I Had No Fear Of Bull.

Another outtake from my WaPo story on female Freedom Riders. Below, Catherine Burks Brooks expands on her conversation with notorious racist and Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor as he drove her and six other Riders to the Tennessee state line in the middle of the night of May 18. As Catherine explains, after the Riders were dropped off on a dark road and told to find their way back to Nashville, she told Connor, “We’ll see you back in Birmingham by high noon.” (She says she’d been watching a lot of cowboy movies at the time.)

You just didn’t do that, you understand. Bull wouldn’t have had a conversation with [a black person] for that long; it would have been hostile. But it was not. I supposed he had that type of conversation with me because I was a woman; I don’t think he would have had that type of conversation with one of the fellas in the car.

The author of The Children [the late David Halberstam] asked me how I could talk to Bull the way I talked to him. I had no real answer for him; it was just me. It was just natural. But later I thought about it — and I should have called him — [and realized] I had no fear of Bull. That’s why I could talk to him.

Catherine takes issue with Halberstam’s portrayal of her conversation with Bull as having “slight overtones of flirtation.”

Of course I was not flirting with him. No way between here and Timbuktu would I have been flirting with Bull Connor.

Notes

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