Sometimes, in news accounts and other retellings of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, Sarah Collins Rudolph is called “the fifth little girl.”

She was one of five girls in the bathroom of the 16th Street Baptist Church on that Sunday morning in September when the bomb exploded. White supremacists had planted it under the church steps.

The crime was one of the most shocking and horrifying of the civil rights era. “Four were killed and one survived,” Rudolph said in a recent interview. “I had to suffer through it all.”

Rudolph will tell her story as the guest speaker at the New Jersey State Bar Association's Black History Month program on Feb. 27, at the Law Center in New Brunswick. Hosted by the association's Minorities in the Profession Section, the free event is open to all and includes participants of the section's annual high school essay contest, an art exhibit by Trenton artist Lee Johnson, music by the Trenton High School orchestra, and more.

The program, a longstanding tradition for the section, is “legal in origin, but it's a celebration of something that goes above and beyond that,” said Cristal Reyes Lambert, chair of the Minorities in the Profession Section.

“A recognition of black history is something that doesn't need to be limited to adults or to people of any particular race,” said event co-chair William T. Rogers. In fact, this year's essay contest topic looked at the repercussions of the Civil War as evidenced by the recent debate about Confederate monuments. The annual contest, which attracts essays from students of all backgrounds and beliefs, encourages young people to grapple with and analyze an issue impacting the community.

'Living History'

While in past years the event's guest speaker has been a more local personality, Rudolph's story is so compelling that organizers were eager to have her. “I'm hoping children who come will have an opportunity to hear living history,” said event co-chair Lori E. Caughman.

Rudolph's story is not as well-known as that of the girls who died: Carole Robertson; Cynthia Wesley; Denise McNair and Rudolph's sister, Addie Mae Collins. Often, Rudolph said, people are surprised to hear that there was another child (she was 12) in that bathroom.

She spent months in the hospital after the bombing, and feels the impact of her injuries every day. Glass from the blast permanently affected her eyesight.

It has been said that the horror of the bombing helped prod the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “It's important for me to talk about it, because it happened so long ago and young people don't know about that time,” Rudolph said. Audiences, she said, are sometimes “surprised that people hate people that much.”

But Rudolph also brings a message of love and faith. She says she has forgiven the men who set the explosives. “God forgave us for our sins,” she said. “I had to forgive them, because I had to let it go…There was no need to keep all that inside of me. It wasn't going to bring those girls back, it wasn't going to bring my sight back.”

“I was getting just like them,” she said. “I was hating them just as much as they hated me. I had to go back and think about it. Why should I live my life hating people?”

For more information on the Feb. 27 Black History Month program, visit njsba.com.