The Murder of Father James Edward Coyle

No one knows if the Reverend James Edward Coyle, a missionary priest from Ireland, knew when he sat on his front porch swing at his Catholic rectory in Birmingham, Alabama that he was about to enter his final rest but in fact, it came soon after on that Thursday night in late August 1921.

On the hot, Alabama evening of the twenty-first of August, the Rev. Edwin Stephenson, a licensed preacher in the nearby Methodist-Episcopal Church approached the resting priest; he fired three shots into the target of his ire. Two did not cause life-threatening injuries but the third which pierced the priest’s brain killed him hours later during an operation to remove the bullet.

Birmingham, Alabama headlines exploded about the death of Father Coyle, the preacher who killed him and the wedding that spurred the crime. The priest just presided over the marriage of the preacher’s daughter, Ruth, a recent convert from Methodism to the faith of the Roman Catholics so that she could marry her now beloved husband a black man from “Porto Rico”. Ruth's parents did not agree with her daughter’s marriage nor her new faith.

Father Coyle, Irish Immigrant

The Reverend James Edward Coyle was a native of Ireland, ordained in Rome in 1896, he soon came to Alabama beginning his tenure in Mobile. In 1904, he came to St. Paul’s Parish in Birmingham, where he remained until his death 17 years later. Several months earlier he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary of his ordination at a high Mass — the local bishop the Right Reverend Edward Allen presided.

An activist priest, Father Coyle was a strong supporter at the time of an independent Ireland, which received her freedom from Great Britain the year after his death.

The American South in the early decades of the Twentieth Century was a place where immigrants, people of color, Catholics and Jews had their detractors, these were the enemies of the notorious Ku Klux Klan (KKK) founded after the American Civil War. The wedding which spurred the murder of the priest by the bride’s father, contained three of the most despised elements of society by such groups.

Bishop Edward Allen ordinary for the diocese of Mobile which included Birmingham at the time railed in his reaction to the death at politicians spewing anti-Catholic propaganda.

“This deed which occurred in this city on Thursday night is the outcome of culmination of a propaganda carried on by a few unprincipled politicians. This is the work of those who carried on this propaganda of hatred against the church, the Sisters of Mercy, its hospitals and charitable institutions and all that goes with them.”

Reverend Edwin Stephenson

The Reverend Stephenson was not a minister but licensed to preach in the Methodist church, he lived with his wife and were now empty-nesters as their sole child, Ruth, a daughter, converted to Catholicism and basically eloped to marry a black, Puerto-Rican, Catholic — Pedro Gussman.

As soon as they learned of Stephenson’s arrest, some leaders of the denomination distanced themselves from him. One even called him a member of the North Methodist Episcopal Church only to receive correction that there was no such thing.

The priest presided over an apparent elopement but it was also, of course, a mixed-race marriage. Both groom and bride were of marrying age and free to make the decision to celebrate the Catholic sacrament with or without their parents’ decision. No law in or out of the church in Alabama prevented the wedding. In some of the United States, interracial marriages were prohibited by law until the 1950’s but they were allowed in Alabama at the time.

One preacher, Reverend Doctor James E. Dillard of Birmingham’s South Side Baptist Church, heroically made a defense of the priest but claimed it was best for any minister or priest not to do a wedding if the parents objected.

Temporary Insanity Defense

Newspaper reporters watched this case closely and learned from the defense team that the defendant planned to offer a defense of temporary insanity. Stephenson was so angry, brooding after learning of the plans and eventual marriage of his daughter to a Catholic, black man, he lost his ability to understand what he was doing.

According to Sharon Davies in her article about the murder, Tragedy in Birmingham, Stephenson was a Klansman, as were his defense attorneys including Hugo Black later a U.S. Senator and a Supreme Court Justice. Franklin Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court in 1937. Davies also writes that the KKK funded the defense team.

Black as Supreme Court Justice wrote the majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States which declared legal FDR’s order for Japanese Internment writing that it was not necessary to address issues of racism in the case.

The Methodist preacher claimed in his testimony that the priest attacked him upon his approach and he fired his gun in self-defense. There were no eyewitnesses, some were in earshot of the incident and testified they did not hear any form of a struggle.

Reverend Stephenson’s former employer, a barber, testified at trial that the preacher could not be trusted to tell the truth even under oath, according to published reports.

The Verdict

The weeklong trial for manslaughter charges against Reverend Stephenson began in October of 1921. After several days of testimony for and against the defendant, the jury deliberated for two hours and at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night the jury delivered a unanimous decision of not guilty. Reverend Stephenson was freed.

Had he been found guilty, it might be interesting to see what would have transpired because after the trial, the names and occupations of all the jurors appeared in local reports.

It is slightly over one hundred years later. The names of Father James Edward Coyle and Reverend Edwin Stephenson to say nothing of Mr. and Mrs. Pedro and Ruth Gussman may not be well known in our society. We can call them to mind to think of a time when politicians railed against Catholics, when mixed marriages were grounds for murder and when an angry father killed the priest who presided over the Catholic wedding of his daughter to a Black, Catholic man on a hot, Summer night in Birmingham, Alabama and freed by a jury of his peers.

Unless otherwise noted, the sources of this article are from the newspaper coverage of the Birmingham, (Alabama) News in 1921.

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