On September 15, 1963, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church cast such a long shadow over Birmingham that two other Black teenagers killed that same day—Virgil Ware, thirteen, shot from a bicycle, and Johnny Robinson, sixteen, shot by police—slipped quietly from the public memory. More than six decades later, a community of cyclists rode through Birmingham's Civil Rights District in the September heat to insist that grief, too, has a hierarchy, and that history must be made whole. The Virgil Ware Institute is now working toward a dedicated monument, understanding that to name the
Birmingham cyclists honor two overlooked civil rights victims with push for new monument
Virgil Ware, age 13, and Johnny Robinson, age 16, were killed on September 15, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama—their deaths overshadowed by the simultaneous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.