Updated on February 8, 2021 at 12:54 pm
NBC Universal, Inc.
The names of the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing of an Alabama church are seared into history. But the name of a fifth girl who survived is often forgotten.
Sarah Collins Rudolph, then 12, was with her sister and three other children when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Rudolph’s sister, Addie Mae Collins, died, along with Carol McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Wesley was 11; the other girls were 14.
“So many people haven’t heard about me,” Rudolph said. “When they talk about the bombing, they always talk about the four girls that was killed. But I was right in the bathroom with them when the bomb went off. God spared my life.”