The Legacy Of Virgil Ware

(6 of 6)

Birmingham's changes have also come in fits and starts. Although its schools were desegregated by the end of the '60s, they are 97% black today in a city whose population is 74% black. More than 75% of the city's residents live in nonintegrated neighborhoods, and 90% say their church or place of worship has no members of other races, according to research by Natalie Davis, political-science professor at Birmingham-Southern College. On the other hand, Birmingham's mayors since 1979 have both been black, and its current police chief is a black woman. According to a 2002 poll by the Birmingham Pledge Foundation, one of the U.S.'s most respected antiracism projects, the average Birminghamian eats lunch with someone of another race at least three times a month and invites someone of another race home for a social visit at least seven times a year. Also, more than half the respondents said they had been involved in a community project with someone of another race. "There is more discussion and action about improving race relations here than any place I've ever lived, North or South," says Lawrence Pijeaux, director of Birmingham's Civil Rights Institute.

That progress owes plenty to people like Virgil Ware. He still lies in a nondescript grave marked only by blue carnations and hidden in a thick roadside forest. Each Mother's Day, his sister Joyce clears the overgrowth. "When we hit the lottery, we're going to move you," she tells him as she works. In the warmest months, swarms of fireflies illuminate the site--innocent reminders of the larger conflagrations that swept through Birmingham in the summer of 1963.