Fri 2/13 @ 11:30AM
Some tragedies hit you hard. I remember when the four little girls, Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole and Denise, ages 11-14, were killed in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, by a Ku Klux Klan bomb which went off outside a church bathroom where they were getting ready for a service. After that, when I was in the basement restroom of our church, I would look out the window that faced that alley behind it and wonder if someone could throw a bomb in there. When I visited Birmingham for the one and only time, they were all I could think about. I thought about my mother saying, ‘There’s nothing south of the Mason Dixon Line you need to see.” (We were Yankees to the bone, but Chicago has its own racial wounds.)
There were other wounds too. Addie Mae’s sister Sarah Collins Rudolph was in that restroom too and was blinded by the shattered glass. Lisa McNair never knew her sister Denise; she was born a year after her death. Both women have written books about this heavy legacy. Sarah’s latest memoir is called The 5th Little Girl: Soul Survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (The Sarah Collins Rudolph Story); Lisa’s letters to the sister she never got know are gathered in Dear Denise.
Both women will be at the City Club for a forum called Daughters of Birmingham where they’ll talk about the legacy of growing up in the shadow of one of the ugliest episodes of the Civil Rights Movement. Larry Macon, Jr, senior pastor at Mt. Zion Church in Oakwood Village, moderates the discussion. Get tickets here…