Justice  /  Retrieval

Birmingham’s Use of Dogs on Civil Rights Protesters Shocked Liberal Onlookers

But the backstory was all-American.

In 1963 liberal critics condemned the Alabama city’s K-9 unit as a relic of the Old South. The harder truth to accept, however, was that it was actually a product of a new America.

For many, attacks by police dogs on Black citizens conjured disturbing images from the era of slavery, when bounty hunters pursued escaped enslaved people with bloodhounds. But the police dog was an innovation of modern policing, not a throwback to past centuries. Indeed, the Birmingham Police Department’s dog squad was barely 4 years old when officers attacked protesters in Kelly Ingram Park.

In 1959 Birmingham’s notorious police commissioner and unapologetic segregationist Bull Connor assigned Sgt. M.W. McBride to move to Baltimore for three months to complete a course on dog handling offered there by the city’s police force.

Though it dated back only to 1956, Baltimore’s dog handling team had quickly established itself as the country’s first successful K-9 unit. A handful of other U.S. police forces had experimented with dogs before, but none had sustained a squad for more than a few years.

At the time, Baltimore leaders championed their city as a moderate, even progressive metropolis. Less than 30 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Baltimore had turned its back on Reconstruction by the new century, even pioneering, in 1911, America’s first city ordinance requiring racially segregated housing. But by the decade following World War II, the city aimed to position itself as a willing adapter of integration. Scarcely two weeks after the Supreme Court delivered the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May 1954, Baltimore’s school board voted to implement the decision. The city’s status as a major East Coast port and one of the country’s leading steel producers further reinforced its image among many white Americans as a leader of a forward-looking South, a regional trailblazer ready to make good on past injustices.

Black Baltimoreans were far from satisfied with the pace of change. In January 1955—nearly a full year before the Montgomery bus boycott and five years before the Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina—Black students from Morgan State College worked with the Congress of Racial Equality to stage a sit-in campaign at Read’s Drug Store branches in Baltimore that triggered the desegregation of the local chain’s restaurants.

Authorities in Baltimore worried about their city. As the Great Migration brought thousands of Black new arrivals from Virginia and the Carolinas to the industrial powerhouse, the city’s demographics changed rapidly, and by the decade’s end, about 33 percent of residents were Black, up from just 23 percent in 1950. White Baltimoreans began to flee the city.