On September 15, 1963, four Ku Klux Klansmen planted 15 sticks of dynamite and a timing device in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four African-American girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were killed in the blast. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Sarah Collins Rudolph, sister of victim Addie May Collins, was there too. Yet even though Rudolph was part of one of the watershed moments in civil rights history, her story has seldom been told.