Day 21 - Sarah Collins Rudolph
Sunday School was an integral part of my girlhood.
Attending Sunday School and church services every Sunday at Mt. Zion UCC in Rockingham, NC were requirements in my house. My parents deemed my Sunday School teachers, Mrs. Gracie Terry and Ms. Allener Watkins, just as important as my secondary school teachers at school.
As a girl, I would have never imagined church or Sunday School as a setting for anything other than love and safety.
That’s why when I learned of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing during our family viewing of the “Eyes on the Prize” series, I questioned that love and safety. I questioned whether I needed to worry about my church being bombed some 25 years later.
Like Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins – known as “The Four Little Girls”, my Sunday School classes were often held in our church basement, and I often changed into my choir robe in the ladies’ bathroom, just as they were doing.
But, much like everything else in a(A)merican history, something, someone was ignored.
Sarah Collins Rudolph, Addie Mae Collins’s younger sister, was a survivor among the girls who were changing in the downstairs ladies’ lounge. Rudolph calls herself the “fifth little girl” and the "carrier of history.”
Mrs. Rudolph says the group of girls arrived at the church late and headed right to the downstairs bathroom "to freshen up" after a long walk. Rudolph remembers watching her big sister begin tying the sash on Denise McNair’s dress. Then, she recalls, "Boom, the bomb went off!"
As you can imagine, this image is burned into Rudolph's memory. She never saw Addie Mae finish tying that sash.
Although Mrs. Rudolph was blinded by the shattered glass, she was rescued by a church deacon and hospitalized. Her memory and the scars on her face remind her of that dreadful Sunday morning. Mrs. Rudolph lost an eye in the bombing.
… but, she was a survivor among the girls in the downstairs ladies’ lounge and serves as the memory for a nation that has no soul, no conscious.
Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins
I have to admit that this story angered me. It still does. Not only did it anger me because of the selfishness and result of such an evil act but also because it shook my innocence. Perhaps, the robbery of my innocence, filled with all of the Bible verses I’d learned, was my own naivety, after all, a(A)merica was the same stage some forty years earlier of the Tulsa Riots where men, women and children were slaughtered by a bomb a(A)merica dropped on its own soil, but like any child, you want to believe. You want to believe the songs you sang in school and the pledge you recited about your country were truth, both in word and deed.
… while, I’m no longer naive, I know … atrocious acts of racial violence will continue, until a(A)merica and her people gain a soul; until then, she will never have a conscious.
… so, on today, we remember and lift up the four little girls of the 16th Street Baptist Church and their memory, Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph.
#CaroleRobertson #CynthiaWesley #DeniseMcNair #AddieMaeCollins #SarahCollinsRudolph #31daysofrevolutionaryblackwomen #31daysofrevolution #revolutionary #revolution