James Coyle
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- This article is about a murdered priest, for James Coyle the software programmer, see Mystic BBS.
Father James Coyle (March 23, 1873 — August 11, 1921), a Roman Catholic priest, was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama. His interment was located at Elmwood Cemetery.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Life
Coyle attended Mungret College in Limerick and the Pontifical North American College in Rome. He was ordained a priest in Rome on May 30, 1896, aged 23.
He sailed later that year, with fellow priest, Father Michael Henry, to the port of Mobile, Alabama and served under Bishop Edward Patrick Allen. He became an instructor, and later rector, of the McGill Institute for Boys. In 1904 Bishop Allen appointed Coyle to succeed Patrick O'Reilly as pastor of the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Birmingham, where he was well-received and loved by the congregation.
[edit] Assassination and aftermath
Father Coyle was shot in the head on the porch of St. Paul's Rectory on August 11, 1921 by Methodist minister and Klansman E. R. Stephenson. The murder occurred only hours after Coyle officiated at a secret wedding between Stephenson's daughter, Ruth, and Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican who had met Ruth by doing work for Stephenson at his house and had been a customer of Stephenson's barber shop. Before the wedding, Ruth converted to Catholicism.
Stephenson was subsequently charged with Father Coyle's murder in an Alabama court. The Ku Klux Klan paid for the defense, a team of five lawyers (four of whom were Klan members). The case was assigned to the courtroom of Judge William E. Fort, a Klansman. Hugo Black, a future Justice of the Supreme Court (who would become a civil rights champion), defended Stephenson.
The defense was soon switched from a self-defense plea to an insanity plea. Stephenson was acquitted on only one vote of the jury. Gussman was accused of being African American, although had Gussman been black the wedding would have been invalid under Alabama law at that time. One of Stephenson's attorneys responded to the prosecution's assertion that Gussman was of "proud Castillian descent" by saying "he has descended a long way".[citation needed]
The outcome of the murder trial for Father Coyle's assassin had a chilling impact on Catholics, who found themselves the target of Klan violence for many years to come.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, by 1941, two decades later, a Catholic writer in Birmingham would write "...the death of Father Coyle was the climax of the anti-Catholic feeling in Alabama. After the trial there followed such revulsion of feeling among the right-minded who before had been bogged down in blindness and indifference that slowly and almost unnoticeably the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk began to lose favor among the people." (McGough - 1941)
[edit] References
- Garrison, Greg (August 20, 2006) "Burial site set for priest Klansman killed in '21", The Birmingham News.
- Beecher, Mrs. L. T. (September 1921) "The Passing of Father Coyle", Catholic Monthly, vol. #12
- McGough, Helen (August 1, 1941) "Things I Remember about Father Coyle, His Death, Twenty Years Afterwards", Catholic Weekly.
