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…
