We Remember Johnny Robinson Jr. And Virgil Ware, Killed The Day Of The Birmingham Church Bombing
It was 62 years ago today that a group of white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sept. 15, 1963.
Four Black girls were killed in that bombing, and their names, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, have been immortalized in Black history as victims of a heinous act of unspeakable racism and a defining moment in the civil rights movement.
But how many are aware that, on the same day of the bombing, two other Black children in Birmingham died as a result of racial violence? The two Black boys, 16-year-old Johnny Robinson Jr. and 13-year-old Virgil Ware, didn’t die in that church on that fateful Sunday; the former was killed while waiting for his sister to bring him a plate of Sunday dinner, and the latter was gunned down while riding on the handlebars of his older brother’s bike.
Neither Johnny nor Virgil was anywhere near the 16th Street Baptist Church the day of the bombing. Johnny, for one, was killed by a police officer armed with a shotgun in North Birmingham that afternoon.
From AL.com:
Johnny was with a group of boys near a gas station in the 800 block of 26th Street that afternoon around 3 p.m., and everyone on the street was on edge after the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Carloads of young white people were driving by, taunting the young black people on the street with chants like “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate,” said James Jemison, 65, a friend of Johnny’s who was playing football nearby.
Some boys in the group started throwing rocks at the white teenagers, police told The Birmingham News at the time, and when a police car arrived, the black boys started running down 8th Alley North. The car blocked the alley and Jack Parker, the officer in the backseat, pointed a shotgun from the window.
Police told The News that day that Parker fired a warning shot at the boys who were running away. Later, officers who were with Parker in the car said the driver had slammed on the brakes or the car had hit a bump, causing the gun to fire.
Johnny Robinson was hit, with buckshot in his back and wrists. When he got to University Hospital, he was dead.
About an hour or so after Johnny was killed, Virgil was fatally shot by a white teenager, who also reportedly acted out of revenge against Black kids who threw rocks because they were angry and tired of white people responding with unbridled glee to the news of four Black girls being killed by a white supremacist’s bomb.
According to retired Jefferson County sheriff’s Detective Dan Jordan, who was assigned to investigate Virgil’s killing, a Mountain Brook police officer informed him and other detectives the day after the killing that he had seen two white teenagers on a red motorcycle in Fultondale, and he noticed one of them had a pistol. From there, the investigation led detectives to the home of 16-year-old Michael Farley, who initially denied being involved in the shooting.
More from AL.com:
Later that day, a tip from a man they met at a local grocery store led them to another boy who was out on the road that afternoon. The boy told them he and a friend had seen the two Ware boys on the road. When they ran into Farley and another boy, Larry Joe Sims, 16, they said the black boys had thrown rocks at them. The boy told detectives Farley pulled a pistol out of his pocket and handed it to Sims, saying, “We’ll see about that.”
When they talked to Sims, he confessed in tears, Jordan said, saying he had his eyes closed when he fired the shots that killed Virgil and hadn’t intended to kill him.
Farley and Sims were both arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Ultimately, Sims was convicted by a jury of second-degree manslaughter, and Farley pleaded guilty to the same charge. In the end, neither of them spent a single day in prison after they were convicted. They were both given suspended sentences of seven months, served only probation, and were released from supervision in June 1965.
“They got off light,” Jordan remarked.
Yeah — that’s putting things mildly.
“They was always talking about the four little girls,” Leon Robinson, Johnny’s younger brother, told AL.com. “But they never talked about the two little boys.”
The Robinson family would spend decades grieving the teen’s death while getting little to no information on the killing from local police. In fact, they stayed in the dark about exactly what happened to Johnny unetil 2009, when his case was reopened by the FBI.
Meanwhile, Virgil’s father, James Ware Sr., died at age 90 on Sept. 5, 2013, ten days before the 50th anniversary of his son’s murder.
“For so long, the four little girls got all the recognition, and they forgot about the two little boys,” James Ware Jr., Virgil’s older brother, said in February of that year.
It’s worth noting that highlighting the stories of Johnny Robinson Jr. and Virgil Ware is not about taking away from the story we all already know about the four Black girls who were viciously killed by hateful white men. This isn’t an either-or situation.
As Rev. Guyrinthian Harris said during Ware Sr.’s funeral 12 years ago: “I’m not saying we should take the focus off the little girls, but if we’re going to tell it, let’s tell it all.”
Exactly.
Rest well, Johnny and Virgil. We see you. We remember you. Your lives mattered, as do your stories. History won’t forget you; we will not let it.
SEE ALSO:
5 Little Girls And The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
FBI Investigating Former Police Men For Civil Rights Cold Case Killings