police commissioner politician
Theophilus Eugene Connor was born on July 11, 1897 in Selma, Dallas County, Alabama, United States. He was the son of Molly Godwin and King Edward Connor, a railroad dispatcher. Because his father's work required travel, the family moved in 1905 to Atlanta, Georgia, where his mother died four months after giving birth to the family's fifth child.
Although Connor traveled widely with his father, he lived with relatives in Birmingham, where he attended school and where he lost the sight of one eye in a boyhood accident. He never completed high school.
Connor took a job as a railroad telegrapher, and he and his wife moved frequently as he sought better employment. In Dallas, Texas, in 1921, he successfully filled in for a sick announcer to do a "baseball matinee, " the re-creation of a baseball game transmitted over the telegraph wires. He was a hit, and in 1922 he returned to Birmingham and began re-creating the games of the Birmingham Barons in the Southern League. His powerful voice earned him the nickname "Bull. "
In 1934 he won election to the Alabama legislature and earned a reputation as a fierce debater and reformer, gaining the friendship and support of the county's most important Democrat, State Senator James A. Simpson. In 1937 he was elected commissioner of public safety in Birmingham. He was most interested in crime control, and he firmly enforced segregation laws. In 1938 he prevented the integrated meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham despite the fact that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was among the attendees.
In 1948 he became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, at first supporting Harry Truman, but then changing his mind because of the president's civil rights position. At the convention he was part of the Dixiecrat walkout, carrying the Alabama state standard on his way out of the hall.
When the Progressive party candidate, Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, ignored a city ordinance and attempted to address an integrated audience in Birmingham, Connor had him arrested. In 1950 Connor ran in the Democratic primary for governor. He came in sixth in a field of fifteen, running on an anti-Communist, anti-civil rights platform. In 1951 he was found in a hotel room with his secretary and was convicted on a morals charge, which was later overturned on appeal by the Alabama Supreme Court. The scandal convinced him not to run for reelection as police commissioner in 1953, however, and he departed the office after having served sixteen years. For a year Connor was proprietor of a service station. In 1954 he ran against a popular incumbent for county sheriff and lost badly. In 1956 he lost the race for Birmingham commissioner of public improvements. He was again a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and this time he supported the ticket. In 1957 he was reelected to the post of commissioner of public safety, emphasizing a position he would espouse the rest of his career. He promised to protect the city from outside agitators creating racial unrest. In 1960 he was elected national Democratic party committeeman from Alabama. In the late 1950's the activism of Birmingham blacks led by Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Jr. , resulted in a stern response from Connor against demonstrators but little protection for blacks from bombings and other violence.
During the 1960's Connor attempted to enforce Birmingham's antiblack code and in the process became the individual who most symbolized diehard southern opposition to integration. In 1961 Connor was reelected commissioner of public safety by the widest margin of his career. On May 14, 1961, a mob attacked freedom riders in the Birmingham bus station. The police response was tepid, and the resulting negative national publicity began to cause city leaders to back off from their support of Connor. As community moderates sought to avoid racial confrontation, Connor grew increasingly inflexible. In 1962 he ran for governor and came in fifth out of seven candidates, but this defeat did not moderate his tough antisegregationist stance. Neither did the replacement of the commission form of government by a new mayor-council format. Despite his active campaigning for the old system, Connor ran for mayor in the new government. He was defeated again. He remained as police commissioner, however, until court action could determine exactly when the new mayor-council form of government was to take effect. When demonstrators protested, from April to May of 1963, against segregation and the imprisonment of Martin Luther King, Jr. , in Birmingham, Connor used fire hoses and police dogs against them to the horror of a nationwide television audience. On May 23, 1963, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the mayor-council form of government was valid and ordered Connor and the other commissioners to vacate office immediately. Under a new administrator, lunch counters were desegregated by July 30, 1963, as the city attempted to moderate its harsh image. Connor continued to speak out against integration while a private citizen. He condemned the September 1965 bombing of a church that killed four black girls, but he continued to defend his record and tactics. In 1964 he ran for the Alabama Public Service Commission and won a narrow victory in a runoff. In December 1966 he suffered a crippling stroke but ran again successfully for reelection in 1968 and attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He lost reelection to the Public Service Commission in 1972. At the height of Connor's anti-civil rights activities, the April 15, 1963, issue of Newsweek reported Connor to be "as much a giant in Birmingham as the cast iron statue of Vulcan, god of the forge, atop Red Mountain just outside town. Both are monuments--Vulcan to the city's steel economy and Connor to her standing as the biggest, toughest citadel of segregation left in the Deep South. " Referring to the galvanizing effect that Connor's resistance to integration had on the nation, President John F. Kennedy said of him, "The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln. " Connor died in Birmingham.
Quotations:
"As I have said on numerous occasions, we are not going to stand for this in Birmingham. And if necessary we will fill the jail full and we don't care whose toes we step on. I am saying now to these meddlers from out of our city the best thing for them to do is stay out if they don't want to get slapped in jail. Our people of Birmingham are a peaceful people and we never have any trouble here unless some people come into our city looking for trouble. And I've never seen anyone yet look for trouble who wasn't able to find it. "
"Negroes and whites would not segregate together. "
In 1916 he met Beara Levens in Plantersville, Alabama; the two were married in 1920.
