Word: virgil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...that Sunday afternoon, as if caught on the billows of the church blast, Virgil Ware and Larry Joe Sims were hurtling toward another racial tragedy. Succumbing to peer pressure, Sims had gone along with friends to a segregationist rally that day--and now he was holding a revolver that his classmate, Michael Lee Farley, 16, had handed him as they rode home on Farley's red motorbike, its small Confederate flag whipping in the wind. As they passed Virgil and his brother James, 16, Farley told Sims to fire the gun and "scare 'em." Sims closed his eyes and pulled...
...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...
...Virgil Ware's death went largely unnoticed then and is hardly recalled today. And so it is with the stories of hundreds of other bystanders swept into civil rights traumas. Their tales don't involve the main characters of the day--villains like Connor or martyrs like King. But what these incidental players did and suffered--and how those actions may have changed them--is just as important a legacy of the movement as the key historic turning points studied in schools today...
...mother of eight, taught boys and rusticated Harvard students in her home [and] would read Homer or Virgil as she shelled peas and rocked a cradle,” Knowles said of Ripley in a memo she sent to Emilie Norris, who is the project manager for the University cultural property survey...