Category: Archive
February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Edward T. O’Donnell
On the night of Aug. 11, 1921, several shots rang out in the still, humid air in Birmingham, Ala. Fr. James Edwin Coyle, leader of Birmingham’s Catholic community, lay dying. Though he clung to life briefly, Coyle died within the hour at St. Vincent’s hospital. Immediately, the incident made national headlines, for Coyle’s assassin was a Methodist minister named Edwin R. Stephenson.