Word: virgil
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...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...
...story of Sims and Farley and their victim's family did not produce a clean, redemptive outcome for all. Told that this month marks the 40th anniversary of Virgil's death, Farley twirls his fingers sarcastically and says, "Whoop-de-do!" But Sims, who like Farley got no prison time for the killing, says his indifference about civil rights died that day too--and friends say he told them he decided to serve in the Vietnam War because he felt he still had a "debt" to pay. "Virgil knows in heaven that positive consequences came from this," Sims told TIME...
...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 the one Farley and Sims attended that Sunday. Virgil's killing "haunted him afterward," says Griswold's son Jon, 40, who teaches English in Birmingham to migrants. "He refocused." The older Griswold eventually stopped speaking at rallies, telling friends, "We have to change hearts before we tackle politics...
...also especially heartbreaking because it happened to Virgil Ware. A smart, skinny kid, the third of six children whose father and uncles worked in the nearby Docena coal mine, he had just 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...