Sarah Collins

On September 15, 1963, twelve-year-old Sarah Collins was downstairs at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church when a bomb, planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded. Her sister Addie Mae was there, along with Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.

Blinded by shattered glass, Sarah called for Addie. There was no answer.

All four girls died. Sarah survived but lost her right eye.

A photograph of her in a hospital bed, bandages covering her eyes, captured the violence inflicted on Birmingham’s children - an image that inspired the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today, Sarah Collins Rudolph continues to share her story.

Her enduring testimony from the lived experiences on that horrible day preserve the memory of her sister and her friends. Her voice reminds us that the history of racial violence lives on in the people who survived it.

That survival and cause for which they died, deserve to be remembered Learn more through the National Park Service The Joy Trip Project celebrates the enduring legacy of Black American History. The Unhidden Minute is part of the Unhidden Podcast Project supported through a National Geographic Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society , with the cooperation of the National Park Service .

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