Word: birmingham
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...Virgil Ware, 13, soared down a lonely stretch of road outside Birmingham, Ala., perched on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle, he was happily unaware of the carnage downtown. It was Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963. At 10:22 that morning, four black girls had been killed by a dynamite bomb set by the Ku Klux Klan at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church was a focal point of Birmingham's civil rights turmoil that year, but that unrest hadn't touched Virgil and his coal-mining family, who lived in a modest, all-black suburb and rarely even...
Larry Joe Sims, 16, an Eagle Scout at Birmingham's all-white Phillips High School, wasn't preoccupied with the civil rights movement either. His family quietly sympathized with blacks' efforts to eat at regular lunch counters, attend integrated schools and vote without hindrance. His father, a manager at a Sears store, privately scorned Eugene (Bull) Connor, the police commissioner who turned fire hoses and attack dogs on black demonstrators, some as young as 7. Still, if the Simses lamented the injustices, they didn't challenge them. As a teen, Sims had girls, his guitar and the Beach Boys...
...wasn't. Instead, Virgil Ware became the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday. (Another youth had been shot in the back by police after he threw rocks to protest the church bombing.) Virgil was the last civil rights casualty of the summer of '63--when the defining social movement of 20th century America became a national concern and not just a Southern one. Network television brought the season's atrocities into U.S. living rooms along with the triumphs, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech...
...Birmingham in 1963 desperately needed change. It was the civil rights epicenter, a place where bombings of the black community were so frequent that the town was nicknamed "Bombingham." Most white families were apoplectic about federal court orders to integrate the city's public schools, and one of their champions was the Farleys' Baptist pastor, the Rev. Ferrell Griswold. Griswold (who died in 1981) was, ironically, an American Indian whose birth certificate read "colored," but he harbored a century's worth of Native American hatred for the Federal Government and spoke out for states' rights at segregation rallies--like...
...entered the eighth grade at the all-black Sandusky Elementary School near his home in suburban Pratt City. An A student who played tight end on the football team, Virgil seemed the sibling "who was most likely to go to college," says brother Melvin, 54, a crane operator in Birmingham. "He wanted to be a lawyer. When we'd watch Perry Mason, Virgil'd always be the one who guessed who did it." He was also, adds Melvin, the favorite of their mother Lorene, a cleaning woman who died in 1996 still grieving for her son. When Virgil made...