Only two weeks after Dr. King delivered his "I have a dream speech," the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed as part of a series of racially motivated attacks on the city's African-American population. Four little girls were killed, but until a year ago, much of the world didn't know there was a fifth little girl. Sarah Collins Rudolf emerged from the fire forever changed. Sarah looks back with us on those attacks more than 50 years ago.
Sarah Collins Rudolf remembers the sound of the dynamite as the bomb went off in the middle of her Sunday School on September 15, 1963. "When it went off, I called Addie. ‘Addie, Addie, Addie," she recalls. But her fourteen-year-old sister Addie Mae Collins, didn't answer. When the smoke cleared, Sarah had lost her sight in one eye, and Addie, as well as Sarah's friends Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair never escaped the blaze. Confused and haunted, Sarah still wonders "why they would kill Addie? Addie never did do anything. I didn’t understand…I just couldn’t’ understand that. Her confusion echoed across the city of Boston almost fifty years later on April 15, 2013, as the marathon was bombed.
"We needed our civil rights, and you know when you’re living in Birmingham Alabama, you don’t want to be treated like they treated us." Eventually the Civil Rights bill was passed, and trials were held, but Sarah Rudolf now shares a different story-- one of healing. To a city, and a country still wrecked with terrorism and hate, she implores, "I forgive them for what they did" Hate, she says, won't bring her sister back, but instead "I feel that we got to love each other in spite of what people do to us."
You can read part one of Clennon's two part Civil Right's look-back here, or navigate here to find out more information on Sarah Collins Rudolph from Greater Boston.
