This city is remembering a dark chapters in U.S. civil rights history. On September 15, 1963 the Ku Klux Klan bombed a church, killing four Black girls and rocking the conscience of the nation.
"Our lesson for that Sunday morning was a love that forgives," she recalls."It was youth Sunday. Everyone was excited about that."McKinstry, 15 at the time, retraces her footsteps through the church that day, starting in the basement, where Sunday School classes were held. She left early to take the collection upstairs to the church office.Carolyn McKinstry was the Sunday School secretary at 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.
She scooted under the first pew in the sanctuary where she remained until she heard the rest of the congregation fleeing the building.Klansmen had planted the bomb beneath a stairwell on the side of the church. She later learned four of her classmates were killed – 11-year-old Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all 14.in a climate where politicians are seeking to whitewash racist history.
She was in the ladies' lounge freshening up with the four other girls, including her sister Addie Mae who was helping Denise McNair tie the sash on her purple plaid dress.Collins Rudolph says she called out her sister's name but got no answer.A deacon dug her out of the rubble and she was taken by ambulance to the hospital with shrapnel in her eyes, face and body.
"I had a lot of fear during that time," she says."Every time I would hear a loud sound, I would jump. Still doing that today.", arguing political leaders of the day helped foment the violence that killed the girls and injured her. But no compensation has come.
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