result of the affair, Connor declined to seek reelection to another commissioner term in 1953, only voted back to his post four years later.[2]
Tirade against civil rights activists
Although Connor was not a recorded member of the third incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, he directly enabled Klan violence in Alabama, refusing to take actions against Klansmen responsible for bombings.[2] When Klansmen viciously assaulted the Freedom Riders, Connor ordered Birmingham city police to refrain from restoring order. The Birmingham police department was "infiltrated" by the Klan, with whom "Connor maintained a close relationship with":[11]
| “ | Without question he knew Klansmen, associated with them, sought and accepted their support, and habitually let them have their way with people of color in Birmingham. | ” |
| —"Speak Truth to Power," p. 24 | ||
In the early 1960s, Connor directed the use of fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful civil rights activists, including against children supporting the protests.[12] National media broadcast these tactics on television, horrifying much of the world; the outrages served as catalysts for congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The diehard flank of Southern segregationist leaders who closed city parks and public schools to prevent racial integration eventually alienated their support from many Southern whites. Connor's handling of Birmingham reached such levels of unpopularity by 1962 to the point of the city's white business leaders and majority population voting for a reform of the government to water down the longtime commissioner's power.[2]
Gun control
Conservative diplomat Condoleezza Rice of the George W. Bush Administration, who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the midst of white supremacist mob violence, opposes gun control laws due to the role of the Second Amendment in ensuring the protection of her family from terrorists. Rice's childhood friend Denise McNair was among the murdered victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and a family friend's home was likewise bombed.[13][14] As a result, she explained in 2001, "I have a sort of pure Second Amendment view of the right to bear arms."[15]
According to Rice, mandatory gun registration would have resulted in Connor confiscating her family's firearms.[13] She elaborated in a 2018 appearance on The View:[16][17][18]
| “ | Let me tell you why I'm a defender of the Second Amendment. I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late '50s, early '60s. There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham police were going to protect you.
So when white night riders would come through our neighborhood, my father and his friends would take their guns and they'd go to the head of the neighborhood, a little cul de sac, and fire in the air if anybody came through I'm sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were, he would have rounded them up. So I don't favor some things like gun registration. |
” |
| —Condoleezza "Condi" Rice, March 1, 2018 | ||
Death and legacy
Connor died on March 10, 1973, in Birmingham, and is interred at Elmwood Cemetery.[1]
Modern left-wing propagandists occasionally engage in spurious designation Connor as a "right-winger"/"conservative," entirely ignoring his history of supporting the New Deal and various economic progressive reforms. The liberal media outlet Salon, blaming "conservatives" for racism, modified a quote by Connor to create a false equivalence between the peaceful, patriotic civil rights activism of the 1960s and contemporary neo-Marxist woke ideology.[19]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Index to Politicians: Connor. The Political Graveyard. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 Baggett, James L. (March 9, 2007). Eugene "Bull" Connor. Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Feldman, Glenn (August 31, 2015). The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism, p. 256. Google Books. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Frederickson, Kari (2001). The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968, pp. 91–92. Google Books. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ "The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South," p. 93.
- ↑ Gerstle, Gary; Lichtenstein, Nelson; O'Connor, Alice (November 29, 2019). Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, p. 47. Google Books. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ "The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South," p. 130.
- ↑ McWhorter, Diane (2001). Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, pp. 85–86. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). The Southern Historian: Vols. 26–29, p. 36. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Eskew, Glenn T. (1997). But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Patrick Dorsey, Mignette Y. (June 20, 2010). Speak Truth to Power: The Story of Charles Patrick, a Civil Rights Pioneer, pp. 23–24. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Meet the Players: Other Figures. PBS. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Whitaker, Matthew C. (March 9, 2011). Icons of Black America: Breaking Barriers and Crossing Boundaries, p. 753. Google Books. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ↑ Lapidos, Juliet (December 17, 2007). The Condensed Condoleezza Rice. Slate. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Felix, Anthony (2002). Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story, p. 58. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Crookston, Paul (March 1, 2018). Condoleezza Rice Explains Why She Defends the Second Amendment. The Washington Free Beacon. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Ernst, Douglas (March 1, 2018). Condoleezza Rice defends gun rights on ‘The View,’ reminds hosts about ‘Bull’ Connor. The Washington Times. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Washington, Clarence, Sr. (June 24, 2021). Hijacked!: How Dr. King's Dream Became a Nightmare, Vol. 3. Google Books. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
- ↑ Elfenbein, Caleb (August 6, 2023). The past isn't dead: Teaching the truth about America's racial history is critical. Salon. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
