The Freedom Rider who talked back to Bull Connor
Catherine Burks-Brooks 1939–2023
With her sharp tongue and iron will, Catherine Burks-Brooks stood up to racists—even the notorious Bull Connor. After the first wave of Freedom Rides ended in KKK beatings, the 21-year-old joined a group of fellow Nashville students to make another attempt at having Black and white activists ride the bus together through the segregated South. In May 1961, she boarded a bus alongside future congressman John Lewis and sat next to a white student. They were immediately arrested upon entering Birmingham, Ala., and Connor, the city’s segregationist public safety commissioner, drove them to the state line. Burks-Brooks sat right up front with him, chatting merrily, and when he left the students on the side of a rural road before dawn, she shouted at his retreating vehicle, “We’ll see you back in Birmingham at high noon!
Mr. Bull!” The commissioner roared with laughter. “I had no fear of the Bull,” she said in 2013. “He was just like any other white man. That fear had been out of me a long time.”
Born in Birmingham to a laundry presser and a steel-factory worker, Burks-Brooks was feisty from the start. At 11, she refused to step out of the way to let white pedestrians pass on the sidewalk. As a teenager, she once “threw the ‘Colored’ sign off a city bus,” said The New York Times. She attended Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University but was expelled for taking part in the Freedom Rides. After her run-in with Connor, she joined two more rides in 1961, with one landing her in a Jackson, Miss., jail. In her mugshot, she “looks straight into the camera, without fear or agitation,” said Alabama News Center. The following year, she returned to Tennessee A&I and graduated with an education degree.
Over the next two decades, Burks-Brooks and her husband, fellow Freedom Rider Paul Brooks, lived in Jackson, Detroit, Chicago, and the Bahamas before returning to Birmingham. In her career as a teacher and social worker, she “urged younger generations to stand up for social justice,” said WPLN.org. “Whatever you see that needs to be fixed, then that’s what you start concentrating on, and find others who feel the same way,” she said in 2011. “You do something! You don’t just sit and say, ‘Well, it’s just me, so I can’t do anything.’”