About the Author

William A. Nunnelley is Director of Information Services at Samford University in Birmingham.

Reviews

"Nunnelley offers us an insightful look at Connor. Neither villain nor saint, Connor emerges as a man of humble origin and simple prejudices. He won office as a reformer, then allied to the "Big Mules" who ran Birmingham's steel mills and city hall. He survived personal sexual scandal and scandalously unprofessional behavior as police commissioner to become a symbol of Birmingham's stormy past. And the feisty, unreflective Connor proved the ideal adversary who furnished Martin Luther King Jr. precisely the right scale to revitalize the civil rights movement after its disastrous confrontation with shrewd police chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Georgia. Bull Connor is synonymous with a different time and a different city, as remote from Richard Arrington's Birmingham as if two centuries separated them. That barely two decades divided their emergence as public figures suggests how cataclysmic and rapid was the racial change that transformed urban Alabama. This is a book worth reading."
--Wayne Flynt, Auburn University