Bull Connor's Ghost

Theophilus Eugene Connor, better known by his nickname, Bull, was the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama—the head of the police—for the better part of three decades, until he was forced out in 1963. The first line of his obituary in the New York Times when he died in 1973 reads, “Eugene Connor, the Birmingham Police Commissioner who used dogs and fire hoses to break up civil rights demonstrations in the early nineteen‐sixties, died here today.”

Sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, commemorates the Children’s March

On May 2, 1963, over one thousand Black students left their schools and gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church to march. They marched because their parents couldn’t; they risked losing their jobs if they did. So the children, many of them marching even though their parents forbade it out of concern for their safety, stepped up.

Hundreds of them were arrested. But they kept marching. Until May 10.

Bull Connor ordered the police and fire departments to blast the children with high-pressure fire hoses, club them, and use police dogs to attack them, as depicted in the sculpture above. The images were shown on television and in newspapers around the world, triggering widespread outrage. Part of the legacy of the children’s sacrifice—many of them spent days in jail in cold, unhygienic conditions with inadequate food—was change. They made the difference. They were part of the spark that changed the course of history.

Today, as on every celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we honor the legacy of peaceful protest that this great man inspired and led. This year, it’s more important than ever, as Donald Trump lines the streets of Minneapolis with ICE agents using tactics that would have put even Bull Connor to shame. I have been rereading his Stride Toward Freedom, a memoir of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycotts, where he wrote, “True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” is “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.”

We must overcome, because permitting what has been happening to continue is intolerable.

Birmingham resident Terry Collins recalled the March in an interview with NPR. The Morehouse Graduate became a foot soldier, and still educates people about the struggle for civil rights. He was 15 when the March happened. He explained that there was “meticulous organization behind the Children’s Crusade, including classes in nonviolence. If you could not refrain from retaliation when faced with force, he says, they would find another role for you - perhaps making signs.” And the children were prepared, prepared for the attacks that came and the prospect of going to jail.

“Normally, people run away from being arrested, but we ran to it. Even though we might have to suffer brutality, we were going through that anyway. The threat of jailing us - so what? We were already in jail, even in our neighborhoods. There was just no fence.”

In November 1957, Dr. King delivered “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon he preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.”

“Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future.”

Friday night, in Tincher v. Noem, Minnesota federal Judge Kate M. Menendez ordered agents not to:

• Retaliate against, arrest, or detain peaceful and unobstructive protestors, including people observing ICE’s Operation Metro Surge,

• Use pepper-spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against people engaged in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity,

• Stop or detain drivers and passengers in vehicles absent reasonable suspicion they are forcibly obstructing or interfering with federal agents,

My shorthand: the order says, “please don’t kill any more innocent people.”

The Judge explicitly pointed out that “safely following Covered Federal Agents at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop.” Her order applies to six individual Plaintiffs and “to all persons who do or will in the future record, observe, and/or protest Operation Metro Surge and related operations that have been ongoing in this District since December 4, 2025.”

It’s hard to imagine the Justice Department objecting to this order. Arrest people exercising their First Amendment rights? Pepper spray peaceful protestors? Stop cars without a legal justification? DOJ doesn’t do those kind of things, at least not a “normal” DOJ.

So today, DOJ filed a notice, appealing Judge Menendez’s order to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is fully Trump’s DOJ, part of his personal apparatus. DOJ has stopped being the independent gem in the crown of the American rule of law. Now, it’s just Trump’s law firm. He’s finally found his Roy Cohn, a number of them.

In the meantime today, Nick Schifrin, the foreign affairs correspondent for PBS NewsHour, reported that he received multiple copies of a message from the U.S. Government to the Danish Prime Minister, addressed to different ambassadors, advising them that “President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, be forwarded to your [named head of government/state].”

Here’s the message:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Set aside for the moment that it’s a Norwegian group, not a Danish one, that awards the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a temper tantrum thrown by a petulant toddler who didn’t get his way. A man who would throw aside our allies to pursue policies that only Putin, not the American people, benefit from. A man who couldn’t be any further from Dr. King.

Bull Connor’s ghost is walking the streets of America in the guise of Donald Trump and others around him, Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan, people who reject country and Constitution. People who have no appreciation for our system of government or our rule of law, but who think only of themselves.

We don’t talk enough about how not-normal this is. We all know it, it’s become an accepted truth. Let’s honor the legacy of peaceful protest by speaking that truth to power. Because we love our country. And we intend to take it back in this election year.

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We’re in this together,

Joyce