Greene County Democrat

Tag: Sarah Collins Rudolph

  • “5th Little Girl”, Sarah Collins Rudolph, sole survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham speaks at Second Baptist Church Black History program

    “5th Little Girl”, Sarah Collins Rudolph, sole survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham speaks at Second Baptist Church Black History program

    by John Zippert, co-owner

    On February 15, Second Baptist Church hosted a Black History program that brought Sarah Collins Rudolph to Greene County to talk about her experience as the sole survivor of the September 15, 1963 bombing, by the Klu Klux Klan, of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Sarah Collins Rudolph was the younger sister (aged 12 at the time) of Addie Mae Collins, one of four girls tragically killed in the bombing of the church, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.


    Sarah Collins Rudolph was in the ladies restroom in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, with four other young ladies – her sister Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14 years old. They were taking a break between Sunday School and a Youth Day program at the church.


    When the bomb exploded around 10:22 in the morning, Sarah Collins Rudolph said she had just walked across the rest room from the other four to wash her hands in the sink. The Klan placed the bomb in an outside stairway that led to the basement that was adjacent to the women’s rest room. The last thing she remembers before the blast, was Denise McNair asking her sister Addie Mae Collins to adjust a sash on her dress.


    Four of the girls were killed instantly by the blast and Sarah survived with serious injuries from the bomb, including glass and other fragments that cut her eyes, face, arms, legs and other parts of her body. She was rescued and sent to the hospital by the first church members that dug through the rumble from the explosion.


    Sarah was confined to the hospital for weeks after the explosion. She was blind in her right eye and had it replaced with a prosthetic eye. Her many cuts healed leaving visible scars both physical and psychological. She says, even today, when she hears loud noises, she revisits the terror of the bomb explosion. She relates this to PSTD experience by soldiers in war, reliving their combat experiences.Sarah was not able to attend the funerals of her sister and the other three girls because she was in the hospital. When she returned to school, she received no special counseling or other assistance to adjust to the explosion which changed her life.


    She finished high school and then worked in various capacities at industrial fabrication plants and domestic work, taking care of elderly and sick people. She married three times. She said that she eventually found a church in Birmingham that helped her to understand that by accepting Christ and his teachings could help her to live a fuller and more meaningful life.


    She testified at the trials of the three KKK members, who were eventually brought to justice for the horrendous crime of bombing the church in 1963, including ‘Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton.
    In the mid 1990’s more than thirty years after the bombing, she began giving interviews and speaking out about her life and experiences. She tried unsuccessfully to get compensation for herself and families of other victims of racial and civil rights crimes. So far she has been unsuccessful in getting any compensation from the state of Alabama or the Federal government, for her injuries and suffering from the 1963 bombing of the church.


    In her travels to speak on the bombing and being the only survivor, she met Tracy Snipe, a professor at Wright State University in Ohio, where he teaches history, politics and related subjects. Snipes collaborated with Sarah Collins Rudolph to write a book on her life including the 1963 bombing. The book is entitled “the Fifth Little Girl”. At the end of the Second Baptist Church Black History Program, participants were able to purchase copies of her book ($30.00) and have it inscribed to them by her.
    The program at Second Baptist Church was sponsored by United Purposes, and its community partners. The organization is headed by Miriam Leftwich, who organized the program and introduced Ms. Rudolph. The program also featured information on Black History, singing, poetry reading , and a liturgical dance presentation, mostly by young people to honor the guest speaker.


    This program had a very profound impact and impression on this writer and others who attended the program and were not aware that there was a fifth little girl, who survived the bombing , that has lived another more than six decades to give first-hand testimony about one of the most consequential events of the Civil Rights Movement and Black History in America.

    Sarah in the hospital with both eyes bandaged from the bomb explosion
    Sarah in the hospital with both eyes bandaged from the bomb explosion

  • Newswire: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks at 60th anniversary Birmingham bombing event

    Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

    By: Associated Press

     

    BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Standing at the pulpit of the Birmingham, Alabama, church where four little girls were killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb in 1963, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the nation must remember and own the uncomfortable moments of its past in order to move forward.

    Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court, spoke at the 60th anniversary of the Sept. 15, 1963 bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church.
    “Today we remember the toll that was paid to secure the blessings of liberty for African Americans and we grieve those four children who were senselessly taken from this earth and their families robbed of their potential,” Jackson said.
    She said the country should celebrate the great strides that have been made since 1963 but that there is still work to do. ”The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom and to that we are going to need the truth, the whole truth about our past,” Jackson said.
    Jackson said she knows that atrocities “like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive” but said it is also “dangerous to forget them.”
    “If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” Jackson said.
    Jackson did not mention any of the efforts in Republican-led states to place parameters on how race is discussed in classrooms. Instead, Jackson, who was born in 1970, gave the example of how her own parents made sure, even at a young age, that she learned about what happened in Birmingham, Selma and other battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement.
    “Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice, but can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now? We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them,” Jackson said.
    Klansmen had placed a bundle of dynamite outside the church under a set of stairs on that day in 1963. The girls were gathered in a downstairs washroom before Sunday services when the blast exploded at 10:22 am. The explosion killed 11-year-old Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all 14. A fifth little girl, Sarah Collins Rudolph, the sister of Addie Mae, was in the room and was severely injured — losing an eye to the explosion— but survived.
    The bombing came during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, eight months after then-Gov. George Wallace pledged, “segregation forever,” and two weeks after the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “ I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, D. C.

    Hundreds of people, Black and white, filled the church Friday for the remembrance. The church bell tolled four times as the names of the girls were read. The crowd also stood to honor Rudolph, the “fifth little girl” in the room that day.
    U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell said they were standing on solemn ground where the senseless deaths “awakened a slumbering consciousness of America and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.”
    For many, Jackson’s presence at the church was a poignant moment. Sewell and other speakers on Friday said the lives of the four slain Black girls are in a way intertwined with Jackson’s. They said she is the embodiment of what civil rights foot soldiers in the 1960s dreamed would be possible, and the Voting Rights Act and other gains that followed paved the way for the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
    “It has been 60 years in the making. Dr. Martin Luther King said that these girls would not have died in vain and our speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is the personification of that today. She is that hope,” former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones said.