James Coyle

James Edwin Coyle (March 23, 1873 – August 11, 1921) was a Catholic priest who was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama by a Ku Klux Klan member for performing an interracial marriage. Biography James Coyle was born in Drum, County Roscommon, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, now modern day Ireland, to Owen Coyle and his wife Margaret Durney. He attended Mungret College in Limerick and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, and was ordained a priest at age 23 on May 30, 1896. Later that year, he sailed with another priest, Father Michael Henry, to Mobile, Alabama, and served under Bishop Edward Patrick Allen. He became an instructor, and later rector, of the McGill Institute for Boys. In 1904 Bishop Allen appointed Coyle to succeed Patrick O'Reilly as pastor of St. Paul's Church (later Cathedral) in Birmingham, where he was well received and loved by the congregation. Father Coyle was the Knights of Columbus chaplain of Birmingham, Alabama Council 635. Murder On August 11, 1921, Father Coyle was shot in the head on the porch of St. Paul's Rectory by E. R. Stephenson, a Southern Methodist Episcopal minister and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. There were many witnesses. The murder occurred just hours after Coyle had performed a secret wedding between Stephenson's daughter, Ruth, and Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican whom she had met while he was working at Stephenson's house five years earlier. Gussman had also been a customer at Stephenson's barber shop. Several months before the wedding, Ruth had converted to Catholicism.