A claim making the rounds online in November 2025 purported that fire hoses mysteriously turned off or ran dry during the ...

The story of the 1963 Birmingham civil rights demonstrations, and the brutal response from Birmingham officials has been told many times and often told well. But missing from these accounts is an ...

When Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law in June, I was correctly quoted in the media as saying that the law is “so oppressive that even Bull Connor would be ...

Today’s guest columnist is Barbara Keight Staub. “I would’ve beaten King if those damn merchants hadn’t given in.” — Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety, 1963 Nine years after Brown vs. Board ...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in the U.S. based on “race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.” Yet, as a historian who studies social movements and political change, I ...

Americans who saw Tom Homan speak at the Republican National Convention last summer or on any recently televised interview likely came away with the impression Donald Trump hoped for when he appointed ...

Turning point of the civil rights movement. Nineteen sixty-three was the pivotal year of the civil rights movement. In a city named Birmingham, where little of note had happened before and nothing ...

The caption in the April 12, 1960, New York Times, beneath a picture of the Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner, was hardly calculated to please the subject. “Police Commissioner Eugene Connor,” it ...