Sixty years ago this month, in May 1963, police in Birmingham, Alabama, used clubs, fire hoses, and dogs to attack crowds of Black people demonstrating against racial segregation. The images of canines mauling protesters, ripping their clothes and biting their bodies, are some of the most disturbing visuals of the entire civil rights movement.
A photograph of officer Dick Middleton setting a dog upon 15-year-old Walter Gadsden appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post on May 4. Newspapers in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America followed suit, prominently featuring pictures of Birmingham’s K-9s attacking protesters. Concerned about damage to the country’s reputation, the United States Information Agency conducted a study of global coverage of the events in Birmingham, concluding that “pictures of police brutality, particularly the use of police dogs, has militated strongly against the U.S. image.” The outcry was compounded by the fact that many of the protesters were school-age, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenant James Bevel had organized thousands of students to march in the “Children’s Crusade” against Jim Crow.
The attacks by Birmingham’s police dogs prompted three main responses from Americans. Conservative critics of the civil rights movement defended the dogs as a necessary law enforcement tool against criminals. Many white liberal observers in the North, by contrast, decried them as cruel weapons of a renegade police force, while insisting that the Birmingham police were a department of “bad apples” amid an otherwise honorable profession.
But it was civil rights organizers themselves whose response was most consequential. The dog attacks in Birmingham offered activists in the South and North a political language for analyzing police abuses within the larger context of Black people’s pursuit of freedom and equality.
In Philadelphia, NAACP picketers demanded “rights not bites,” while protesters in New York denounced “dog government in Alabama.” Some argued that Alabama authorities were not the only ones bearing responsibility for the attacks and highlighted the presence of the dogs to sharpen their critiques. As James Baldwin told a rally of predominantly white marchers in Los Angeles, “Those crimes in Birmingham, those dogs and fire hoses, are being committed in your name.” A headline in Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper captured the mood: “B’ham’s Police Dogs Shock World.”
Indeed, just as horrific videos of police killing Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Tyre Nichols would galvanize protests across the country and globe decades later, the outrage in the wake of the news of Birmingham’s K-9 unit brutalizing protesters as young as 4 injected a local movement into the national, and even global, consciousness.
And yet, as Birmingham’s police dogs have endured as powerful symbols of backlash against the civil rights movement, their origins have largely escaped scrutiny.
In 1963 liberal critics condemned the Alabama city’s K-9 unit as a relic of the Old South. The harder truth to accept, however, was that it was actually a product of a new America.
For many, attacks by police dogs on Black citizens conjured disturbing images from the era of slavery, when bounty hunters pursued escaped enslaved people with bloodhounds. But the police dog was an innovation of modern policing, not a throwback to past centuries. Indeed, the Birmingham Police Department’s dog squad was barely 4 years old when officers attacked protesters in Kelly Ingram Park.
In 1959 Birmingham’s notorious police commissioner and unapologetic segregationist Bull Connor assigned Sgt. M.W. McBride to move to Baltimore for three months to complete a course on dog handling offered there by the city’s police force.
Though it dated back only to 1956, Baltimore’s dog handling team had quickly established itself as the country’s first successful K-9 unit. A handful of other U.S. police forces had experimented with dogs before, but none had sustained a squad for more than a few years.
At the time, Baltimore leaders championed their city as a moderate, even progressive metropolis. Less than 30 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Baltimore had turned its back on Reconstruction by the new century, even pioneering, in 1911, America’s first city ordinance requiring racially segregated housing. But by the decade following World War II, the city aimed to position itself as a willing adapter of integration. Scarcely two weeks after the Supreme Court delivered the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May 1954, Baltimore’s school board voted to implement the decision. The city’s status as a major East Coast port and one of the country’s leading steel producers further reinforced its image among many white Americans as a leader of a forward-looking South, a regional trailblazer ready to make good on past injustices.
Black Baltimoreans were far from satisfied with the pace of change. In January 1955—nearly a full year before the Montgomery bus boycott and five years before the Woolworth’s sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina—Black students from Morgan State College worked with the Congress of Racial Equality to stage a sit-in campaign at Read’s Drug Store branches in Baltimore that triggered the desegregation of the local chain’s restaurants.
Authorities in Baltimore worried about their city. As the Great Migration brought thousands of Black new arrivals from Virginia and the Carolinas to the industrial powerhouse, the city’s demographics changed rapidly, and by the decade’s end, about 33 percent of residents were Black, up from just 23 percent in 1950. White Baltimoreans began to flee the city.
“That the Negroes of Baltimore and of other urban centers commit more than their share of crime is certainly not news,” a Baltimore Sun editorial opened in January 1956, signaling just how widespread racist attitudes about this demographic shift were. The newspaper was quick to identify Black newcomers to the city as a problem. “It is not easy—indeed it is often impossible—for a country-bred colored boy to adjust himself to crowded city life. It is hard for him to get a job, and, even if he gets one, his slick friends often take his earnings from him. The temptation to get money by criminal means is thus always before him and too often he succumbs.”
It was at this moment of white flight, heightened racist fears about urban crime, and growing demands for equality that Baltimore’s police department launched its K-9 unit. Notably, other cities just below the Mason-Dixon Line, as well as self-styled New South metropolises that prided themselves on racial moderation, were quick to follow, with St. Louis, Atlanta, Houston, and Kansas City all creating their own police dog teams by 1959.
Baltimore police promoted their dogs to other departments with an almost evangelical zeal, not unlike today’s law enforcement boosters who champion tasers and body cameras as humane, cutting-edge innovations. In addition to welcoming McBride from Birmingham, Baltimore’s K-9 unit opened its doors at various points to visiting police from D.C., New Jersey, and Rochester, New York, who all wanted to create their own K-9 divisions, and even international guests from Thailand, Turkey, Bolivia, Spain, and South Vietnam.
Reporters showered praise on Baltimore’s police dogs, often after they were invited by officials to admire the canines firsthand. “German Shepherds in Baltimore Prove Effective in Apprehending Bad Men” read one glowing New York Times headline from 1959. “The modern police dog is a highly trained animal that walks the streets with his handler with dignity and efficiency,” Sgt. William Kerbe boasted to the Times in a second feature on the unit that appeared in the paper just three years later, adding, “He is probably one of the most potent weapons given an officer.”
John Biemiller, a lieutenant in the unit, put it more bluntly: “One dog and an officer can handle four or five punks.” But if the canines were powerful, they were also safe, an impressed reporter for the Christian Science Monitor informed readers, uncritically repeating a dubious claim by Biemiller: “Police dogs are trained to seize and hold the right arm of their quarry. Unless the person struggles severely, no serious damage is caused.” The Associated Press, for its part, was happy to report that Baltimore police had discovered that “two patrolmen accompanied by dogs could keep order in a throng of rock ’n roll devotees after a show or a dance where formerly eight burly officers were required.”
Best of all, the dogs were reported to be expert crime fighters. The Baltimore Police Department’s annual report in 1956 heralded the new division, with a handler next to a large hound standing on its hind legs, its front paws perched on a chalkboard, seemingly giving its approval to a hand-drawn message: “Crime Reduced 26.9%.”
Baltimore police presented themselves as national authorities on K-9 units. In 1960 one officer, Irvin Marders, even published an instructional guide for law enforcement, How to Use Dogs Effectively in Modern Police Work.
Birmingham police were no less proud of their K-9 unit, which McBride established shortly after returning to Alabama from Baltimore. The sergeant called his dogs Rebel and Blackie, names that suggested the department’s Confederate nostalgia and unrepentant racism. Connor and his department booked McBride and his dogs on Birmingham’s dinner-talk circuit, with appearances before the local Chamber of Commerce, Lions Club, and Kiwanis Club, and they trotted out the dogs for new station openings billed as community get-togethers. From the start, police dogs were prized not only for aiding officers in the field but also for their effectiveness in putting an adorable face on the less-than-attractive work of policing.
Maybe it was because Birmingham’s white residents so embraced the K-9 units that city police were caught off guard by the national and international opprobrium they faced when the dogs attacked protesters in May 1963. Weeks earlier, Connor had even bragged to a state legislator, “Dogs have been of invaluable assistance to us here in keeping down violence in connection with the racial demonstrations.”
Although the May 1963 attacks on Black protesters solidified Birmingham’s reputation for having America’s most brutal police, few if any media outlets reported the fact that the supposedly “good” Southern city of Baltimore had equipped the Alabama officers with one of its most ruthless enforcement tools. Indeed, by 1963, police forces across the country had replicated the Baltimore K-9 unit, with teams popping up everywhere from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh, Honolulu, and Topeka, Kansas.
The real history of police dogs, it would seem, had been lost in the myth that the worst forms of police repression reveal a long history of Southern exceptionalism grounded in human bondage. More than many might like to admit, K-9 units instead betray law enforcement’s roots in racism throughout America after slavery was abolished.
Today, in the 21st century, police continue to find sophisticated, questionable, and modern ways to use dogs to their advantage. While canines are rarely deployed for crowd control, they still do terrible harm, as evidenced by the death of Joseph Pettaway, a Black man killed by a police dog in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018, whose family has filed a federal suit against the department, scheduled for trial this year. Today Birmingham, Baltimore, and countless other police departments operate K-9 units, and they continue to hurt people. As one study has found, about 3,700 people bitten by police dogs reported to emergency rooms in the U.S. every year between 2005 and 2013.
And police departments are still eager to weaponize canines in the realm of public relations. Police dogs were all over the news in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death at the hands of five Memphis police officers in January, as seen in puff pieces about law enforcement canines getting their mug shots taken or serving communities as comfort dogs. Perhaps the timing of all this was pure coincidence—or maybe many police and their supporters in the media hoped to promote feel-good stories about law enforcement, just as the profession was facing another wave of national outrage.
