Journalist interviews KIDS storytellers for deep reporting on civil rights cold cases

Journalist Liz Ryan turned to Kids in Birmingham 1963 as she dug deeply into two murders that have received little attention over the last 60+ years. She interviewed retired professor Randall Jimerson and sculptor Elizabeth MacQueen, both of whom were young teenagers in 1963 when two young African American men were fatally shot — on the same day that four young Black women were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Jimerson and MacQueen have found moving ways to honor those lost lives — Jimerson, through a book, and MacQueen, by creating the Four Lives sculpture that today graces the park across from that Birmingham church. Click here to read Liz Ryan’s article, “The 1963 murder of Virgil Lamar Ware and a fight for remembrance,” published by Alabama Political Reporter in May 2025.