Word: wares
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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. "I thought I was shooting at the ground," he says. "I remember pop-pop and then thinking...
...charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting...