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And it was 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 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 an extra dollar or two delivering coal, "he'd come home and say, 'You need a couple quarters of this, Mama?'" recalls James, 56, a Birmingham truck driver.
In 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 trees rising from a tangle of swamp grass and kudzu. As Virgil clutched the handlebars, telling his brother where to steer, James says, they laughed about the girls they would pick up in their new car.
Farley, meanwhile, was showing off the pearl-handled, .22-cal. revolver he had bought for $15 from a school friend two days earlier. Farley, like Sims, was an Eagle Scout, but now, wearing his gun in a shoulder holster, he looked more like an enforcer wannabe amid the anti-integration rally's crowd of 2,000 whites. To his credit, Griswold denounced the church attack and spoke against violence. But moments later, a youth strung up an effigy of Bobby Kennedy, and the crowd burned it.
Afterward, Farley, Sims and friends stopped at the offices of the National States Rights Party, a Klan-associated group. Farley bought a mini Confederate flag for 40ยข, and they heard reports of retaliatory rock throwing by angry black youths. A white teenager, Dennis Robertson, while returning from his job, was struck in the head with a brick hurled by a black teen; he would spend days in critical condition before recovering. Upset by the news, Farley headed out. Sims, caught up in the day's emotions, says he "went along for the ride" on Farley's motorbike.