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Virgil's sister Joyce, 50, has not forgiven. "Lord knows I haven't," she says. "That was my brother." Nor does she wholeheartedly trust white people--especially considering that while Farley and Sims were free to finish high school, attend college and build middle-class lives, the Wares still live in much the same humble, segregated circumstances they did 40 years ago. Yet that too is changing. Four years ago, Melvin's daughter Melony, 26, became the first in the Ware family to graduate from college, and her younger sister Mindy, 19, is now a pre-med student at Alabama's private Talladega College. They say they have been inspired in large part by their Uncle Virgil.
Farley, 56, remains bitter. He won't discuss his life since 1963, but friends and neighbors say he is married, has a son and is a desktop publisher who works at home in the affluent, white Birmingham suburb of Trussville. He also, they add, rarely comes out. Speaking briefly with TIME, he complained, "No one seems to care about what I've suffered for 40 years!"
Sims, 56, was more remorseful from the start, though, he says, "I do still believe that what happened was an accident." He became a more active civil rights advocate and purposefully befriended the black woman who cleaned his fraternity house at Auburn University. But after graduating in 1969, he felt he still had "something heavy" to purge. He did it in part by going to Vietnam, even though his graduate studies could have kept him out of the draft. He also rejected the Army's offer of officer training, because "I was aware that it was people from poorer families, like [Virgil's], that were being sent to fight the war. I needed to see the war from the grunt's-eye view." He was awarded a Bronze Star for valor in combat. When told that Lorene Ware successfully petitioned the U.S. government to keep her remaining sons out of Vietnam, Sims says, his voice choking, "Thank God."
Still, it wasn't until 1997 that either Farley or Sims called to apologize--and, ironically, it was Farley who telephoned James Ware when one of the few articles to recall the tragedy ran in a local paper. Sims, married to a woman from Ohio and a retail manager on Mississippi's Gulf Coast, is a born-again Christian. But he claims he hadn't contacted the Wares because "I never knew how I'd be received, and I didn't want to hurt them more." Last month, however, he finally called to ask their forgiveness, "to let them know my sorrow--that I was a scared and stupid kid."