Word: virgil
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...that late summer of '63, the three brothers had agreed to share a paper route delivering the Birmingham News--and to buy a car with their earnings. But Virgil needed a bicycle. So that Sunday after church, at around noon, he and James rode James' bike to Docena, where an uncle had a scrapyard. The church bombing had already occurred, but word hadn't reached their uncle's when, shortly after 4 p.m., they headed home after failing to find a bike for Virgil. The boys took a rural stretch called the Docena-Sandusky Road, flanked by pine and mimosa...
...Farley's friends saw Farley and Sims about to head west on the Docena-Sandusky Road. The friends claimed that they'd seen Virgil and James throwing rocks, which James vehemently denied then and today. "We'll take care of them," said Farley, according to police documents. But instead he gave the revolver to a stunned Sims, who had never fired a gun. Farley still insists that the Ware brothers had rocks in their hands, but Sims says, "I guess we were just expecting rocks to be coming at us." Sims is righthanded; the gun was in his left hand...
...James adds, the ordeal "made our family realize there was a civil rights movement going on and we could make Virgil's death be a part of that." It didn't exactly work out that way. The movement wanted Lorene Ware to hit the stump, but because speaking publicly about Virgil's killing was too painful for her, his story faded away, an obscure, salt-in-the-wound footnote to the Sixteenth Street Church bombing...
Civil rights and racial reconciliation instead became a personal journey for the Wares. If not for the movement's nonviolent tenets, for example, Virgil's brothers say their rage might not have worn off. Melvin was the angriest, and although he thought for years about revenge, he eventually immersed himself in his Christian faith, encouraging whites and blacks to attend each other's church services. James too has long forgiven Farley and Sims, but he says he found real meaning in Virgil's death one night years later, in the '60s, when his car got stuck in a ditch...
That progress owes plenty to people like Virgil Ware. He still lies in a nondescript grave marked only by blue carnations and hidden in a thick roadside forest. Each Mother's Day, his sister Joyce clears the overgrowth. "When we hit the lottery, we're going to move you," she tells him as she works. In the warmest months, swarms of fireflies illuminate the site--innocent reminders of the larger conflagrations that swept through Birmingham in the summer...