A Catholic Italian woman built a career in a city run on class, race, and dynamite. She helped dismantle Jim Crow and was nearly killed for it.
Marion Joseph Miglionico was an early riser. Good thing.
The retired deli owner lived with his daughter, City Councilwoman Nina Miglionico, in a leafy neighborhood east of downtown Birmingham. He opened the front door on this cool April morning in 1965 to get the newspaper, and was surprised to find a green box on the porch.
Miglionico, 80, looked up and down the quiet street, then stooped to inspect the box further. No address. He lifted a corner of the lid and saw a clock. It was ticking.
“I decided it wasn’t a gift but a bomb,” he told a Birmingham News reporter later. “Someone had to move the clock, so I did.” He reached into the box, pulled the clock and battery free from a bundle of dynamite sticks, and threw it to the sidewalk.
Bombs were common in Birmingham. That day there were three: Another green box was found at the mayor’s house nearby, and the third blew a massive hole in the garage of a Black accountant. Six had been defused 11 days earlier in a Black neighborhood.
Councilwoman Miglionico, an outspoken opponent of the poll tax that discouraged low-income voters, was running for reelection. She called police, urged them to check other council members’ houses, then fretted about the children who would soon be walking to the nearby Avondale School. It was only when police arrived that she learned her father had detached the bomb’s timer.
The councilwoman, whom everyone called “Miss Nina” rather than try to pronounce her last name, served coffee to the gathering police and press. Then went on about her day. She admitted the gravity of the situation finally hit her later. “As time goes on, you do get more nervous because you realize your mama and papa might have been killed.”
Methodist Minister Edwin Stephenson was seething. He stomped past Birmingham’s Cathedral of Saint Paul and onto the rectory lawn. The Catholics had stolen his daughter, converted her, and now she was married to a Puerto Rican.
Father James Coyle was on the rectory porch swing on this muggy August evening in 1921. The Methodist preacher shouted at him: “You have treated me as dirty as a dog by marrying my daughter to a Negro.” There may have been a struggle before the Rev. Stephenson shot Father Coyle in the head. Then again as he fell. And again as he lay on the porch floor.
Ten weeks later, the Rev. Stephenson was on the stand, facing second-degree murder. He had either acted in self-defense or was temporarily insane, said his defense attorney, Hugo Black. Black, a future Supreme Court justice, had finished questioning his client when he asked the bailiff to bring in Pedro Gussman. The Rev. Stephenson’s son-in-law stood calmly, wordlessly before the jury. “A little closer,” a juror in the back row called.
“I just wanted them to see the man,” Black later explained.
Before taking its only vote, the jury “read several selections from the Bible,” the foreman said. “I don’t know what passages they were, but they were excerpts from the words of Jesus.”
The jury acquitted the Rev. Stephenson. Black, his lawyer, joined the Ku Klux Klan and traveled the state making anti-Catholic speeches while campaigning for the U.S. Senate.
Nina was seven years old at the time. Father Coyle was her family’s parish priest. Her parents, Italian immigrants, ran a grocery store and the family lived above it. The children were raised not to let their ethnicity, and in Nina’s case her gender, stand in the way of their success.
Nina Miglionico earned a law degree from the University of Alabama in 1936, one of the state’s first female lawyers (the “he” on her license was scratched out and “she” written in). She was offered a job as secretary, provided she learned shorthand. Instead, she became the first woman in Alabama to start her own practice.
At the time, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was concerned that his New Deal programs were not gaining traction in the South. Supporters convened the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938. Sharecroppers, bankers, politicians, and preachers sat together on the first night to hear University of North Carolina President Frank Graham proclaim: “Repression, whether it be of the Negro, Catholic, Jew, or laborer, is the way of frightened power.”
The conferees were greeted the next morning by a force of Birmingham police, who ran a cord down the middle of the auditorium to separate whites from Blacks. “White and Negro are not to segregate together,” declared Eugene “Bull” Connor. The former sports radio personality was elected the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety the year before. His officers prevented Eleanor Roosevelt from sitting on the Black side of the aisle. She dragged a folding chair to sit astride the cord.
In this environment, Miglionico forged a practice in family law, inheritance, and the occasional criminal case. “Nina, a lady doesn’t go to the jailhouse,” her mother once said. “Mother, I’m not a lady; I’m a lawyer,” she replied.
Barely 5 feet tall, she made her presence known as best a woman could in that time. She raised money for the hospital through the Zonta Club. She was an active member of the Business and Professional Women’s Club and became one of the first women to join the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. She was a guest speaker at women’s groups across the state, speaking on financial issues and the need for women to get involved in civic affairs. In 1958, she served as president of the National Association of Women Lawyers.
Birmingham, meanwhile, was drawing the nation’s attention, and not in a good way. Freedom Riders were beaten upon arrival at the city bus station in 1961. Bull Connor, still commissioner of public safety, closed city parks and golf courses rather than follow a court’s order to integrate. So many bombs had been set at Black homes and businesses the city had become known as Bombingham.
Birmingham voters rebelled, voting in 1962 to eliminate the city commission and elect a mayor and city council. Miglionico, who had served on several city committees, threw her hat into the ring. “Our interests are too deeply bound together to permit our continued separation,” she said. “In a spirit of mutual goodwill and understanding, we must emphasize the purposes and goals that unite us, rather than the problems that divide us.”
On April 2, 1963, she was elected to Birmingham’s first city council. It would have a very rocky start.
“Look at that dog go! That’s what we train them for—to enforce the law.” Bull Connor marveled as his German shepherds lunged at marchers on Palm Sunday, just days after losing his bid for mayor. The new council hadn’t been sworn in yet, and Connor argued he still had two years left on his City Commission term.
In the seven weeks it took for courts to finally oust him from office, Connor would fill his jail beyond capacity as he arrested marchers demanding integration of stores, lunch counters, and jobs. He arrested Martin Luther King on Good Friday, giving the preacher plenty of time to scribble his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in newspaper margins and on sandwich wrappers. He arrested 1,000 children who sang songs in department stores, snuck into whites-only seats in movie theaters, and defied Connor’s dogs and fire hoses.
Birmingham’s business leaders had suffered through a boycott in which Blacks refused to buy new Easter clothes. They agreed to integrate their stores, dressing rooms, and drinking fountains, and to hire an unspecified number of Black clerks. King left town just ahead of a bomb that blasted a five-foot hole in the hotel where he had been staying.
After kicking Connor out of City Hall, Miglionico and the rest of the council voted unanimously to repeal all of the city’s Jim Crow laws. A spring and summer of strife seemed to have abated.
But a new school year was ahead. Nine years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional, Birmingham was finally admitting a handful of Black children into white schools.
On Sept. 15, 1963, four girls primped in the ladies’ room, getting ready for their church’s first-ever Youth Day. The pastor dreamed up the idea, having been criticized for allowing children to stage protests at the church the previous spring.
Denise “Niecie” McNair, 11, had been instrumental in lining up boys and girls to be ushers at the service. Carole Robertson, 14, was showing off her first pair of heels. Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, both 14, checked their hair in the bathroom mirror.
The sun shone through the garden-level window. Outside, in a canvas bag tucked next to a magnolia bush, a fishing bobber sank slowly in a leaky can of water. Just as Addie turned Niecie to tie the bow on her dress, the bobber tripped a wire that set a spark that ignited 15 sticks of dynamite.
Niecie, Carole, Cynthia, and Addie Mae would be found together in the rubble of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church ladies’ room. Dead. Addie Mae’s sister Sarah lost an eye but survived.
In the aftermath, Miglionico stuck to her message of unity. Speaking to a group in Anniston weeks after the bombing, she said, “America is not a finished product. The needs of its society change. As businesswomen and homemakers, we must have faith in ourselves to meet the problems that sometimes make us insecure.”
On Oct. 11, she traveled to Washington for the Commission on the Status of Women’s final report. She had a message for the President: “I believe 99% of local residents are more than disgusted with the bombings here, and I’m going to tell him.”
She flew back from that meeting for an evening banquet in Birmingham, where she was honored as Birmingham’s Woman of the Year.
Despite wiretaps, eyewitnesses, and paid informants—despite having a good idea who was responsible—J. Edgar Hoover quietly closed the BAPBOMB investigation in 1968. No one would be held accountable for the death of four little girls until 1977.
It was Ladies’ Day at Jefferson County Courthouse yesterday, as womenfolk reported for jury duty for the first time in local history.
The front-page article in the June 6, 1967, Birmingham Post-Herald went on to note that “predictions of widespread confusion and delay didn’t materialize.”
Success came like that: After years of speaking to civic groups and lobbying legislators, it took a federal court ruling to force the state to allow women to serve on juries. Miglionico led a Business and Professional Women’s Club committee in developing a guide to jury service for women.
She lobbied for changes to inheritance law “so husband and wife can be each other’s heirs.” Only when the legislature overhauled the entire probate system in 1982 did they address gender inequities.
In 1974, she ran for Congress, supporting a Democratic plan for “a health program so no American can be bankrupted by illness.” The Klan burned a cross in her front yard days before she fell short of unseating the Republican incumbent. Despite a post-Watergate Democratic wave, health coverage for all was never passed.
After nearly 23 years on the Birmingham council, Miglionico stepped down in 1985. She continued to advise council members and speak to civic groups, especially her beloved Business and Professional Women’s Clubs.
At her funeral in 2009, The Rev. Kevin Bazzel said, “She sought to do what was true and just, simply because it was true and just.”
To this day, the Birmingham Bar Association Women Lawyers Section presents the Nina Miglionico Paving the Way Award to a lawyer who has advanced women in the legal profession.
First woman to run a law practice in Alabama. First woman on the Birmingham council and its first woman president. First woman nominated by a major party to run for Congress in Alabama.
“Isn’t the more important thing the people who follow you?” she told a reporter. “It’s great to be first, but it’s the two and three and four that come after you that is the telling thing.”
SOURCES
While researching my novel, Mission: Butterfly, I traveled to Birmingham. In Linn Park, I came across the statue of Nina Miglionico, and immediately knew she had to be a character in the novel.
The quotes and details of events in this essay come from newspaper accounts fetched from Newspapers.com.
For the flavor of life in mid-century Birmingham, I am indebted to Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Details of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, particularly the description of the bomb, come from Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing That Changed the Course of Civil Rights by former Sen. Doug Jones.
Mission: Butterfly’s Helene Lee meets Nina Miglionico. In these sample chapters, join her as she wakes up on her first day in Miss Nina’s library.
